Using film to share climate knowledge

Yesterday, Jeff blogged about Kindle as a social venture - and the how the real need is to turn education away from a top-down approach where students read textbooks (on kindle or not) and then spew them out again into the world. Rather, he argued for the need for students to become producers and not merely consumers of information. Coming from a family of educators, I couldn't agree more; the best way to learn is to teach, and to engage in life-long learning no matter how old one is. Our production is as important as our consumption - and both how and what we consume is essential for us to build the moral and communal strength to create the world we need to create to survive climate change. Sometimes, media can be one of the best tools to produce knowledge and share it widely: especially when children lead the way.

Recently, I've been struck at how powerful children can be in creating change. Not only do we learn from our kids - but when given the responsibility and the opportunity, children can lead communities to change their behaviors. Plan (www.plan-childrenmedia.org) helps organize children/youth radio programmes throughout Africa to spread awareness of children's rights.

Children in a changing Climate, a project of Action Aid and the Institute for Development Studies, helped teach community members in villages in Nepal how to sue participatory videos to learn from one another about how climate change is already effecting their villages and what they can do about it. Since many are illiterate, the video gave them the ability to share what they knew - and to advocate for what they needed. For example, through children filming the process of trying to get to school by crossing a river that had dramatically risen from climate change-related snow melts (and in the film a child was almost washed away by the strength of the river), the local government officials agreed to build a bridge. The national government realised, in watching the film, how real the needs of the children were - and have put children's rights higher on the agenda of their own National Adaptation Plan. And at the global level, the film has sparked the UN's interest in supporting the process of participatory filming as a way of promoting knowledge and change. Not to mention the number of people around the world who have been inspired by the Nepalese children's story and have wanted to learn the simple art of participatory filming in order to tackle the seemingly impossible tasks of adapting to climate change.

It is an amazingly simple and beautiful example of how even poor communities can find empowerment through social media - and how we all have knowledge to contribute to every level of debate, regardless of our age or educational achievement.