Life in the Open Prison is a documentary film on the Cambodian Genocide.
The notion that students should play an active role in directing their education is an ideal to which many schools pay lip service. But at St. George’s School of Montreal, student-led learning is a reality, and the results are academically impressive. A case in point: Last year, Megan Webster’s Grade 11 Humanities class decided they wanted the focus of their year to be an inquiry about the Cambodian Genocide. Beginning the year with only a faint idea of how much they didn’t know, by the end of the school year, with Webster’s guidance and supervision, the students worked together to produce a video documentary based on oral history interviews of survivors, entitled “Life in the Open Prison.”
The film, along with various accounts of Ms. Webster and her students experiences can be accessed through the links below as well. Teachers wishing to contact Ms. Webster can do so via St. Georges staff directory.
Read the blog we wrote throughout the process, here:
http://www.lifestoriesmontreal.ca/en/blogs/megan-webster
Watch two students discuss the meaning of the project:
http://www.lifestoriesmontreal.ca/en/life-stories-in-education
Watch the trailer to our film on the Montreal Life Stories website:
http://www.lifestoriesmontreal.ca/en/cambodia-working-group
And the complete film, here, on the CitizenShift website: http://citizenshift.org/node/27732&dossier_nid=22423/
