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On Twitter I had an intriguing conversation with Monika Hardy about the power of journals and the movie Freedom Writers. The movie is based on the true story of a teacher who made progress with her at risk students through journal writing. The movie demonstrates the impact Anne Frank’s Diary made on the students who struggled with overwhelming issues, such as poverty, racism, and gang violence.
In Proximity
Living in Germany for the last two years has renewed my interest in a diary that touched me years ago as a child. Anne Frank was born within a 3 hour drive from me in Frankfurt, Germany. When she was 4 years-old she moved to Amsterdam where she wrote about her family’s struggles when hiding from the Nazis. Last Sunday, I visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and was deeply moved by the experience. At the time, I had just watched the 20 second footage of her released on YouTube, which I shared with my adult students in this lesson plan.
When Our Students Doubt their Impact …
Anne Frank was only 13 years-old when she began writing in her diary, yet her words manage to still inspire real change. For a new teacher struggling to relate to at risk students, Anne Frank’s writings managed to bridge that gap. For students who struggled to stay alive in their violent neighborhoods, her words became strength. In the short video below, Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank, describes her impact on children everywhere. I saw this video at the Anne Frank house and thought Otto’s words were quite moving, especially since he had survived his wife and children.
In this next video, Nelson Mandela shares the impact Anne Frank’s diary had on him and fellow prisoners.
As I begin digital storytelling projects with my students, I keep Anne Frank’s impact in mind. I want my students to find their voice and begin to think about their influence on the world. I want to raise a generation of students who will empathize with others and collaborate to solve global crisis. Many of our students believe that they are too young to make a difference. I hope Anne Frank’s example will continue to demonstrate to them the potential their voice has for change!
If you enjoyed this post, then you may also enjoy Anne Hodgson’s post on Anne Frank.
Challenge:
How do you help your students realize they can create change? Please share this with us by leaving a comment below.
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2 responses so far ↓
1
Anne
// Oct 19, 2009 at 3:30 am
Dear Shelly,
Very moving to hear these two men speaking of Anna with such reverence. I’m looking forward to learning about your projects. You, like me, have worked in museum programs, and we share a lot of ideals, so there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you:
There’s something I worry about a little with digital storytelling, and it’s connected to the nature of this very fast, very public, very “polished results” oriented medium. I’m wary of choosing too slick, instant-results producing software to keep things from being finished before the students have really started exploring. I’ve used “old media” for self-actualization, and am just not sure how that will translate.
In the 90s I worked with at risk young teens on personal projects expressing their sense of culture, location and displacement – an arts project at a museum that developed into a storytelling exhibition. The most rewarding thing for my group of 15 was having enough time, space, structure and respect to do their own thing. Plus they had a very wide variety of tools to experiment with. And they’d also just sit round chatting with each other as they did their stuff.
Every Wednesday afternoon they’d come round to the museum, and they’d do something else together: make collages from magazines, discover details on artifacts that caught their fancy to draw, ink and pen calligraphy of their names translated into ancient scripts, use artifacts to tell stories, examine objects for signs of wear and think about the people who used them, take pictures and develop/edit them, do physical or chemical experiments, create huge replicas of tiny things, make cave paintings, etc. … and all of these more structured and contained mini projects allowed their creativity to blossom. It was the variety in explorative methods that gave the young people enough space to be really open.
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Shelly Terrell Reply:
October 19th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Anne,
That’s the question that was in my mind when I wrote this post. I usually use most of the digital storytelling tools as presentation tools so students do this instead of PowerPoint. I still like my students to write in journal notebooks. My habit was to pick these up at the end of every other week and leave questions or comments to spur more writing. I don’t know if I could ever give up writing in journals and fully replace with a digital storytelling tool.
I am thinking of students blogging. However, many of my students liked the journals as a conversation with me or to express their feelings of assimilation and personal struggles. When the time comes for students to continue this type of writing I will have to make a decision, but I really think I will keep journals for students and use digital storytelling tools for creative writing, presentations, and so forth. I think both work well in the curriculum, but language learners and at risk students need some personal writing time for self-reflection and to get out their feelings and emotions. When they feel comfortable to share they can choose to just like in the movie.
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