Grant Proposal

Introduction:

Kentucky Folklife Program Folk Arts Grant

Description of our Organization:

Kentucky Remembers! is a youth-focused human rights summer education program for students ages 13-18 under the direction of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights. The mission of Kentucky Remembers! is to “preserve our past, teach our present, and build our future.” Students across the state learn basic interviewing and community research skills, take part in community mapping, and create a mural in partnership with an artist from their community. This summer Kentucky Remembers! will continue its work with two camps in Eastern Kentucky partnering with Appalshop and advisory boards made up of regional human rights organizations. Kentucky Remembers! will also continue to partner with the Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky Folklife Program, Kentucky Arts Council, Community Scholars Program, local scholars and human rights agencies, and community activists across the state.

All research conducted and arts produced in these camps will culminate in a state-wide textbook and interactive webpage for Kentucky Public Schools which will document the diverse history of the state of Kentucky and the story of citizens’ fight for equality from the Civil Rights Movement through today. Through learning about Kentucky’s past and present, students prepare themselves to become human rights leaders of the future. Students are recommended to the program by community leaders and final admission is based on students’ potential for leadership rather than grade point average or previous academic accomplishments.

Description of our Folk Arts Project

The Kentucky Remembers! Project! requests $3,500.00 to support the completion of a radio-based education and production project entitled "Listen Out Loud" to be implemented in the summer of 2008 during our week-long “Voices of Conscience: Human Rights Leadership Camp.” During last summer’s camps several youth expressed a deep interest in continuing their research and work with the program. This July, students from last year’s camps who want to pursue their research will come together for this one week Human Rights Leadership Camp. In the months prior to the camp, four students who expressed an interest and showed particular promise in working with oral history will receive Marantz recorders to document the sounds and stories of their community, including their own. To prepare for this work, the four selected students will attend a day-long preparatory session in which Martin will present examples of other youth radio podcasts and explain how oral history and folklife interviews can be turned into podcasts. Students will also explore the creativity and ethics involved in this storytelling process. By the end of the day, students will prepare a detailed plan of action for their upcoming field recordings and oral history interviews and will write up their goals and schedule for the final produced audio pieces to be created at the camp. Students will also commit to three critique/discussions sessions with Martin to make sure they are on track and moving forward with their work. During the week-long camp, the students will bring the audio they have collected and their ideas for podcast creation and continue the creative process of producing podcasts to be placed on the interactive Kentucky Remembers! webpage.

Inspired by youth radio and folklife programs across the nation, the "Listen Out Loud" program will allow students to tell the stories of social justice and cultural expression in Kentucky. Once complete these audio documents will be sent to local public radio stations for airplay and made available for use in the public schools and after school programs across the state as supplementary audio for the Kentucky Remembers! textbook. The audio products will also be available for free download on the Kentucky Remembers! webpage. Teachers or after school programs who wish to use the audio pieces but do not have computer access will be provided with copies as funding permits.

Performance Expectations:

Artistic Excellence/Cultural Significance

The Listen Out Loud program will build on the successful work of the Kentucky Remembers! project with communities across the state in documenting, preserving, and drawing attention to Kentucky’s human rights stories of the past, present, and future. Kentucky Remembers! believes that through cultural expression and the folklore of our daily lives we articulate that which is strong and beautiful in our cultures. We also articulate that which we hope to change in our culture such as classism, racism, lack of opportunity, and poverty. Through storytelling we express ourselves, our relationship to others, speak to and about our community, and collectively struggle for justice. The Listen Out Loud project will allow students to be tradition bearers of this form of artistic communication. The audio documentation process will provide students the opportunity to share what they have learned with a wider audience thus fostering intergenerational dialog surrounding social justice, storytelling and its power in communities. Podcasts and transcriptions can be used for help in reading programs and ESL classes.

Interpretation and Presentation

Our goals include:

Teaching youth the skills of audio production so they can share this audio with others via radio and the Kentucky Remembers! webpage.
The presentation of artistic culture and human rights struggle in the state of Kentucky through the perspectives and voices of our state’s own youth leaders. Such stories will have the ability to transcend generation gaps and examine the ways in which folk arts, especially storytelling, can articulate the quest for human dignity and fairness.
Student produced podcasts will be an integral part of the Kentucky Remembers! textbook and public school classroom thus encouraging the storytelling tradition that exists in both community elder and youth communities and linking this storytelling tradition to new forms of accessible media.
Raising awareness in students and adults about the diversity of human experience in the state of Kentucky.

