OUR NEWEST ASSOCIATED GROUP
Summers at Insight Arts bring forth a series of performing arts youth courses to the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago. This summer it will continue the tradition, only with a new added component.

Insight Arts has recently partnered with Hecho en Encinal (Hecho), a small, grassroots organization based in Encinal, Texas (pop. 629) a largely Hispanic (91%) and ranching community in rural South Texas.

Hecho strives to offer arts, arts education, and cultural activities to communities in La Salle County by providing access to materials, to dialogue and to the kinds of performers and exhibits that rarely stray from urban environments.



Through MDM youth learn creative and critical skills necessary for successful documentary design including sound recording, composition, editing, lighting, equipment handling, and interviewing.  Here South Texas youth conduct an interview for their Ranch Stories documentary project.


MEDIA DEL MONTE
This summer, Insight Arts artistic associate, and South Texas native, Maritza Bautista will assist leading a new youth media-training program called Media del Monte (MDM).

MDM is an intensive youth media-literacy/training summer institute in rural South Texas. Through intensive workshops, underserved youth in Encinal/La Salle County, Texas will be challenged with hands-on technical training in digital media technologies including video, photography, sound, editing software (Final Cut Pro), and lighting.

MDM is greatly informed by the work of Paulo Freire (1998), specifically ideas outlined in his book Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage. MDM workshops will be aligned with Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (state learning standards).

“…[A] correct way of thinking that goes beyond the ingenuous must be produced by the learners in communion with the teacher responsible for their education. At the same time, it is necessary to insist that the matrix both of ingenuous and critical thinking is the same curiosity that characterizes all human vitality” (Freire, p. 43).

MDM will allow youth to engage in a critical learning environment where interactions and communication, through critical discussions with peers and facilitators are essential. Youth will not only be learners, but teachers and leaders, establishing a learning environment for themselves, other participants, and the community, therefore empowering them as such.

As a group, youth will investigate aspects of life unique in their rural community and the social impacts digital media technologies have in their community. They will learn how to initialize concepts by teaming up with experienced mentors throughout the process. Youth will intensively learn basic technical aspects of video making equipment and software and will lead the creation of a youth views documentary short to promote awareness of a rural community issue. They will learn how to make choices about interviewing, recording behavior, narration and dialogue, and visual composition before shooting.

“Through dialogue, grassroots groups can be challenged to process their social-historical experience as the experience that is formative for them individually and collectively” (Freire, pp. 76-77).

In six weeks MDM participants will develop creative and critical thinking skills for documentary design and proposal through artistic examination and analysis by exploring, dialoguing, and processing the following as a group:

•     film, video, and other media,
•     critical reflection,
•     online resources,
•     literacy,
•     idea of community, and
•     distribution and screening.

Media Del Monte (MDM) is the rural South Texas Media Institute.  It will kick off for the first time this summer.





In six intense and challenging weeks, MDM interns will be afforded the opportunity to work with professional film/video making equipment in order to create documentary projects about issues important to them and unique to their community.





Award winning filmmaker Marcela Moran will lead MDM.  Moran is an award-winning international filmmaker and photographer. 





Hecho en Encinal headquarters.


By the end of the course, youth will be better listeners; have experience in proposal design; have effective interviewing skills; understand importance of recording sound and image composition, narration and dialogue; have budget planning skills; and, hopefully, have the skills needed to believe in themselves to be effective leaders in their community.

HELP MAKE MDM SUSTAINABLE
MDM is a unique youth media-training institute, unlike any other in South Texas. Insight Arts and Hecho en Encinal are currently working together to make MDM sustainable and available to rural South Texas youth to help establish critical consciousness and arts-based community development.

For more information on how you or your organization can help support Media Del Monte, please contact Maritza Bautista at maritza@insightartsliberation.org or at mdm@encinalart.org.


Hecho En Encinal
www.encinalart.org