Full Tilt Ahead: Intermedia Literacy in the 21st Century
TILT was officially born in San Francisco on August 10th of 1998, but the concept for TILT came in 1995 when I set up a video project at a continuation high school for Latino youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. I proposed to them that they tell a narrative story - in their own words and style - dealing with their lives and community. The project required them to create a story, script, storyboard, and shot list; find a cast and locations; learn to use an array of sophisticated equipment both for the shoot and for the edit; and rehearse and perform in addition to handling the technical work. The project encountered the same innumerable obstacles and setbacks that plague any large production - faulty equipment, unreliable weather, creative differences, recalcitrant extras etc. In spite of the challenges, the majority of the teens not only stuck it out, but also immersed themselves in the production. The culminating movie, Love Between A Boy And Girl, went on to screenings at local, national, and international festivals.
Since this first movie project TILT has gone on to produce many more projects ranging from very simple low tech media investigations to high tech, time intensive multi-monitor video installations for museums and galleries. At TILT we don't think there is much that is more important than becoming media literate in the 21st century. Most of what we know about the world comes through media representations. Therefore we must know and teach that all media are constructed and all constructions have biases and points of view. Being media literate is being able to ask the right questions, bringing an analytical mind and skepticism to any media construction. It is our responsibility to help ourselves and others to decode and dismantle the media messages that surround us and to empower ourselves by using those very conventions of persuasion and communication to get our own perspectives and values into the mix.
Combined with in-depth production training and critical viewing skills, we have also developed an educational model that is rooted in contemporary ideas of critical pedagogy. In 1999 we set up a voluntary "think tank" made up of local teachers, academics, curriculum specialists and media producers to help us articulate our teaching and learning methodologies.
Most of our training and workshops are geared towards youth aged 11-21, but we are committed as an organization to working with all populations, and we believe the following methods apply across age, class, geography and ethnicity:
- Student-centered learning -
We believe that the workshop or the classroom should be a democratic environment to which we all bring something to and we all have a stake in. TILT projects are forged from a collective knowledge of media and a telling and combining of personal stories resulting in a hybrid form that reflects multiple media genres and multiple personal perspectives.
- Project-based learning -
There is an end goal that drives our collaboration.
- Collaborative and community based learning -
All our teachers take into the classroom the idea that we all come from a place, a continuum. We make sense of ourselves and our world in the context of our lives. Learning, then, is not separate from our everyday experience.
- Interdisciplinary learning -
All media production is interdisciplinary, drawing on many skill sets that deeply investigate the relationship of form and content and that rely largely on the intelligent intersection between theory and practice. To keep pace with our rapid growth we are in the process of raising upwards of $100,000 so that we can build out our new site for which we will sign a 15 year lease next week.
We are also interviewing people for both our half time office manager position and a full time Education Director position. In June we are hosting our second teacher training, to bring on much needed new teachers. Due to oversubscription and the expansion of our programming, we have already added another teacher training for August that at last count was almost full. We have a number of youth whom we met on past projects coming on board over the summer to work on various projects, and we are looking forward to meeting a whole new bunch of TILTers on the upcoming projects.
One of our full scale moviemaking projects this summer is working with a group of young adults who live and work on Polk Street, primarily in the sex industry. One of the main reasons that we are working with this population is that they recently had a feature documentary made about them and their lives that they feel grossly misrepresents them. They want to learn the tools of media production to create and distribute their own images of themselves and their lives. We are on a mission to provide those tools, and we really are going full TILT ahead.
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Lise Swenson is a media artist, activist and educator.
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© 2000 National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. All Rights Reserved.