Planning and Implementation

Timeline:

January-May: Research and Networking: Martin and Swain will begin identifying students who wish to take part in the program. As a part of her independent study, Martin will research the most recent forms of inexpensive audio editing equipment, make contact with other youth radio programs and discuss with teachers how podcasts can be most helpful in ESL classrooms and Reading Recourse Rooms. She will also create a 15-minute radio piece about the Kentucky Remembers! Camps, which will be complete in May.

January-May: Communication and Meetings: Weekly telephone planning meetings will take place between Martin and Swain, staff members of Kentucky Remembers!, board members of the project, and Kentucky Folklife Program staff to plan out the details of the Listen Out Loud Program and discuss any unforeseen challenges.

April-June: Audio Preproduction and weekend preparation training: Four students will be identified. Martin and Swain will conduct two daylong training sessions (one for students in Bowling Green and one for Paducah students), which will build on their work from last summer. By the end of the weekend session, students will have a detailed, written plan of action for their work and will commit to three discussion/critiquing sessions with Martin before the Leadership Camp begins. Students will then begin using the Marantz recorders. The discussion/critique sessions with Martin will be interspersed throughout the students’ work process to help students at each step of the way.

June-July: Final Meeting and Production Set Up: Martin and Swain will work on Kentucky Remembers! camps in eastern Kentucky. Swain and Martin will travel to meet with radio producers and students. During these trips Martin and Swain will discuss any final arrangements for the airing of podcasts on these public radio stations. 2-4 Laptops belonging to Kentucky Remembers! will be set up in the audio production studio. Martin will create and launch her own radio piece as a podcast from the Kentucky Remembers! webpage to make sure all systems are up and running.

July 27-Aug 1: Voices of Conscience: Week long Human Rights Youth Leadership Camp implementing the Listen Out Loud project. Martin, with assistance of other Kentucky Remembers! staff members, will work with the students to incorporate audio they have gathered over the winter and summer, along with the audio recorded last year in their interviews with Civil Rights leaders, into audio podcasts. Students will explore how audio editing is a creative process involving acute listening skills and the process of storytelling.

August- October: Launching of Podcasts. Podcasts will be launched on the webpage and sent via email to public radio producers. These audio documents will then air on local radio stations according to local radio schedules. All website upkeep will be controlled by the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights. The Commission will begin marketing the podcasts to public school teachers, home school networks, and human rights organizations across the state. Additional publicity will be undertaken by the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights preexisting media network.

Gathering and Responding to Evidence

As a part of the Kentucky Remembers! Leadership Camp, the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights requires attitudinal surveys following the camp from both staff and students. Both Martin and Swain will keep a “Lessons Learned” binder. The Kentucky Remembers! project solicits input from outside observers including the community scholars with whom the students worked during the audio gathering stage.

Additionally Martin will solicit input from the four youth community scholars through two formally written evaluations following the first four week period of recording in their neighborhoods and following the weeklong camp. Swain will also have a debriefing session with these four youth community scholars after the final camp to get their creative thoughts on programming plans for the future.

As a part of Martin’s independent study, she will also keep a detailed work diary of all steps taken in the project and host a blog that will make available sources of information sources about folklore, social justice, and youth radio.

An online survey will be launched on the Kentucky Remembers webpage after the podcasts have been made available.

Cultural Diversity and Accessibility

The project directly addresses the cultural diversity of the state of Kentucky by showcasing the multiple voices of youth and elder community members speaking to issues of human rights. Both the creators of the stories and the content of the stories deliver important messages about ethnicity, socioeconomic realties, age, and religion in our state.

Because these pieces will air on public and independent radio, the stories and messages about social justice will be broadcast to a large and diverse audience across the state and perhaps even be picked up for national radio. Likewise, because youth will be the creators of these pieces, other youth will see how oral history and the folklore of our daily lives transcends generation gaps. Through these podcasts and the stories contained within, positive dialog across generations can occur.

We will make transcripts available online and through radio stations for deaf and hard-of-hearing community.