Collin and Daryl- first workshop @ NYPL

https://vimeo.com/78986624

Collin and I had our first workshop at the Bronx Library Center yesterday- it was (hopefully) the first of three workshops building towards our self-published, teen-generated walking guide to the neighborhood zine.

It started out rough but ended much better.. I think we overestimated the role of the library in getting teens to come to our workshops, both in the week prior to it and in the few minutes before it started. The teen center was full of kids, and one library personnel yelled an announcement for our workshop a few times, but even after ten minutes had passed, no kids came in, and we pretty much thought we weren’t going to have any participants. Then, one kid came in and said he was our first customer. He helped us gather a few more, and still more trickled in throughout the entire workshop. Our “first customer” ended up being the most disruptive and least cooperative participant, and he left halfway through. But he did help us get started at least.

We started with about five or six boys, two of which left, and a few more came in while we worked, so the lack of continuity was disruptive. They were also just hyper active and it was hard to keep them concentrated. But in the end, about five boys were really into our activities and having a really good time.

We started with an icebreaker that was like “pictionary telephone”, where you write a scene on a paper, pass it around, the next person draws what you wrote, pass it around, the next person writes what they see, etc. It was fun but one or two of the boys were really hard to engage and they distracted everyone else. They left soon after this activity, I think.

Then we watched the Barack Obama Call Me Maybe video, which the boys thought was funny, and we had a little discussion about how it was made, how we make stuff from varied sources. They had some interesting comments about how much work must have gone into the video.

Then we started our mini-zine storytelling activity that we practiced with the class. In pairs, we came up with the beginning and end scenes to our story. Another team came up with the middle point, and then we had to reconcile the actions in between. I think this was the most successful part of our workshop (partly because some of the rowdy kids had left) and we had a lot of fun doing it together. Collin and I sat at the table and fully participated, thinking of scenes for stories to begin and end. I worked with one kid (I can’t remember his name) who I was really impressed with. In our mini-zine, our beginning scene was the golf course in Dallas. He picked the ending scene to be “the year 600 AD in Japan, and you’re fighting in the war between the rich and the poor”. A different team wrote us into outer space in the middle of the story, and this kid had some really creative and great ways to create a narrative between those three places. You can see him working really hard in this video, he’s the quiet one.

The video was towards the end, when we were trying to finish up the stories. One kid (who also ended up in outer space) is trying to figure out how to continue the story. I think it’s a good example of them doing what we hoped they would do- thinking about narratives as more collaborative and fractured. I was really impressed with the way they used their imaginations and came up with some funny stories. Another book read something like “p1: you are sitting in burger king drinking a milkshake when someone comes in and robs it. p2: you find a rock and throw it at him p3: you wake up in bed at home and realize you were just dreaming. you’re late for school. p4: you’re on the school bus and you go to school and go to the big cafeteria p5: you are sitting in the cafeteria when someone comes in and robs it and steals your lunch money. deja vu”

I also noticed that at least one of them seemed excited about keeping his mini-zine and story, which I felt good about, because one of the reasons I wanted to do these workshops was because I think physically making books can be really empowering and offer a lot.

Most of them ran out right after we finished that workshop. We gave them a sheet of paper with a really simple assignment to thinking of places in the community and write some stories about them. The sheet also had a map of the community. I doubt that any of them will keep the paper or do the assignment. I’m also worried that we will have really low continuity of participants between workshops. A few of the boys said they would come back next week, some of them said they might not be able to. Next week we will bring a large map of the neighborhood and have the participants point out some of their favorite places and write stories about them.

I think for a first workshop, it went pretty well. The lack of attendance and continuity is a little discouraging but we were unfamiliar with the environment and the teens themselves, and now we know better what we should have done. We should have marketed our workshops better (the library had us listed as a “zine workshop” and the announcement was for a “writing workshop”. I tried to get a few kids to come in and work with us before it started and they said it sounded boring). I think it’s really hard to get kids to sit and be still and concentrate after a day of school in a completely voluntary program with people they don’t know. Considering that, we did pretty well.