For the Global Education course, Anna and myself made a documentary about education in Nepal and wrote a report about it. Below you will be able to view the documentary and read my report.
Introduction
In this report, I will explain the process of
making the documentary, A Mountain to
Climb – Education in Nepal, as well as look at what Global Education is, the
challenges faces during this project process and how the project has helped
broaden my understanding of global education in general.
What is Global
Education?
The UN’s Secretary General’s First Initiative on Global Education
gives us some insight into what the term actually means. The three priorities of
the initiative are: 1, Put every child in school, 2, Improve the quality of
learning and 3, Foster global citizenship.
The first of these is significant in that is
tells us what the state of education is globally today. Not every child is in
school, not every child has the possibility to be educated and that’s a basic
human right we all accept, so there’s clearly work to be done here.
The second in the list also tells us something
important: It’s not enough to get every child in school, but the quality of the
education must be good and getting better all the time. This begs questions
about what constitutes “good” education, but what’s important is that no matter
if we have disagreements about the nature of quality education; we certainly
agree that a discussion on improving the quality of learning is a discussion
worth having.
The third priority is, for me, the most
interesting. Getting the children to school and then getting them out of school
with the ability to competently read, write and count isn’t enough.
Global education should help to foster a
mindset which helps find solutions to global problems. It should instill in the
minds of the young people a sense of care and responsibility towards the planet
and those they share it with.
“Education must fully assume its central role in helping people to forge
more just, peaceful, tolerant and inclusive societies. It must give people the
understanding, skills and values they need to cooperate in resolving the
interconnected challenges of the 21st Century.”
Logistics
In the spring of 2013, Anna Pesonen-Smith and I
received a grant from the Finnish Foreign Affairs Ministry to travel to Nepal
for the purpose of conducting journalistic work. Initially, our aims were to
cover such issues as, among other things, gender equality in education and how
Finland is helping in clean water programmes.
Our plan was to work as a team, creating
various kinds of media to be sold or distributed in different places. During
the trip, Anna would take photographs and I would shoot video and when we came
back to Finland, we would work together to produce the relevant material.
For the first time, I was project-working
shooting video on a DSLR camera, the Canon 5D Mark II. I had bought an external
uni-directional microphone to pick up better sound than the onboard camera mic
as well as a monopod to steady the picture. I was happy with the result, though
I learned something through the process; I should have been more careful in
shooting with a wider depth of field (as can be seen in the second principal
interview).
Generally speaking, though, the camera
equipment was reliable, compact, discreet, easy to use and provided a good
quality of image. I will happily employ similar equipment in future.
Challenges
There were logistical challenges for us in
terms of finding the people to interview and then, especially with the mountain
village near Pokhara, travelling to the destination. In the end, those
obstacles were overcome but it did highlight the fact that it’s not easy to get
stuck into the issues facing educators in the third world.
If we hadn’t received the backing of the
Finnish Foreign Affairs Ministry, the Finnish Embassy in Kathmandu and the
Nepalese Government officials who aided our efforts, we would simply not have
been able to reach those people and places.
Once in place, we set ourselves the task of
asking a broad range of questions and trying as much as possible to give the
interviewees a chance to speak for themselves and tell their own story. Anna
and I discussed possible questions beforehand and then it was up to her to
conduct the interviews while I shot the video and tried to make the sound work
as best I could.
Luckily for us, Anna’s extensive experience
working as a journalist meant she was both comfortable in this role and capable
of finding the right angles which could translate into newsworthiness.
Recording people talking does not make a
documentary. At heart, any documentary is a story and, within that frame, a
justification of why the story is important. In this case, we found ourselves
facing the challenge of having approximately 45 minutes of interviews and 45
minutes of b-roll (non-interview material to help illustrate the story and cut
together the interviews), which we decided we should try to cut down to
approximately 15 minutes.
The final length of the documentary came in at
just over 15 minutes, so we were able to do that.
Carving out a cohesive story from a collection
of interviews like those we conducted on the myriad subjects of education,
equality, current practices, challenges, gender issues, sanitation, plans for
the future etc. is no easy feat.
The process resembles sculpting a large
monument. You start with an idea and begin hammering away at bits of it.
Through a very time consuming process of elimination, you eventually end up
with something starting to resemble the final product. Finally, you chip away,
refine and polish until you have something that is lean and working in the way
you first imagined it could.
In all, the editing process took us somewhere
in the region of 20-25 hours.
Results &
Conclusions
The final documentary speaks for itself. In
that film, you can hear the voices of those people who are working day-to-day
with the issue of global education. Those character are wrestling with the
challenges of funding, equipment, state of school buildings, outside pressures,
sanitation issues, standards of education and the difficult domestic situations
faced by their students.
It reveals a lot to us how they meet their
challenges. In a way, I feel the solutions, such a boosting interest and
attendance levels through teaching in English, are not the keys to this
challenge. For me, the real key is the attitude that brings about that kind of
solution.
As the principal says, education should not
just be about passing exams, it should be about teaching life skills and
improving all aspects of society. This isn’t self-clear to many, so education
also has a role to play in fostering the right kinds of attitudes in the young,
which in turn will help to combat the various challenges of the future,
whatever they may be.
References
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