Media studies in Eastern Taiwan
Yilan County’s Pei-cheng Elementary is the only school in Eastern Taiwan that sees itself as a “media literacy center.” In addition to a school newspaper, the campus includes a small production studio, which is available to students in the school’s middle and upper grades who are members of its journalism club. The studio offers students chances to immerse themselves in media production, whether by conducting interviews, broadcasting news, or hosting live events. And they frequently go off campus to shoot videos.
A team of passionate teachers with expertise in the field took this small production studio and turned it into Pei-cheng Television. More than a means for teachers to convey their knowledge, the station offers chances for students to express and organize their thoughts through the media production process. Meanwhile, teachers can participate in related teacher development courses.
Since 2010 the teacher Li Yi-luen, a passionate photographer, has been hoping to make media education universal. Consequently, he got together with some homeroom teachers and came up with a plan to use three general education class periods per week to teach courses in multimedia and video production. They hired some outside lecturers and local reporters to help teach the classes and to lead students on reporting field trips.
Local Yilan photographer Lin Ming-ren shared 20 years of aerial photographs with the students as documentary evidence, allowing them to see the changes to the local landscape for themselves.
These images caused many children to ask questions about the recent construction of “farmhouses” that in fact are typically villas built on farmland but owned by non-farmers. In response, Li Yi-luen took the class to an agricultural education symposium. The symposium had invited Leo Fang, a partner at an advocacy workshop in Yilan that is trying to preserve farmland, and Lin Che-an, the owner of the Tiandong rice brand. The two men are sparing no effort to preserve Yilan’s farmlands. As they told their own stories, they sparked in the children a desire to carry out in-depth investigations.
“Those two young men were small farmers, and after their talk the children were very excited,” says their teacher Li, who was born and raised in Yilan himself and has shared his photographs and his memories with the students. “What’s more, with all the debate over the Regulations Governing Agricultural Dwelling Houses in the news later that year, I asked them to go back home and discuss the issue with their parents, and write down their thoughts. It was only then that I discovered that although the children felt passionately about local land-use issues, they usually had no means to express their feelings.”
So he suggested that they make a film that focused on the issue of “farmhouse” development. Immediately, the five children were taken with the idea. But they were at first uncertain about the specific theme of the film and about what production methods to use. From a film production standpoint, they were starting from scratch.
By documenting their hometown with a camera and capturing the voices of people from different walks of life, these children have done their part to protect what makes Yilan a unique place.