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BY ROSARIO PAZ

In print | Published April 5, 2007

Anne Marie Frassica ’09 and co-coordinators Ayanna Johnson ’09 and Soraya Lakhani ’09 are producing a video project documenting the lives of children in Chester.

The project will attempt to capture the day-to-day experiences of middle school children in order to help Swarthmore student tutors better understand the community in which they work. Its producers said they hope the film will serve as a beneficial resource for incoming students with minimal experience in tutoring who may be interested in working in Chester.

The documentary is being filmed at Smedley Magnet Middle School, one of the sites targeted by the student-run Dare 2 Soar tutoring program. It focuses on sixth- to eighth-grade children with the hopes of providing a general look into the lives of students who may otherwise not have the chance to voice their perspectives.

“What we often hear about Chester is the bad stuff … but the kids may or may not think that. So I think that asking the kids is the best way to get an objective view of the school,” Frassica said. “As tutors, we go in seeing a problem and seeing ourselves as the solution. It’s hard to be a solution if you are uninformed about what is going on … This is what brought me to the project.” Frassica has described the project as an “introduction to the school system” that will also “paint a picture of the students as whole people.”

“Basically what we do is we take a camera on Fridays and we go and … videotape the interactions of the students within themselves,” Johnson said. “More recently we’ve been doing one-on-one interviews with the students. We don’t know much about the students anyway, so it is a way for us to get to know them and for them to get to know us. We were tutors for Dare 2 Soar, but it can kind of be generalized for all the schools that the students might go into to teach.”

In addition to directly videotaping the students’ interactions and interviews, multiple video cameras are used so that various angles of the same scene can be obtained, including an angle from the student himself.

“We go in with two or three cameras at a time … We also give a camera to another student who is not being interviewed. Not only are they being interviewed by us, but [they] are involved in the filming themselves,” Frassica said.

Though the film is being labeled as a documentary, it will not be education simply through narration. Frassica emphasized that she and the other coordinators of the project are present in almost none of the shots and that there will be no narration in order to provide the audience with the most objective perspective possible. “My main point here is that it is not a documentary in a strict sense … I really don’t want to editorialize this … but just bring in the voices of the Chester students themselves,” she said.

Also, Frassica said, it was important to the coordinators for the students to feel comfortable with the filming.

“I don’t want the kids to be putting up a front or want them to feel intimidated, so I think allowing them to … do some of the camerawork will allow them to open up a little bit more,” Frassica said. Consent forms were obtained from the students’ parents prior to the filming.

“The ultimate goal of the project is to show the tutors what to expect … what we as tutors do and … the relationships that you build between students,” Lakhani said. “It’s just trying to give these kids a little time to talk about themselves.”

“I think one of the experiences that I had [happened when] one of the boys started to talk to us about his life. It was obvious talking to him that he had a lot of things that he wanted to talk about … He didn’t have a consistent mentor figure in his life,” Lakhani said.

“As a tutor, you have an opportunity to play that part for this kids … They don’t have consistent teachers. They don’t get an opportunity to build a relationship with a teacher or an authority figure … That was one point when I realized mentoring is a big part of this,” Lakhani said.

“This project has been a great way to tie it all together. It’s a film that they’re in and a project that they’ve worked on in terms of putting it together,” Lakhani said.

According to Frassica, funding for the documentary is coming from a Swarthmore Foundation grant, which is made available to students with ideas for innovative projects or programs. Equipment for the filming process is being loaned from LPAC and the WRC.

According to Johnson, there is no final date for the end of production, although they hope for the project to be completed by the end of May. “We want to do a screening with the students and their parents and the directors of the center,” Johnson said. After completion, Frassica and the other coordinators of the video project plan to have a viewing of the documentary for the college students that are involved with any of the Chester tutoring programs, not solely Dare 2 Soar.

Jessica Engebretson ‘09, a tutor in the Dare to Soar program, predicts that the film’s perspective will be appropriate and worthwhile for new students interested in tutoring in Chester. “As a tutor, I think that the film’s focusing on the kids themselves is a really important tool for incoming tutors who don’t know much about Chester, and have only learned what they do know from other tutors or from the administrators of the school system, and not the students themselves,” Engebretson said.

“I’d be very interested in looking at the documentary … through the perspective of the kids’ eyes,” Engebretson said. “We’re not going to hear from the students before we go in unless we get to hear from them through this kind of project.”

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