SEELEY LAKE – Seeley-Swan High School English students are embarking on a new project entitled the Empathy Project. With the help of the University of Montana School of Journalism and guided by the classic “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, the students will be capturing the stories of community members to share through podcasts and photographs.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” was written by Harper Lee and published in 1960. One of the main themes in the book is compassion.
In the book Father Atticus Finch spoke to his six-year-old daughter “Scout” (Jean Louise Finch), “First of all,” he said, “if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view […] until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
The Shmoop Literature website equates Atticus’s recommendation to climb into someone’s skin to another familiar phrase, walk a mile in someone’s shoes. The idea is the same, to put yourself in the other person’s place and understand why they act the way they do even if you don’t agree with it.
SSHS English Teacher Lori Messenger choose “To Kill a Mocking Bird” because while she feels it is important for students to read new works of fiction and non-fiction, it’s also good for them to read works from other generations.
“It’s great for them to read and watch at least a few things that their parents read in school and that many people have enjoyed and learned from throughout generations - especially when the text is still relevant,” said Messenger.
The Empathy Project aims to give Seeley-Swan students the opportunity to interview and photograph people in the Seeley-Swan community they might not otherwise get to know. The idea is to draw upon the theme of empathy in “To Kill a Mockingbird” by encouraging students to talk to their neighbors and learn more about them.
“Empathy is perhaps one of the most important imaginative skills for young people to go out into the world with,” said Messenger.
Missoula County Public Schools Communications Director Hatton Littman initially connected Anne Bailey, UM Director of the Montana Media Lab in the School of Journalism, to several teachers at SSHS who she thought might be interested in embarking on a digital storytelling project with the Montana Media Lab.
“Lori Messenger had a great idea to pair her students’ reading of “To Kill a Mockingbird” with an audio and photo storytelling project, so we ran with it!” wrote Bailey in an email.
One of the Montana Media Lab’s core missions is to teach media literacy and digital storytelling to youth in rural parts of the state and on Montana’s reservations. They’ve already partnered with Box Elder High School on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation to help their students create a podcast on missing and murdered indigenous women. They will be working with three to five more rural schools during the 2019-2020 academic year.
Current and former UM Journalism School students will help train Seeley-Swan students in digital audio and photo skills to enable them to document the community members they meet. They will also be providing remote feedback to students on their project throughout the month of April and will assist in final distribution of their content on Montana Public Radio.
Messenger said the Common Core curriculum requires development of students speaking and listening skills, which will be one of the challenges with this project. The close reading and textual analysis work will tie into the more traditional requirements of our English curriculum.
The interviewing and podcast creation ties into the MCPS 21st Century Learning Initiative that encourages teaching young people technology skills and also getting outside traditional classroom walls to connect with the wider community.
The students simultaneously began reading the book while interviewing community members. Those interviewed were chosen from a student-generated list of people – with a range of ages and life experiences - from the Seeley-Swan area who would be willing to share a bit of their story and what they think is important in life.
“Students will hopefully have enjoyed reading “To Kill A Mockingbird” and watching the movie and then can become part of a larger conversation about the story with so many of the rest of Americans who have read it,” said Messenger. “They will strengthen their skills as readers, speakers and listeners, as well as improving their communication skills beyond the school walls. In the end they will have made podcasts that can be shared with the wider school and community audience.”
The podcasts will possibly be aired on Montana Public Radio later this spring. Some of the photographs will be on display at the Celebration of the Arts April 24, 7 p.m. in the SSHS Auditorium. The Seeley Lake Community Foundation has also invited the students to display their photographs at their new location this summer.
For more information about the Montana Media Lab visit montanamedialab.com. Watch the Pathfinder for more information about where the students’ work will be displayed.
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