Archive for the ‘Films’ Category

Teaching Human Rights – Start at Home

Sunday, December 11th, 2011

On Friday I visited Philadelphia’s Independence Charter School, where the entire school day was dedicated to an inspiring Human Rights Day program for all the kids.  I plan to write a full piece on that soon, but in the meantime wanted to share a few ideas on International Human Rights Day, which was this past weekend.

Here’s the link to a video from UNICEF highlighting the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most ratified global treaty – ever.

(UNICEF) Overview: Convention on the Rights of the Child

The video gives a clear idea about what the Convention on the Rights of the Child is, and emphasizes seeing children as actors that can make a difference in our society.  This means seeing our children with new, respectful eyes.  Listening to them, caring for them, educating them in meaningful ways that ensure they will have the wherewithal to make impact for an ever-advancing civilization.

UNICEF’s website includes curricular materials starting with middle grades: http://teachunicef.org/explore/topic/child-rights-crc.

For younger children, I believe human rights begins with a discussion of how we treat the people all around us.  This means siblings and parents, and even self-care and consideration.  The ever-present issue of bullying is relevant here.  I wrote a short piece for PBS Parents on how instilling a global vision in kids can serve as an antidote to bullying.  It’s linked here.  At Independence Charter, they started the discussion with kindergartners, beginning with watching the film Ant Bully.  As kids got older, the films got more serious and intense, corresponding with the maturity of the grade. (K-8) (Film list forthcoming, too.)

The UNICEF video starts with stark pictures of desperate kids mostly in very poor countries.  Some kids (and adults) are feeling a backlash to being fed desperate images to get them to think about anything other than videogames, TV shows and the like.  If parents want to start a thoughtful conversation about Human Rights Day, or “Have you ever thought about human rights and what it means?” they could start with an open-ended question at the dinner table or a car ride to just launch thinking about the issue.  Make it personal.  What does it look like in YOUR life?  What about in the life of a friend or relative who emigrated to this country?  What conditions might have been different there?  How can we take our human rights into our own hands? What virtues are displayed when you consider human rights, and especially when you take your rights into your own hands?

Then, after ideas are kicked around, look at the UNICEF materials and videos, to add definition and clarity.

We never have to wait for International Day of (Fill in the Blank) to focus on an issue, but it helps spur our consideration.  Hopefully, every day will be human rights day!

You also can weigh in here, or on my FACEBOOK page.  Thanks!

 

 

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Posted in Bullying, Films, friends, Global education, Golden Rule, Human Rights, Moral Education, Prejudice, UNICEF, War and Peace | No Comments »

Share Your Story on 10.10.10 – One Day on Earth

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

Imagine what it’s like when musicians from disparate countries, playing diverse instruments, dedicated to different genres come together on one stage, having never met each other before.  Initially the collaboration produces dissonance, but among skilled practitioners dedicated to their craft, disharmony transforms into harmony and something altogether new forms.  This is what took place in 2008 at the World Festival of Sacred Music, and became the inspiration to create a similar collaboration, but this time using the medium of film, with the whole world as its stage.

10.10.10

The project One Day on Earth emerged from this experience, with the goal of creating a unique worldwide media event where thousands of participants would simultaneously film over a 24-hour period.  An auspicious day – October 10, 2010, or 10.10.10 – serves as the platform for thousands of people, from every nation, to film their perspective and contribute their voice to the largest participatory media event in history.  Imagine individuals from every nation, united around creating something beautiful and powerful, even with the mundane routines of their lives as the starting point. Now, imagine yourself joining in this great participatory exercise.

As the creators of ONE DAY ON EARTH describe, the outcome will be “an online community, a video time capsule, and a film. It explores our planet’s identity in the attempt to answer the question: Who are we? WHAT WILL WE SEE? ONE DAY ON EARTH showcases the amazing diversity, conflict, tragedy, and triumph that occurs in one 24‐hour period. What happens in a day? Birth, life, death, and everything the imagination can find in between: from the basic human needs, joys and struggles that unite us, to the unique cultural traditions that give us identity. Thousands of normally untold stories will have another chapter. Through the eyes of citizen filmmakers, we will create an extensive library of international footage and experiences from a single day. What we will exactly see is an unanswerable question. But, as we piece together a mosaic of moving pictures from this archive, we will create a powerful and new perspective of daily life on this planet.”

