After a fantastic afternoon of web geekery courtesy of The Fledgling Fund - and a look at the impressive impact report put out by the filmmakers behind Lioness - the Propeller Films' audience engagement team was inspired to share some insights into what we've been working on and what we've learnt:
The Recruiter, directed by Edet Belzberg and released in 2008, is a documentary about American military recruitment told through the eyes of one of the Army's most successful recruiters and the four teenagers he recruits from his station in rural Louisiana. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and aired on HBO. Last year it won a DuPont Award from Columbia University for excellence in journalism.
Since the film's release, and with the support of The Fledgling Fund, our curriculum developer Sheila Sundar has been working with schools throughout the country to bring our film and educator's guide into high school classrooms. Our goal is not to assume a political position on the war but to initiate conversation about its disproportionate impact on low-income, rural communities, as well as the myths of war versus its realities. Ultimately, we hope that a critical examination of the choices that they and their peers confront will help students break the quiet that permeates high school classrooms around what it means to be a nation at war.
Our goal, on a recent visit to three demographically distinct schools in New York and New Jersey, was to raise questions among young people about the relationship among poverty, opportunity, and enlistment. We wanted students to think critically about the inequity that shapes the choice to enlist, and about the desperation with which some young people make a choice that others, with perhaps greater opportunity, could not imagine for themselves.
Our first visit took place at Montclair High School (NJ), an ethnically diverse, affluent suburban community located roughly half an hour from New York City. In 2004, a student-led effort resulted in over eighty percent of parents submitting written requests to keep their children's contact information private and inaccessible to military recruiters. Yet students spoke of this success not as a product of their political leanings but their privilege. One student argued that families could afford to resist military recruiters because they were able to pay for college with little compromise or sacrifice. Roxbury High School (NJ), reflected greater economic diversity and slightly higher rates of military enlistment. Yet, despite our presence in the classrooms of two dynamic teachers in a course focused on the Vietnam War, students were hesitant to draw connections between history and the present, between the lives captured in The Recruiter and their own. When they did begin to speak, their words seemed to challenge not only the silence in the classroom but a greater silence around war both within and beyond the school. At Christopher Columbus High School (Bronx, NY), students gathered from three schools housed within the same building. Similarly, the conversation began quietly. Yet it ended with a group of students and the eager and extraordinary librarian who hosted us continuing the discussion informally over pizza after school. This group included a number of young men and women who spoke with great frustration about the influence of military recruiters on the lives of many of their friends and family members, as well as a number who were in support of the opportunity provided by recruiters and who themselves hoped to enlist. In all three classrooms we circled back to the questions of equity and fairness. Why were the young people in The Recruiter choosing to enlist? Why are some communities paying a higher price than others?
Students in all three schools initially resisted the notion that this was a reflection of injustice. Many argued that, unlike the Vietnam War, young people now are presented with a choice. The choice may be unfair, it may be rooted in inequity, and it may be guided by monolithic notions of war, but it was a choice nonetheless. Yet in each school, as we continued to talk, minority voices emerged that cracked this notion. They pointed to Lauren, whose choice to enlist is captured in The Recruiter as one motivated only by a desire for a college education. They talked about Matt, who spoke after his first tour in Iraq about the losses he endured, and about the reality he confronted that was so different from the one presented by his recruiter. And they spoke of people in their lives who chose to enlist based on a vague understanding of war and a belief that the army would give them opportunities that seemed unavailable everywhere else.
As these voices grew more powerful in each classroom, they came to challenge not just traditional ideas of poverty and opportunity, but the silence around a war that has remained marginalized in high school curricula. And we hope that as we continue to reach out to schools we will play a role in breaking the silence around an issue that is as critical in communities directly impacted by war as in those in which it its impact is less visible. We hope that our conversations will guide those students considering enlisting to think deeply about the realities of the decision they confront, and we hope that students far removed from this choice will think of their peers with heightened compassion and understanding.
We filmed our programs in each of these schools and will be adding them to our website this summer. We have already added the footage shot during our visit to Manassas High School in Memphis at the beginning of last academic year. This August we will be putting together a short compilation video from all of the schools in which we have filmed to showcase student responses. We will feature this on our website so that teachers can see that our curriculum has been used across a wide spectrum (from rural schools to urban ones, from North to South, etc.). We will also be completing an article about the teaching of war in high school classrooms as observed through our outreach efforts, and revising our curriculum which will be available on our website in the fall. We are also excited to announce that our curriculum was chosen to be included in the 2010 -2011 educators' guide "
Planning to Change the World: A Plan Book for Social Justice Teachers". Howard Zinn called the guide "an imaginative and innovative idea in the field of education." And we hope that our continued outreach will live up to his words by bringing these qualities into critical discussions of war in high school classrooms.
