[Editor’s Note: Conclusion of a two-part report on the Mobile Film Classroom program by the Mary Pickford Institute for Film Education, 8885 Venice Blvd. Part I: “Wedding an Old Icon to New Technology Makes a Brilliant Marriage,” Dec. 19.]
Thinking creatively is what entrepreneurs do, and this is one explanation for Keith Lawrence’s success the last year and a half with the traveling digital media classroom that was designed by his Mary Pickford Institute for Film Education.
[img]49|left|Mary Pickford behind the camera||no_popup[/img]
He is not only the boss, the President and CEO, but the innovative mind behind a daring plan to revolutionize teaching and learning.
[img]50|left|Mr. Lawrence||no_popup[/img]
“What we are trying to do, says Mr. Lawrence,“is understanding where people are, coming into the Digital Age, understanding the Digital Age, introducing the Digital Age to school districts, showing them how they can use it as a tool.”
Resisting Change
The prospect of surrendering to a massive changeover from old, comfortable ways to mysterious, lesser-known ways that are mysterious “terrifies teachers because they don’t know what their role is.
“Teachers don’t know where they go and how they work. Administrators don’t know what to do with the Digital Age.”
For a moment, Mr. Lawrence seemed to stop just short of asking, Who needs a conventional teacher in a conventional setting anymore? But not really.
“If you were to take a geography course and use Google Earth, you can use a whole 2- or 3-year geography course just by using Google Earth,” he said. “It would be exciting and dynamic.
Finding a Comfort Zone
“But where do the teachers go? What are the roles for teachers or for administrators if you are using Google Earth? How do you get them involved?
“I believe there is an even greater role for teachers and administrators in the Digital Age than there was before, as mentors, as facilitators, as guides, to individualize curricula to meet the needs of each student.”
Mr. Lawrence and his Mobile Film Classroom walk onto campuses that he believes are in mid-crisis whether they know it or not.
“We are losing our students, losing our ability to reach young people,” he says.
No Mystery
“The reason is, we are not understanding their world. We are denying the fact their world has to do with individual information flow.”
Through text messaging and emails, schoolboys and girls actually are communicating more than ever before, Mr. Lawrence maintains, if only we resistant older people would realize and accept the notion.
Loaded with space-age technology that teens and adolescents know better than they know their families, the colorfully decorated, specially outfitted Pickford bus visits the campuses of private and public schools and other educational institutions around Los Angeles, showing them an imaginative way to gain knowledge and confidence.
Right Atmosphere
Old-style learning is out, new learning is in.
“We bring their world to them in a beautiful environment, an environment they want to be in,” says Mr. Lawrence, who is not given to throwing off adjectives very casually.
“Bring teachers who are willing to not lecture but guide students into projects that they are into so they can talk about their story. We talk about skateboarding. We talk about graffiti. We talk about gang violence. We talk about drugs. We talk about relationships. We talk about stories they want to talk about.
“The curriculum is based on where the students are.
“When they come into a Mobile Film Classroom, they immediately go to a computer and go to work. There is no lecture, no explaining who we are or what we are going to do.
“People want to do instead of being talked to. Once you start doing a project and you’re interested in the project, you want to get people wanting to learn, not being asked to learn. That is the key.”
No Room for Wallflowers
The Mobile Film Classroom is a purely hands-on experience. Participants not observers, students operate all of the equipment.
Consistent with the entirely freestyle nature of the state-of-the-art classroom, when Mr. Lawrence addresses the question of how long the Pickford guides are on a campus, he says breezily:
“Doesn’t matter. Days, hours weeks. Depends on what they have available. Depends on where the site is, not where we are. We have stayed a minimum of two days at a site. We have stayed a maximum of a year at a site.”
Different Kind of Bottom Line
In a succinct and revealing philosophical description, Mr. Lawrence said that Mobile Film Classroom plan is “project-driven, but it is not accomplishment-based. There is a difference. We are not worried about what they accomplish. We are worried about where their goals are. We try to deal with where they want their goals to be. Instead of saying, ‘You have to complete this amount to be successful,’ we say, ‘Let’s work on what your goals are and try to maximize where you are.
“Someone may have needed 10 or 20 weeks to complete writing a script, with a mentor behind him, encouraging him. Another student may have completed a 5-minute film.”
Academic subjects are central to the project.
“Every part of what we do is academic,” Mr. Lawrence said. “There is tons of work on Microsoft Word and research about history.”
Although he includes adults in his campaign to “re-educate” American society, Mr. Lawrence’s present focus almost exclusively is on school-age children.
Adaptation Mandatory
He is convinced that revered teaching methods of the last century are blocking the learning path for modern students. Therefore, we must adapt, says Mr. Lawrence, the godson of Ms. Pickford.
Take the software and the hardware that students fall in love with at birth and educate them with tools they are most comfortable using.
“We need to start focusing on re-educating the public, not just students, how people are learning,” Mr. Lawrence says.
Here is where his creativity, his nimbleness enters. A businessman/entrepreneur by training and experience, he defines “re-educate” in a way that no professional educator is likely to accept.
“Re-educate,” says Mr. Lawrence, “means introducing a way that works, introducing a way by which people learn today. Right now, newspapers are in decline. Internet websites and blogs is where they are going. Kids get all of their information from a small format — cell phones, I-pods. They are text messaging each other. They have YouTube and MySpace. The majority of their life, how they communicate, is done in that format.
Too Old-Fashioned
“Teachers right now are at a disadvantage.
“They are using the kind of curriculum we learned when we were going to school, lecturing in front of classrooms.
“They are hamstrung because of that.
“They are not really understanding that people don’t learn that way anymore. People don’t have any interest in learning that way.
“When a textbook is produced, it already is five years out of date by the time it reaches the classroom. Even on the internet, a book is outdated because of how long it takes to get published.
Urgency of Learning
“Digital media is, of course, immediate. What we are trying to do is introduce tools and show adults, administrators, students that there is a way to learn, a way to increase your worth, your self-worth with tools that are available to everyone.
“The price of textbooks for a year in any school, private or public can outfit every student with his own terminal, his own computer.”
For information: marypickford.com.
