Objectives
I conceptualized this project as an introductory filmmaking unit, with students creating their first film by the end as a goal. This unit’s backbone is to switch the normative conversation of listening and asking questions and instead have students participate as public historians and oral storytellers. First, as public historians, students’ understanding
of people and places and how multiple meanings can be created through the "sense of place" is contingent on the ways they travel through them. Secondly, students will work as oral storytellers, speaking about their own engagement with the space and their relationship to it, struggles within it, and identity formed in relation to it. Finally, as filmmakers, students will continue the storytelling process with a focus and exploration of their neighborhood through the language of film, and the search for an understanding and sense of meaning in their own public history. The focus of Otra Lado, a search for understanding the public history of my students and making meaning of this history is explained in the next section,
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