Everyone can participate and the project is free and open to all. Participants include school children in remote classrooms from Ethiopia to Texas, Academy Award nominated filmmakers, to charitable organizations such as 350.org. YOU (or your classroom) can sign up to participate at www.onedayonearth.org. Then, set aside 10.10.10 as a day to create and share.

What an awe-inspiring time we live in when disparate voices from far-away places can create a beautiful harmony.  And what a hopeful message to share with our children who need connection now, more than ever.

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Homa Sabet Tavangar is the author of Growing Up Global: Raising Children to Be At Home in the World, hailed a “Best New Parenting Book” by Scholastic Parent + Child, and a Best Education Book of the Decade.  She is the mother of three girls, in grades 2, 10 and 12, host-mother this year to an AFS exchange student, and a volunteer in the public schools where all four attend.

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Speaking in Tongues: A Film. A Challenge.

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

With all the talk of “Restoring Honor” and taking back our country, I’ve been thinking a lot about the changes in America that feel so threatening to some.  We are living through revolutions in just about every sphere of life.  Some revolutions can be terrific.  Like the American Revolution. Or the technological revolution that enabled us to throw out our bulky typewriters for increasingly thin, fast and powerful computers.  A revolution in learning and human relations needs to accompany the technology shift – and this is where it can get tricky.  At a time when national borders mean less and less, and cultures interact on a daily basis, Americans can do better than complete their education as monolinguals with a weak grasp of geography, math, or how to interact across cultural lines.

From ‘Speaking in Tongues’

Among the key skills for success in the 21st Century workforce is fluency in at least a second language. Many disagree with me on this point.  Thirty-one U.S. states have passed “English-only” initiatives, in order to not be required to translate official documents and services.  School districts (including where I live) have dropped foreign language instruction in elementary school and/or middle school due to budget shortfalls or because the results aren’t demonstrated on standardized tests.  Meanwhile, the US Department of Homeland Security is clamoring for Americans fluent in the languages of other countries to aid intelligence work, the Department of Defense is pouring money into language programs, businesses are more likely to hire a bi-lingual candidate when offered a choice, and research (as well as common sense) indicates the younger the learner, the easier it is to acquire an additional language.

Yet, for many Americans, the idea of foreign language immersion falls somewhere between threatening and mysterious.  Amidst this backdrop I was delighted to watch the new documentary film Speaking in Tongues, by veteran filmmakers Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider.  The film humanizes the difficulties and triumphs of language learning by following four diverse students and their families.  As we get to know the children we see the impact of speaking more than one language, from becoming closer to one’s heritage and the older generation that holds the traditions, to taking opportunities to live and travel abroad, to offering a chance to break out of a cycle of poverty.

The medium of film tells a story that no academic study could convey.  I found myself rooting for Durrell, an African-American boy living in public housing who starts Kindergarten immersed in a Chinese classroom.  And also for Jason, a Mexican-American boy, whose parents are not literate in any language, but who develops proper Spanish literacy while mastering English. Their determination through substantive lessons in Chinese or Spanish actually serves as their ticket to potential success in mainstream America – and beyond.

The filmmakers are clearly committed to this ideal.  “We have seen the amazing transformation through language in our own home. Our sons are in their fourth and eighth year in a Chinese immersion program. They are equally comfortable in both English and Chinese” explains Ms. Jarmel.   “As parents and as filmmakers, we wanted to pose the question: ‘In today’s world, is knowing English enough?’ and we invite the film’s audience to consider the answers with us and one another.”

Watching the film helped me better envision what an immersion classroom looks like, how a family can support the intellectual (and at times emotional) challenge their child is taking on, how a global mindset can be developed for a child from any economic condition, and more generally, how language can unite diverse peoples.

