"Place-Based Media Arts" is the integration of Media Arts with Place-Based Education. While place-based education has often had an aversion to technology out of concern for its tendency to distract students from their immediate surroundings and distrust their own senses, I contend that the media arts can do just the opposite when used intentionally as a way of reconnecting students to place. My term, Place-Based Media Arts (PBMA), and the practice of it as described in my thesis is grounded in the pedagogy of Place-Based Education, and looks to the ideals of the Indigenous Youth-led Media Justice and Youth Empowerment Movements.

Place-Based Media Arts is working with students to assist them in creating media arts projects meaningful for themselves and their community. Media arts projects lend themselves easily to a place-based curriculum while utilizing the relatively easily accessible technology tools of media making such as computers, video cameras, still cameras, and even cell phones. Media Arts allows a student to creatively express their ideas and tell the stories they want to tell in a familiar medium that can be shared widely. Media Arts is not limited to filmmaking; it can include animation, digital art, creative power point, performance pieces, and a number of creative expression projects.

Here, in my unique community in Northern Arizona, I’ve had the tremendous pleasure to witness and work with youth who are profoundly reinvigorating our local communities with an engaged interest in our social and natural environments.  In our unique place, here on the edge of the res, young people are re-enacting the significant events of their ancestors’ lives, on stage, and in film.  Teens are making documentary films about heritage foods, their local social and environmental issues, and their own community histories. Youth are raising awareness of the issues most important to them and are actively contributing to the well being of the community.  They proudly look to their local communities, histories, traditions, and environments for inspirations for creating films, plays, music, websites, and other art to tell their own stories and share with their families, their community, as well as the wider society.  Our youth here are doing all of these, and more, at the STAR School, and with the Outta Your Backpack Media Collective, in Youth of the Peaks, and even in my own family.

Place-Based Education:  The STAR 3-to-3rd Model

A short film demonstrating how STAR School utilizes Place-Based Education in the 3-to-3rd (Age 3 to Grade 3) classes. STAR is the 1st all off-grid charter school in the country, and is recipient of the 2012 Dpt. of Ed. Green Ribbon Award. STAR is located on the southwestern edge of the Navajo Nation and serves a majority indigenous population. This film was written and produced by Rachel Tso (tsoinspired.com) made for The STAR School (starschool.org) as a part of a free training packet for educators. It is for non-commercial, educational purposes.

Rachel Tso's Thesis Film on Place-Based Media Arts. Chronicles the making of Camille Manybeads Tso's award winning film, "In the Footsteps of Yellow Woman" made as a Demonstration Project of Place-Based Media Arts Education. Submitted to Northern Arizona University in partial fulfillment for the Degree of Master of Arts Sustainable Communities, December 2010.

Link to see Camille Manybeads Tso's "In the Footsteps of Yellow Woman"

For my thesis project, I documented my home-schooled eighth grade daughter’s place-based media arts project, that resulted in her multi-award winning film, In the Footsteps of Yellow Woman. Camille had done this type of project before, as a student in one of my STAR school classes that produced the Tolchaco project, and she had learned to make films through being involved with Outta Your Backpack Media, an indigenous youth-led media literacy collective.   Since she already had experience with doing this type of project and knew how fun they can be, she jumped at the opportunity to do one as her final project.

RedBird Saves the Corn Traditional Navajo Spider Woman story retold through Lightbox Animation by STAR School students Larissa Luther, Taylor Long, Makyla Allison. Story learned through the Voices Native Literature program, "Zinnia: How the Corn was Saved" by Patricia Hruby Powell. Demonstration of integration of Native Literature, Literacy, and Place-Based Media Arts under the direction of Rachel Tso. Youth Mentors Camille Manybeads Tso and Kira Butler.  This film is an official selection of: The Red Nation Film Festival in Los Angeles The American Indian film Festival in San Francisco The Flagstaff Mountain Film Festival, and shown as a part of the Museum of Northern Arizona Navajo Show and NAU Native American and Indigenous Film Series.

The influence of the American media machine on all our youth and their psychological development can be immensely disconcerting. Our students have grown up devouring corporate-sponsored audio-visual and print media. Media influences our children's identity and sense of self and community. It is ever pervasive in our children's lives and effectively indoctrinates them into a consumer- based homogenized pop culture, losing connection with past, culture, and heritage. However, the Media Literacy / Media Justice movement seeks to free students from being mindless consumers.  Media already engages our kids; media literacy seeks to teach them how to intelligently analyze and evaluate the media they see and how to create their own messages and to tell their own stories.

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