History of the Project

The Beyond the Butterfly project has its roots in research by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher and others who reported that girls were suffering a crisis of self-esteem as they went through middle school.

The next step toward developing this 60-minute television documentary came with our involvement in the AAUW-sponsored Sister-to-Sister Summit held in Green Bay. Area girls, who were in grades six through nine at the time, were asked to identify concerns that they had; major issues turned out to be body image, sexual issues, and substance abuse. The girls were then invited to attend an all-day summit, they met in small groups, facilitated by a teen and an adult, in two of the three topic areas to discuss the concerns and to try to develop possible solutions.

After listening to what the girls had to say, it was decided that one way we could help address the issues facing middle school girls would be to let the adults who work with them (teachers, parents, coaches, etc.), as well as other middle school girls, know how the typical middle school girl interpreted her world. We set out to discover what middle school girls were thinking, doing and feeling.

Groups of girls were identified throughout the state of Wisconsin and from parts of Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. Although the project originated in Green Bay, Wisconsin, girls were selected from large urban areas, small towns, tourist areas and isolated rural regions. More than two hundred girls were chosen by school counselors, principals, teachers and coordinators of community organizations and neighborhood centers. Each group of girls was then given a Sony Hi-8 video camera and instructed to record the thoughts, feelings, discussions and activities their group engaged in for approximately one week. They then returned the cameras and their recordings to us. Additional footage was gathered when we invited some of the girls to come to the studio for "eyeball to eyeball" interviews with program producers. "Eyeball to eyeball" refers to a technique that allows interviewees to look at the interviewer directly through the camera lens. This results in the girls speaking directly to the audience as opposed to an unseen interviewer off to one side of the camera.

After viewing the nearly one hundred hours of tape shot by the girls, we determined which topics seemed to occur the most often and organized representative clips from the various tapes. The resulting video is Beyond the Butterfly: Middle School Girls Speak Out!

Beyond the Butterfly is co-produced by Wisconsin Public Television and NEWIST/CESA #7 (Northeastern Wisconsin In-School Telecommunications).