Some of the most interesting learning happens outside the walls of the classroom. I design experiences that connect students with the wider world; field trips that spark their curiosity, guest speakers who offer new perspectives, festivals that celebrate student voices, and unique projects centered around the students building their own meaningful experieneces.
Beyond the Classroom
Film Festivals
I co-founded the Shanghai Student Film Festival in 2007 in order to give students the opportunity to share their vision with an authentic audience. Fifteen years later, thousands of students from more than 20 schools from Shanghai and beyond have participated in our workshops, film challenges, and screenings. Visit the S2F2 website to learn more.
Last year, I created Nest Fest, the first annual film festival for Nido de Aguilas. Currently, my students and I at Nido de Aguilas are planning expanding this into a student-led film festival in which they will work with local students to teach them filmmaking and communication skills and meet with professional filmmakers.
China Alive: Hengdian
Hengdian Film Studios is the largest film studio in the world, boasting a 5/6 scale sized set of the Forbidden City (pictured above) in addition to other equally impressive locations. In 2015 I created our annual Hengdian Film Studios China Alive trip. While all of our week without walls trips connect to Chinese culture, what made this one different was that it also functioned as a rich PBL learning activity. With guidance from myself, an English teacher and an Asian History teacher; students researched, wrote, and produced a different historical fiction film set at various points of China's rich past (like this one).
We also got to play Cricket and Hide And Seek in the "Forbidden City" after hours.
Artist & Author James Gurney (Dinotopia, Imaginary Realism) showed us that you can find meaningful experiences right in your backyard, as he did when he took our IB Art students to the wet market across the street for a sketching lesson. Access to working artists who find inspiration in everyday life has empowered my students to find the small moments of beauty in their own lives. Over the years we have worked with artists like Ken Wong (designer of Apple's Game of the Year, Monument Valley), Scott McCloud (author of Understanding Comics), Sarah Hurwitz (Michelle Obama's Speechwriter) and Nacho Vigolando (director of Colossal and Time Crimes).
Guest Artists
School Trips
A community is made up of people who share commonalities. Schools are based on commonalities of proximity, but deeper community roots are formed with commonalities of interest. Luckily, I get to share my interests every day in my art and film classes. However, it is also important to connect with students on other levels. This is why I was happy to pick up leadership of experiences such as the school ski trip to Switzerland, or take the students on a habitat for humanity build in Guanxi province.
In trips like these and others, students find the opportunity to take a different kind of risks and find new commonalities in new experiences.
Imagine Oz
Sometimes great things come out of simple misunderstandings. When I was running the drama club at Huntington High school in New York, I thought the Music Teacher told me that he had once performed the Wizard of Oz with music from the Beatles. What he meant, was that he used that music as interstitials between scenes, but I thought he meant that they substituted the music. I related the conversation to my students who loved the idea of bringing this idea to life for our community. With the help of local composer Scott Barkan, who transposed the music, the students wrote, directed, designed set, props, and costumes, and performed this musical; which was not only a hit in our school community, but has become a cult favorite on Long Island over the past 20 years. Imagine Oz has found a home in a variety of high school & college drama departments, camps, and community theaters.
The Student Creative
The Student creative was an annual challenge that I created with fellow Adobe Education Leaders Mike Skocko and Matt Cauthron. Every year we would release a different photography & art challenge to students around the world. The submissions from participating schools would then be published in a compilation book, with the proceeds sent to the Jacaranda School in Malawi.
Rotoball
For 10 years, I ran an international collaborative project. Students from schools all around the world had to animate a 30 second sequence in which a ball enters from one side of the frame, transforms into something that that creates or disrupts a scene, turns back into a ball and bounces back out the other side.
This simple prompt allowed students to 'pass' this ordinary object, which takes on a mythical 'trickster' characteristic (sometimes good, sometimes bad) across continents.
This lesson introduced students to both keyframe and rotoscoped animation. In the 10 years that it ran, more than 1200 students participated.