impact Archives - annabel smith

On Photography*

Posted by Annabel on 27/08/2013 communities, experiential education, global, impact, media, Photography, reality, skills, social justice, stories, volunteering, young people

Aug 272013

How would you feel if a complete stranger had a photograph of you on their fridge? Your hair a mess at the end of a tiring day, caught at an unflattering angle in your oldest clothes, damp and sweaty, longing for a shower.

You might feel that your soul had been stolen – plenty of people see cameras as frightening, not just annoying – or you might just be furious that your privacy had been violated by someone who doesn’t even know your name. A few years ago a group of young Chinese men surrounded me at a tourist spot in northern India, friendly, laughing, snapping away. I asked them to stop, but they didn’t. A tiny window into the lives of those whose faces pop up as screen savers the world over.

It can be tempting just to snap away vaguely, presuming it does no harm, but a quick walk round the block in someone else’s shoes provides a sharp reminder that it does. Many people who go on slum or township tours equate the experience to a trip to the zoo.

Enough.

Clicking the shutter should be the last thing you do.

Why are you taking the picture anyway? What will you use it for?

Now we don’t have to load film, check it’s caught, wind on, keep it in a dark place, make sure it’s developed safely and hope, pray we got the shot we saw. We’re digital, we’re point and shoot, we can take thousands of frames at no extra cost.

Yet it’s no coincidence that most photographers who have worked for long periods in war zones, disaster zones and among the desperately poor, are haunted. One ex-Sunday Times reporter told me he could not longer take those pictures after his first child was born.

You want to show people what you saw, but don’t give up on words. I won’t forget watching a student tell a friend about her day at a school in a South African township. Her voice became soft and tears came to her eyes as she realised that the children she was describing were far too small for their age because they had never had enough to eat. Talking forces us to engage; photography can let us off the hook.

Use the power of your camera wisely. Access to the lives of others is a privilege, so bring both good intentions and a critical mind.

Don’t forget to capture details, insights on the condition of people’s lives. Look for the things you can’t see. A near-empty drugs cupboard in a hospital can tell you far more than a picture of someone dying, and doesn’t compromise anyone’s dignity. Heads bent over a shared textbook, an unnecessary flower garden, feet in new shoes.

Seek out contrasts, juxtapositions that illuminate. Ordinary objects that tell stories.

Talk to people. Introduce yourself. Ask.

Sometimes people say no. Perhaps one of their friends, or someone nearby will say yes. Take the photo. Show them. Do it carefully, move to catch the light and their best angle. Many people have never seen a photograph of themselves. Don’t start if you don’t have time to finish.

Last January I was in Tamale, northern Ghana. I walked through the market with a local guide. He knew everyone, they catcalled as we went past. With his permission I took shots of the market, a riot of colour and activity. But I wanted the women. So I asked. Some said no. Some said yes. I started taking pictures and when I had a good one, I showed them. They were delighted. They were beautiful, astonishingly beautiful. Those who had said no, now fought to be next in line. We laughed, I teased them, they teased me, we had fun.

I took their names and asked permission to use the photos. Although I had showed everyone their pictures, I couldn’t give them copies. I promised I would send them, and I did. I don’t know if they arrived. If I could have done I would have printed them on the spot. We lost something very precious with the demise of the polaroid. I was converted after a trip to a remote part of Madagascar in the mid 90s by friends who insisted on taking and giving people their photographs. I had been completely against the idea. I could not have been more wrong. What could be more precious than a picture of your family?

Don’t underestimate the power of photography. In thoughtful hands a camera shrinks space, connects strangers and illuminates lives. In thoughtless hands it snatches and grabs, hits and runs, confirms stereotypes. Used to tell stories it is still the magic lantern that captivated our forefathers and made us leave home in the first place.

* See Susan Sontag’s 1977 book of the same name, and her later Regarding the Pain of Others. Also The Bang Bang Club and Ken Light’s Witness in our Time

Making It Matter

Posted by Annabel on 24/02/2013 Africa, education, experiential education, history, identity, impact, reality, resources, schools, skills, stories, teachers, uncategorized, young people

Feb 242013

What motivates young people to learn?

Fun? Imagination? Fear of the future without a college education?
If you ask them, they will tell you that you can teach them anything if you make it matter to them.

