Another group was trained under the Mural workshops. A course that focuses on recruiting and training community correspondents reporting from the outskirts of São Paulo.
The target group is comprised of reporters, bloggers, broadcasters, videographers, and journalists, professional or otherwise, interested in creating stories about their neighborhoods.
The second group came to the headquarters of the mural for the Folha de Sao Paulo, who kindly gave up their facilities to another edition of the course over two weekends and concluded its activities on Sunday, May 19.
These classes demand some energy, are time consuming and require a certain deal of elaboration. One must think of different exercises, avoid repetition and lack of variety, it is necessary to try and surprise the students. And it's not assured that you'll get it right. It's frustrating when there are technical problems against which you cannot find any solutions.
But it is always rewarding when the instructor is the one surprised. And I must add that my students have not offered me any unpleasant surprises, rather the opposite. In this class, the unexpected was the group's creative energy, their eagerness of engaging in lively debates and their willingness to find original ways of telling a story.
In this atmosphere of high creativity, to improve some things seen in the first edition of the course, to go deeper in certain topics and to better focus became much easier.
As we are about to close a deal under which a major Brazilian newspaper would host the content generated by the trainees in a blog, the emphasis was more on short, straight-forward accounts, resembling those of a blog rather than news stories of a print newspaper.
It was not a difficult task for this group, composed of well informed and well read youngsters, many of whom with literary inclinations. Several of the trainees have their blogs already and feed them on a regular basis. But my luck was that our paths crossed.
On the first weekend, we began as we always have, discussing the day's headlines, with special attention to the fact that they were or not portraying outlying communities.
If your neighborhood is in the headlines, do you like the tone of the report, the emphasis is only on the bad side or there is emphasis on positive themes related to your community? Such questions generated heated discussions.
As a matter of fact, nearly every task rendered productive debates. One of the first exercises given was to create a written piece -- and each one chose a different format -- inspired by the account offered-by the narrator of the song "A Vítima" by Racionais MCs, a cult hip hop act from Capão Redondo, a peripheral borough on the southern part of São Paulo.
Another assignment was inspired by a controversial issue, which took place a few years ago, when a popular TV presenter, after having been robbed in a traffic light in São Paulo wrote an angry letter to a newspaper calling for harsh policing in the streets of the city. On the occasion, this sparked both a backlash as well as favorable reactions, many of which we read about in class. The student's task was to write a short essay about the whole incident and the multiple views it contained.
The next day, students took to the streets in groups, to capture images for videos recorded in central Sao Paulo. They were free to choose their own topics, which ranged from art in the subway, to trade in the region, and, local residents and their expectations concerning the elections.
In the following week, we edited the videos and were given a lecture by Sérgio Vaz, a poet who inspired the trainees with stories on how he managed to overcome his humble origins to become an author and the creator of a poetry soiree night, which has given birth to many new poets in peripheral boroughs.
We also looked into the tragic story about a singer who had complications in childbirth and faced a bureaucratic ordeal through different hospitals that eventually lead to her death. This sad tale was turned into an exercise on how to conciliate brevity without sacrificing emotion, even when writing a mere sentence for the microblog Twitter.
Finally, each student had to create a short biography of his or her colleague, to include on the blog. There were some emotional reports, others, funny. But most of them made with elegance and cleverness, perhaps the strongest qualities of this group.
The student Juliana Torres said on her Twitter that "if there was a Bruno Garcez for every 20 students, things would be different".
I think the opposite, Juliana. When I started this course, I had never ventured to be a teacher, had never given classes whatsoever and was not fully sure of what paths to take.
I devised exercises that I thought would have to do with the experience of most of the participants and sought to make tasks that students could enjoy.
The responses I've been getting might be one of the best experiences of my entire professional career.
Nowadays, I humbly know that I have something to offer as a teacher. But if I arrived where I am right now, it was not through my own. I was fortunate to have had amazing students. . If every journalist had a chance to teach and learn with a group like this, things would surely be different ...