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Show Escalante Center Sponsors Student Media Workshop At Sat, May 26 Festivities ESCALANTE On Saturday, May 26, as the town of Escalante celebrates its 125th anniversary with a Founders Day Festival, a premiere of an exhibition of digital photographs with accompanying commentary on their "Sense of Place" by the young people of Escalante will be a feature event. They will be responding to issues of identity and how their lives relate to local life and the world at large (most have cable TV). A website (www.xmission. comjohnutah) of the project will open the same day. The innovative use of art and technology promises to be a telling look at rapidly changing times . through the perspective of youth in one of the most remote towns in America. The Childrens Media Workshop (CMW) in collaboration with The Escalante Center has been awarded a $20,000 grant under a unique partnership between the National Endowment For The Art and the National Forest Service. Through the Escalante Chamber of Commerce, Com-merce, local businesses have lent support to the project. Over the past eight, months, CMW artist John Schaefer has been periodically visiting the Escalante community, working directly with every student at Escalante High School and Escalante Elementary School. Children have been learning basic media literacy skills how to critically watch and participate in media experiences. - (The average American child has over five hours of media experience a day!) With the advent of cable and digital television, Escalante's youth are now bombarded with the same programming pro-gramming and peer pressure advertising adver-tising that inundates large urban areas. "One aim of the project," said Schaefer, "is to develop in the students the necessary skills to counter this barrage and establish the worth of their existence." Schaefer said that the other major focus of the project is the "empowerment of the young people to comment on and affect their own lives." Each high school student has been actively trained in the art of visual communication. Casio Education has provided digital cameras and the students have had the opportunity to take a camera home and record aspects of their lives. Through the efforts of English teacher Angie Alvey with local artist Richard Costigan, the students have written insightful commentaries to accompany their images. Through the participation of experts in their fields of study, students were taught to use the "filters" that would be employed by the disciplines of history, anthropology, anthro-pology, education, art and ethics in examining their lives and surroundings. sur-roundings. "The work is an anthropologist's anthropol-ogist's field day," said Schaefer. The images are stunning a visual revelation of daily life in this small but important Utah town. With the creation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Monu-ment, this community has become a flashpoint for issues facing the country at-large concerning the environment, individual rights, even the concept of private property." |