Speaking in Tongues is streaming on PBS Video through September 17, and is the first program to be carried in three languages (Spanish, Chinese, English) on the PBS video portal.  (Click here to watch it now.)  The film also will be available to watch on PBS and other cable TV stations throughout the United States, now and beyond September 17.  Check the film’s website here for schedules.  If you don’t find your city on the schedule, call your PBS affiliate and ask for it.  The website also offers information if you’d like to host a screening and community discussion, and more resources for language learning and global thinking.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the film, and your community’s experience on this issue, whether it’s with children learning a second language through immersion or simply dabbling, or the response to immigrant English language learners.  Are you from one of the English-only states?  How has this played out in practice?  How have school budget pressures impacted programs?  If school leaders don’t speak a second language is this affecting the way they decide on programs?

Whatever your experiences with language learning – keep talking!  It will translate into a better community, and might even stir a revolution.

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Posted at www.momsrising.org

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Alamar (“To the Sea”) Film Review – Less is More

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

My family and some friends recently watched Alamar, the new Mexican-Italian feature by Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio (available through FilmMovement.com), on one of our countless, steamy east coast evenings.   As we adjusted our over-stimulated, short-attention span watching habits to this near-documentary, it seemed a calm, cool peace from a simpler corner of our planet gradually washed over us, like the blue water so prominently featured throughout the meditative film.

alamar film cover

Initially – especially the parents of boys – thought their kids wouldn’t respond to the soft rhythm of the gorgeous film, but it managed to keep the attention of the boys and girls, women and men.  The centerpiece of the film is a father-son relationship amidst the idyllic life of subsistence fishermen in the Mexican Caribbean – selling or eating what they catch, sleeping in hammocks in cottages on stilts in the water, learning to swim, dive, and navigate the sometimes treacherous sea, for an ultimate “Free-range kid” experience.  Their quality time together will be cut short imminently when five year-old Natan returns to live the urban life with his mother.  In an opening scene that feels like raw documentary footage the parents describe their doomed love.  She is a city girl and he is a man of the wild, who doesn’t want to be constrained by a concrete jungle.  A life together raising their love child calls for one of them to compromise all they know, so the marriage is unsustainable, but the joy it produced is real, in Natan, the beautiful, perfect mix of his mother and father (these are not actors playing the roles, and even their real names are kept for the film).

Parents might be concerned by a brief vignette of the young couple on the beach near the film’s start.  No worries – they’re just in European-style bathing suits and that’s the most risqué it gets.  Later in the film posters of pin-up girls in tight bikinis are shown adorning walls of bachelor fishermen shacks, but that’s as far as it goes.

The tenderness of the father-son relationship more than makes up for any concerns about appropriate content.   When you watch, pay attention to the first impression you might have of Natan’s father Jorge and then notice how this changes by the end of the film.  Looks deceive.  Jorge is no Tarzan.  He knows the Latin classification of native plants and viewers will appreciate the care with which he converses, teaches, protects and disciplines his young son.  In the end, many might be pining for that relationship with their own father and forget the initial impression they had of the Mexican man who eschews the urbane life.  Like Jorge’s own life, the movie’s themes remind us that much of nature is not for us to tame or own.  The egret affectionately named Blanquita by Natan, might come close and linger, but in spite of best efforts, she can’t be domesticated and kept.  This mediation on “detachment,” a theme so rare in our consumer culture, can spur rich discussion across generations – and is one of the many gifts of Alamar.

Faithful to its title, the sea itself plays a major role in Alamar.  We are surrounded, immersed, awed, fed, and threatened by it throughout the film – again, we can’t own it or tame it.  It’s hard not to be reminded of the mess we’re making of our oceans when we see how generous and gorgeous it is to those who treat it well, co-existing harmoniously with it.  Without a drop of lecturing, this is serves as a powerful treatise on environmental stewardship.

We’ve enjoyed some delightful family films this summer, like Toy Story 3, and now add Alamar to that strong list.  As one of our friends commented a few days after our movie night, “the more time went by, the more I liked it, and couldn’t stop thinking about it.”  And when I asked my 7 year-old which of those two films would she prefer to see again, she couldn’t decide – both were so good.

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By Homa S. Tavangar, author, Growing Up Global: Raising Children to Be At Home in the World (Random House/Ballantine, 2009).   Growing Up Global contains a full chapter on additional foreign films to watch with your family, and was named a “Best New Parenting Book” by Scholastic Parent + Child.

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