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Hallways And The GroundsHallways and school grounds played a greater role in student videos, and this is consistent with Hemmings’ (2000) findings that students structure the culture of these areas—to make them a place for learning and applying “illicit practices” (p. 5). Students who were observed in these three programs did not, however, seem to use these areas for any “illicit” activities, but they were important places—mostly because of the space they afforded them. In examining the focal projects, only the one from Suburban High did not make use of the hallways and grounds, being recorded entirely in the Television Production classroom. For the other two schools, major differences in meaning and uses were apparent. At Urban High, the hallways—as already discussed—were important for their first assignment: Its structure as a path with hard boundaries but few other constraints—physical or otherwise—was important for the chases that most projects contained. The hallways were useful in a way that the grounds were not. In “Sex Talk,” however, the differences were muted as the students’ purposes changed. The hallways and grounds were a means to find students to interview—a means to move around the school and find people who were not engaged in other activities—and the differences in affordances were unimportant. In terms of the methodology, it was the narration provided by it producers that yielded the most information because students labeled different areas by how students saw them rather than their official names. One area was referred to first as something inaudible (perhaps in Spanish) and then clarified as “the uncool part of the school.” The “senior quad” was later referred to as “freakville,” where the “cutters,” the “people on the edge” or “who want to be on the edge” hang out. These references were elicited by the videos they created and my direct question about the location rather than being inherent to their activity in these places. The video from Boarding High communicated a great deal more about the hallways and grounds, and this was because the students were less goal oriented—most of the video seemed to be off-task—and because they were far more oriented toward the material environment. The areas served the same basic purposes in being less constrained and routes toward finding people. The meanings about particular places in hallways and on the grounds, however, are both more frequent and more personal. Many items—murals, displays, and a sculpture—are distinguished as being of interest, and some become part of an oral and visual dialog that defines places within locations that are primarily for movement. These places have no clear boundaries and may go unrecognized by many people. The murals, for instance, frequently became more than background decoration. In one project, a girl pretended to open a “door” painted on the wall and enter the mural. Jerome showed a mural while Wicket labeled it a “boogeyman.” He defined it as “a Hopi style.” Jerome turned the camera toward him and said, “It's your tribe!” while Wicket repeated that it was a Hopi style and ducked out of the way. Wicket was one of the few who was interviewed and defined himself clearly as belonging to a tribe, Zuni, thus the mural was significant in defining Wicket's identity as not-Hopi and in the relationship between two boys who were not of the same tribe. See Illustration 9. Similarly, a rose garden provided the stimulus and visual for a poem, “Roses are dead, Violets [violence?] are blue, What the hell is wrong with you?” The hallways and grounds were thus places that were dominated by students, but they were clearly not consistent in their meaning or ownership. Nevertheless they consistently held places that afforded the activities students sought, whether they were planned or impromptu, object related or person oriented, selected for its characteristics or lack of characteristics. The variety of ways in which students were found to use such places provide strong evidence that having places away from institutional agendas and staff supervision promotes development at least to the extent that students can more readily seek personalized activities. |
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