PAGE: Wrapping Up Session One
Come rain or shine, three hours of sleep or eight, the PAGE program continues to move along full speed ahead. Highlights of this week have included more gardening time, developing the permaculture orchard, and connecting with the girls on a deeper and more personal level in the literature groups.
The interns have fallen into a steady rhythm here as week two comes to a close. This increased comfort level comes from the fact that all of the girls who have signed up for week two are returning students from week one. Thus, we all have a level of familiarity that allows us to connect with the students both one on one, and in a group setting. As a result of increased familiarity, one can hear gleeful shouts and laughter in abundance, ricocheting through the hollows of the mountains. A daily scene is the girls all walking down to the garden from breakfast together, chatting with their new friends, and eagerly showing the interns the projects that they have been working on. This is a stark contrast to the first week, where the interns clustered together in their own group, and the girls stayed strictly with those from their communities or their friends that they had made in school. One of my favorite recurring moments from this session are the several students who are excited to show me pictures of their pets. One point of community and connection amongst many of the girls is that a lot of them have gardens at home, with an abundance of pets to go along with it. So far I have seen bulldogs, calico cats, and snakes that the girls have as pets — all of them with a name and a story to go along with them.
The girl's eagerness to show off their pets and other photographs that they’ve taken was a major motivating factor that encouraged the theme for my literature groups this week: digital storytelling. For this mini-unit, I incorporated place-based education through digital storytelling with photographs. My vision was that the girls would explore their Appalachian identity by taking photographs with point-and-shoot cameras and polaroids. The girls would also analyze the impact that photography has had on the Appalachian region and explore photography as a way for empowerment as opposed to exploitation. In order to accomplish this, I designed a project where the girls will produce a ‘Page from PAGE’. This project serves as a scrapbook-Esq, vision board Esq, storytelling tool for the girls to recount their experience in PAGE over the past two weeks, telling the story through their eyes.
During the first day of the session I introduced the project and was surprised by the enthusiasm that the students exhibited. When I asked if they had ever done anything relating to photography before one of the girls immediately spoke up and said, “No, but I’ve always wanted to! I think that it’s so cool!” The second day we had a library day where we deleved into the history of exploitation in photography, particularly the Appalachian region during the War on Poverty. This discussion was supplemented by our discussions that we had had the previous week about Appalachia and what it meant to the girls to be from that place, which had heralded positive responses from the students. To see their home portrayed the way it was through the eyes of individuals like Shelby Lee Adams angered them, and infuriated them even more when they realized that photographs like these and films like Deliverance and the Beverly Hillbillies were the only representation some would ever see of a place that was so special to them. “We have so much. And this isn’t what real life is like here.” one of the girls sighs in one of our literature group sessions. We also examined some positive portrayals from the region, drawing on examples from those such as John Domitris and Meg Wilson, individuals who have across time documented, “real Appalachian life” as one of the girls notes.
For the rest of the week, we worked on our ‘Page from PAGE’projects, which turned out to be a big hit at the end of week picnic and sharing circle.
Friday signaled the end of session one, and was the last time we would see many of the younger girls, as session two is geared more towards high school Juniors and Seniors. This was a bittersweet end for me especially, as I have developed such a close emotional bond with some of the students, and after seeing them blossum and thrive over the past couple of weeks, it was especially hard to say goodbye. Next week will be spent preparing for the start of session two, which will take place after the fourth of July weekend.
