In education there is always a plan and outcome goal for every lesson. Departures Youth Voices begins with this framework, but is designed to adapt and change based on a variety of factors, including the students’ needs, the facility, resources available, and our education partners expectations. With each project, we work with students from different areas of the city with different backgrounds and different skill sets, in traditional classroom settings and in community facilities both with varying resources. The Education Notes blog helps to mediate between plan and reality by looking at the weekly workshops from the educator's perspective, and how the process of developing the project relates to larger social and educational issues. We invite you to keep a close eye on Departures Highland Park Youth Voices and share in our exploration.

For the final assignment of the "My Neighborhood Project", students produced digital interactive murals. Through the development of this project, students learned to use design principals and graphic elements, such as repetition, hierarchy, texture, color, and transition. The student murals are designed to take viewers on a street level journey of their neighborhood, their hot spots, and their memories. Students were challenged to see what kind of juxtapositions or narratives they could create through these "linearesque" audio⁄visual presentations. Students were also encouraged to apply the graphic principles learned and perhaps integrate some of the collage and design styles they had been introduced to over the course of the workshops. Students were taught to use Vuvox, an online application that allows users to cut and collage images, embed video and audio, and create stand-alone multimedia panoramic experiences. As can be the case with any application or software, there were technical issues and unfortunately students were unable to embed their videos. None-the-less, many of the interviews and video portraits the students created will be available in entries throughout the Youth Voices Highland Park blog. This phase of the project brought a new level of excitement and motivation to the student’s work. They were interested to see what others were creating and were influenced to try new things and stretch themselves. Collaboration amongst the students increased as well as many of their commitments to complete the project in order to see their final work screened to their classmates. Check out the murals by clicking on the entries below.

We asked the student producers to look within themselves to identify meaningful memories and places in their community and link them to a map. Through this process they created an interactive representation of what makes their neighborhood unique, rich in stories, and most importantly, what makes it theirs.

Youth Voices began at the end of the 2011 school year and for most of the participating students it was also the end of their four years at Franklin High School. As seniors, they were on route to their graduation and the next phase in life. Youth Voices gave them an opportunity to reflect on their community, their experiences and pick up valuable multimedia skills in the process.

The student producers jumped right into the “My Neighborhood and Me” project creating power point presentations, 2D and digital maps, and engaging in a series of workshops where they were introduced to creative and technical aspects of photography, audio and video production. The constructivist aspect of the project allowed students to put these new ideas into action immediately, researching, documenting and sharing their experiences in their community. It was a fast paced and arduous adventure that yielded wonderful insightful work.