Building
Global Citizens
DOCUMENTARY TRIPS TO CAMBODIA, CUBA
AND VIETNAM HELP MEDIA STUDENTS GAIN
PERSPECTIVE AND EMPATHY TOWARD OTHERS
By Michael Hernandez
A
s a journalism adviser, it’s always a challenge
to get students to see the world in different
ways and from new perspectives.
A few years ago, I was fed up with my students’ lack
of vision and empathy. Story ideas were unoriginal
and my kids always missed the real story, which
usually had to do with stakeholders that were less
fortunate than themselves. It wasn’t that they were
purposely neglecting the underlying story, it was
that they simply lacked perspective and experience.
The school where I teach is in a wealthy suburb
of Los Angeles, and while you might assume that
living in LA would make our students inherently
cultured and worldly, it often turns out to be the
opposite. We’re trapped in our neighborhoods by
traffic and distance, comfortable with familiar faces,
accents and food.
So I did what any desperate journalism adviser
would do: I took my students to Cambodia.
We visited magnificent ninth century buddhist
temples, ran laps at the Olympic stadium and
bargained in the bazaar. We also visited the Killing
Fields to see mass graves, spoke face to face with
a genocide survivor and played with children who
lived in abject poverty in the floating villages of
Tonle Sap.
During our 10 day working trip, my 16 journalism
and cinema students produced documentaries on
topics such as the effects of landmines on civilians,
the Southeast Asian sex trade and the restoration
of traditional arts that had been destroyed by the
Khmer Rouge.
Students A