Hampton, Va. – A group of Hampton University broadcast journalism students have produced two audio documentaries to be included in the National Black Programming Consortium’s (NBPC) “Masculinity Project.” The documentaries, which answer the question “What does it mean to be a man?” will be featured alongside works submitted by long-time documentary veterans.
The opportunity arose when VanDora Williams, assistant professor in the Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications, was invited by NBPC to submit ideas for the new project. Williams saw it as a unique, hands-on learning experience for students enrolled in her broadcast news writing course. “I was the producer, but the students were everything else. They are credited as associate producers, editors, audiographers, researchers,” she explained. “This was a wonderful teaching tool for the students.”
She and the students, all of whom coincidentally are female, were awarded two $3,000 grants to produce the documentaries.
“The Masculinity Project” is a national partnership of the NBPC and the Independent Television Service (ITVS) with funding provided by the Ford Foundation. It addresses the critical topic of masculinity in the African-American community, exploring how men are represented and perceived, investigating the obstacles they encounter, and celebrating the contributions they make.
“The whole series addresses a particular issue in the black community and then highlights stories that are inspirational. So it’s not about identifying problems and perpetuating them. It’s about the folks that are doing what society thinks are not being done,” stated Williams.
One documentary aims to debunk the myth that there are no first-rate, single black fathers. According to the 2006 Families and Living Arrangements report by the U.S. Census Bureau, of the 12.9 million one-parent families in the United States, 2.5 million or 19 percent were single father families. That is up from only 400,000 single fathers in 1970.
The second documentary project examined the correlation between author Jawanza Kunjufu’s “Fourth Grade Failure Syndrome” theory and the likelihood of black males to become incarcerated. Kunjufu states in his book “Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys” that black males succeed in elementary school through the third grade, but upon entering the fourth grade begin a downward spiral of academic achievement. Meanwhile, there are approximately 1.1 million black men in prisons and jails in the United States today; a number that surpasses the total number of incarcerated black men in the rest of the world combined.
For most of the students, this was their first time working on a documentary. According to Whitney Robinson, a senior broadcast major from Baltimore, Md., who worked on the project, “It was a great chance for us because not a lot of students have been put in the same category as 20-year veterans.”
“The Masculinity Project” will be available for listening this fall at
http://www.blackpublicmedia.org/catalog/ch...
Posted By: Jehan Bunch
Monday, July 21st 2008 at 4:06PM
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