Novice producer has a huge hit on her busy hands

Abbots­ford Times

 Abbots­ford, British Colum­bia, Canada

World­wide inter­est in documentary

Mar­cia Downham

Fri­day, Sep­tem­ber 26, 2008

Valerie Lowe of Abbots­ford is at the tail end of fin­ish­ing her first inde­pen­dent edu­ca­tional doc­u­men­tary, and it is already gar­ner­ing inter­est from uni­ver­si­ties around the world.

Lowe, who holds a Bach­e­lor Degree in Adult Edu­ca­tion from the Uni­ver­sity of the Fraser Val­ley in Abbots­ford, took it upon her­self five years ago to solely fund and pro­duce her own doc­u­men­tary on the life and the­ory of Lev Vygotsky.

“I wanted to cre­ate this so pro­fes­sors could have an exten­sive and intrigu­ing edu­ca­tional tool,” said Lowe, who used to work in staff train­ing and man­age­ment for the B.C. gov­ern­ment and has had a hand in pro­duc­ing other adult edu­ca­tion videos.

Valerie Lowe of Abbots­ford is almost fin­ished pro­duc­tion on her first edu­ca­tional doc­u­men­tary on the life and the­ory of Lev Vygot­sky, a 20th cen­tury devel­op­men­tal psy­chol­o­gist who helped estab­lish the branch of cul­tural and his­tor­i­cal psychology.

Recently, Lowe pre­sented a few clips of her doc­u­men­tary at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia in San Diego and it received great response, she said.

Since then many orders hav­ing been com­ing her way, her first being from Aus­tralia. She has also been invited to show her doc­u­men­tary at the Per­form­ing the World ’08 con­fer­ence and fes­ti­val in New York City Oct. 2 to 5, which is expected to attract more than 500 grass­roots prac­ti­tion­ers, schol­ars and researchers.

Lowe’s doc­u­men­tary explores almost every aspect of Vygot­sky, a 20th cen­tury Russ­ian devel­op­men­tal psy­chol­o­gist, who was the founder of cultural-historical psychology.

Vygot­sky was a highly pro­lific author who’s the­o­ries — around the dis­ad­van­taged, blind and men­tally hand­i­capped — are still, to this day, taught in class­rooms worldwide.

“I talked to a lot of pro­fes­sors to see if this prod­uct was wanted and I couldn’t believe the inter­est,” she said. “Most of them were really excited about it and the sup­port to do it was phenomenal.”

To prop­erly por­tray who Vygot­sky was and what he was try­ing to teach, Lowe spoke to almost every edu­ca­tor and prac­ti­tioner famil­iar with Vygotsky’s theories.

She set up film crews in Jerusalem, Moscow, Flo­rence, San Diego, New York, Van­cou­ver and St. Louis, inter­viewed Vygotsky’s remain­ing fam­ily mem­bers and even gath­ered orig­i­nal archived pho­tos and film footage, such as the orig­i­nal footage from the Russ­ian Revolution.

She found many tal­ented peo­ple from the Fraser Val­ley to help her in her ven­ture includ­ing a music com­poser, an edi­tor, a graphic ani­ma­tor, a nar­ra­tor and a Russ­ian trans­la­tor who just so hap­pens to be the head of the UFV lan­guage department.

Lowes doc­u­men­tary is expected to be fin­ished Oct. 15.

For more infor­ma­tion about the video and its con­tent go to www.vygotskydocumentary.ca.

© Abbots­ford Times 2008