The easiest way is to make it about them. Nearly 20 years ago, when I took over the History Department of a Nairobi School, the most successful thing I did was to introduce a family tree project.

I had Kikuyu students in my classroom, and Luo and Kalenjin and several born in Britain as well as five or six born in Nairobi but with parents or grandparents born in the Indian Subcontinent. Computers barely existed, so all information was gathered by talking to family members, either in person or on the phone, waiting for visits or even writing letters. Everyone had to keep notes and start drawing their tree – and as they grew, the trees became collages, with stories and even artefacts stuck on: a coin, a bead, a piece of cloth, a photograph.

My students held court, sharing their research and findings, feeling the thrill of an attentive audience. They were the experts on their own lives, and they loved it (a lot more than Napoleon, who they’d done the previous term).

Of course you can’t design thirteen or fourteen years of curriculum around ‘Me’ – at least not without creating a generation of narcissistic monsters. But taking time to relate distant or abstract material to those in the room, and finding ways to engage heart and emotions as well as head, makes excellent educational sense.

This is one area where education can learn from the non-profit sector which has long understood that you engage people by creating proximity. It’s hard to care about people of whom we know nothing in a faraway country; the trick is to tell stories to bring them closer, to show the similarities between their lives and ours, to help us understand how it might feel to be them. To make it more real.

Carl Jung wrote that people cannot stand too much reality, but I disagree: in my experience, teenagers gobble it up. It brings out the best in them, differentiating them as individuals with both abilities and passions.

2 years ago Mayor of London Boris Johnson and I both hit on the idea of a London Curriculum (although I’m pretty sure I thought of it first.) I based mine on an experimental class I’d taught a few years before in the US that used our local city as a classroom. Part of my inspiration also came from CITYTerm, a brilliant programme run out of the Masters School, which uses New York City as a classroom and laboratory. In both cases the approach was project-based and relied on collaboration with experts from the city – architects, engineers, poets, social workers and entrepreneurs.

It can come as something of a shock to learn what’s on your doorstep: the things that are closest to us exert huge influence, yet we seldom look at them carefully, let alone understand them.

The nearly 4 million people who have seen Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk on the danger of a single story will also have heard her descriptions of growing up on a Nigerian university campus reading British and American children’s books. She loved those books, but because of them, the first stories she wrote featured characters with white skin and blue eyes, who played in the snow and ate apples. Only later did she realise that people who looked and thought like her could be in books too.

In January I met Deborah Ahenkorah, Ghanaian Echoing Green Fellow and founder of the Golden Baobab Prize for African literature for children and young adults. She created the prize because

“the tremendous lack of good quality African children’s literature dawned on me. A continent so large and richly diverse has tons of wonderful stories to share with young people everywhere: where were these stories?”

Last year they had more than 400 entries from 25 African countries. They also run workshops for writers and illustrators, and have plans to establish distribution channels across the continent to ensure that African books reach African children in their schools and, at last, in their own homes.

And it’s not just African children on the continent who need stories about themselves. There are millions of children of African heritage in the diaspora who never read stories that connect them with their own identities either. For stories cross continents too. Last month in Ghana I visited the slave castles of the Gold Coast and saw the door of no return through which millions of men, women and children left, many of whom ended their days in Jamaica. With over 200,000 Ghanaians and 250,000 Jamaicans in London, shouldn’t these stories be told in British schools too?

Who else is in our classrooms? Are we telling their stories?

Growing up is an identity project, and if we want to engage young people, we need to show them that school is the place to learn about the things they care about. We do that best by nurturing schools’ most valuable secret weapons – infectiously enthusiastic teachers. They are an endangered species now, killed by the growing exam culture and an obsession with cookie-cutter, lockstep learning, but they are still there. Let’s hope that those who have been taught by them will realise that it is loving learning that matters most, and the freedom to explore who you are and how you will take your place in the world.

Teachers v Tech: No Contest

Posted by Annabel on 07/08/2012 Africa, African Leadership Academy, education, impact, Leadership, schools, skills, stories, teachers, technology, young people

Aug 072012

Being in southern Africa has given me a new perspective on the debate over technology and education.

We shrink distance and build empathy by storytelling. Empathy, as Gloria Steinem once said, is the most revolutionary of emotions.

In the Global North, apart from a polite conversation in the New York Times and the Guardian, it has become a generally accepted truth that money spent on technology is money well spent. The stuff’s cool, the kids seem happy and anyway, who has time to talk? Laptop programs are being replaced by iPad programs and Salman Khan is a household name. If your kid’s classroom isn’t flipped, you’re probably a bad parent.

Recently, though, some murmurs of concern have bubbled up: does filling classrooms with computers actually increase the quality of education? One upside of devastating budgets cuts is that calls for proof that money delivers impact are getting louder. Most people are well-equipped to join the debate, voice their opinions and vote. We might also consider asking the children: a recent student newspaper at a wealthy London school carried an article begging teachers to stop spending money on technology, not least because the boys’ locker rooms were full of discarded interactive white boards.

In the Global South, however, many parents, teachers and learners are having these decisions made for them. Governments are eager to bridge the digital divide, while well-intentioned donors and foundations are tripping over in their haste to wire up classrooms and get everyone online: it’s physical, impressive and has great ‘before and after’ appeal.

But does technology increase learning? Not if:

• Power is unpredictable, bandwidth limited and download speed snail-like

• Computers are regularly stolen

• There aren’t enough qualified IT teachers or money for training

• Nobody knows which websites or software to use

• Computers break or do weird things that can’t be fixed

• Computers can’t be upgraded regularly, virus-protected and maintained

• The are no projectors or printers.

So what then should tax and donor dollars be spent on in the Global South?

Unless you have a transcendent skill the chances are that it is your personality and your people and communication skills that will play the greatest single part in determining your future success

People.

In the North too.

Here’s why:

Unless you have a transcendent skill – art, entrepreneurship, languages – the chances are that it is your personality and your people and communication skills that will play the greatest single part in determining your future success. Teachers see this every day. They also help young people develop their identity, their confidence and their mastery of how to move through the world. They act as mentors, guides and role models. Technology does not.

Technology distances people and prevents them from connecting and learning from one another. Of course it facilitates some kinds of connection, but not the kind we need most.

At one of the UK’s outstanding state (public) schools, all non-core curricular teaching time has been filled with a school-designed relationship curriculum. Many young people, particularly those from complicated, traumatised or deprived backgrounds, haven’t been shown how to form relationships – with one another, authority figures, their parents or siblings.

Whilst online bullying, sexting, inappropriate contact by predatory adults and young people intentionally or unintentionally witnessing hardcore pornography are clearly problems, so too is the fact that we just don’t talk anymore.

One more thing: whilst technology can certainly be engaging, recent research has found that a new digital divide is opening up, as children from lower income families increasingly use it for ‘time-wasting’ – games, social networking and watching videos.

One of the Global South’s great advantages is that it can leapfrog the North’s mistakes. If it’s too soon to see what those mistakes might be, then it’s too soon to make significant investments.

So what do we spend those donor dollars on?

Identifying future teachers, school leaders, governors and trustees and giving them the best training and support we can:

• Supporting them through college

• Pairing them with mentors and master teachers

• Providing clear job descriptions, regular evaluation and professional development

• Paying them reliable and reasonable wages; creating structured and secure careers

• Equipping classrooms with basic supplies

• Giving all school communities access to a library

• Guaranteeing every child access to safe bathrooms

• Ensuring that all students have at least one meal a day at school, uniforms, including shoes, bus fare and textbooks.

I felt pretty strongly about this, but thought I’d just check with a couple of experts. Since I’m here at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, I asked 2 of their most recent graduates:

I is from Ghana, where her brother is a teacher. Every day he has to cross a river to get to his school but many of his students will not be there, because there is work at the plantations. Like many of his colleagues he is demoralised and badly paid and has little hope of things getting better.

F is from Mali. There are not enough schools in the region she comes from, so she is going to start one. She already has backing from a powerful set of supporters, who were no doubt as impressed as I when they learned that 2 years ago she spoke no English.

For both girls, technology is a low priority.

Finally, the front page of one of last week’s newspapers carried the headline ‘IOUs Instead of Cash Stun Teachers’. Their pensions were raided for wages, but now neither are being paid. Inside was the separate story of a recently discovered cache of textbooks, destroyed and abandoned, never delivered to schools.

So teachers first. When the fundamentals are in place, by all means bring in the technology: train the teachers, invest in maintenance and let technology’s magic work. But don’t forget that before we had technology we had imagination, and one another. We can’t afford to lose either.