Moves Leaders Make - Season 1, Episode 2: From Classroom Creativity to Advocacy Filmmaking with Sully Gaudreault

In this episode of Moves Leaders Make, hosts Penny Kittle and Elaine Millen reconnect with Sullivan “Sully” Gaudreault, a former student whose love of storytelling evolved into a career in advocacy filmmaking. Sully shares how creative freedom in the classroom helped him discover his voice, and how he now uses film to fight for justice and human rights through projects with the Syrian Emergency Task Force and the Making an Exoneree program.

GUEST
Sullivan (Sully) Gaudreault, documentary filmmaker, teacher, and Deputy Director of Communications at the Syrian Emergency Task Force. Head of Documentary Filmmaking for the Making an Exoneree program.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Creative freedom can ignite lifelong passions and purpose.
• The learning process matters more than the final product.
• Small sparks of curiosity can grow into meaningful creative pursuits.
• Insights into Making an Exoneree and its impact: 12 exonerations since 2018.
• Leadership lessons: find people’s passions and give them space to act.

BOOKS & REFERENCES
• Serial Podcast (Season 1, Adnan Syed case)
• Omar Alshogre, Syrian activist and TED speaker
• Syrian Emergency Task Force
• Making an Exoneree
• 11/22/63 by Stephen King
• Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon
• Percy Jackson - Sully’s first video project

Moves Leaders Make — A Book Love Foundation Podcast; Hosted by Penny Kittle and Elaine Millen; Produced by Testwood Creative Studio; Music by ryanancona (Pond5); booklovefoundation.org

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Creators and Guests

Host

Elaine Millen

With a heart of a teacher, Elaine has over 50 years of experience as a Teacher, Director of Special Education, Principal, Curriculum Director, and Assistant Superintendent of Schools.

Host

Penny Kittle

Penny is Chairman of the Book Love Foundation and is dedicated to helping students and teachers develop a passion for reading and writing. She has taught English and coached literacy in public schools for 34 years.

Guest

Sullivan Gaudreault

What is The Book Love Foundation Podcast?

Celebrate the joy of reading with the Book Love Foundation podcast. This is a show filled with information and inspiration from teachers and leaders across grade levels, states, and school systems. We interviewed authors and educators for the first five years and now turn our attention to leaders in public, private, and charter schools. Find out more at booklovefoundation.org or join our book-love-community.mn.co of 2500 educators from 28 countries. We sustain joy together, one kid and one book at a time.

Penny (00:06)
So how are you today?

Elaine (00:07)
I'm pretty well, I'm pretty excited Penny, to actually be meeting one of your students that I've heard so much about. That has just been such a part of our work. You've talked so much about your interactions and having Sully in class that I'm just thrilled to be able to be here and a part of it.

Penny (00:13)
I know. Well, I think back to the core of what happened the year that I had Sully as a ninth grader, I had a leader, a principal, who when I went to him and said, I want to plan a year for ninth grade kids, I haven't taught him in 15 years, but I want to plan a year where students make most of the choices about how and what they learn. And it's going to look like this. And that leader said, I think that's fabulous. Go. That may sound like a really big move.

But it really didn't cost him anything. He could just say, why don't you try this out and tell me how it's going? And so Sully landed in that class, Sullivan Goudreau, who's with us today. And I think what's so interesting in looking back on that year is the way that early on Sully took charge of what he wanted to do in learning that year. So welcome, Sully, to our podcast.

Sully (01:22)
Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.

Penny (01:24)
We are so excited to have you here. Could you tell listeners what you do now?

Sully (01:28)
Kind of a collage, a mosaic of a lot of different things. But I guess the way I'd describe it is I'm a documentary filmmaker, I'm an advocacy documentary filmmaker, and I also teach on the side. I teach undergraduate students how to do what I do, essentially, and advocate for individuals, for causes, ⁓ filmmaking as their tool.

Penny (01:50)
And so two of those causes, one of them is the Syrian Emergency Task Force. Is that correct?

Sully (01:55)
That is correct. I'm the Deputy Director of Communications at the Serenity Task Force. There I handle all of our original media, that's social media, emails, videos, but it also means I get to tell really amazing stories through documentary filmmaking specifically.

Penny (02:11)
Well, that's how I found you again, because I was hanging out here in North Conway, New Hampshire and picked up our free local paper. And on the front cover was Sullivan Goudreau filming in Syria, a picture of you. I couldn't believe it. I was so excited. But the other half of your life is The Exoneration Project. Could you talk about that?

Sully (02:33)
Sure, yeah, I'm happy to. So my role in this project started as a student, actually. It's called Making an Exoneree. And when I was a junior at my university, I was taking, when I was becoming ⁓ a film major at University of California, Santa Cruz, I found this class called Making Exoneree. And what it is, is undergraduate students reinvestigate real criminal cases here in the United States that a team of lawyers believe there's a strong case for innocence. And then the students go out and they go and reinvestigate the case. They talk to jurors, they talk to witnesses, they do a lot of the work that in most cases, the investigators, the prosecutors, the defense attorneys never did in the first place. And the kind of the final product of this class is a documentary, an eight minute documentary to advocate for this individual's freedom. I was assigned a guy named Tim Young. He's serving ⁓ a life or a ⁓ death sentence in California's death row. And it was through this class that I kind of found this love for advocacy, filmmaking and advocacy work in general. And I guess fast forward, what, three years later now, I am the head of documentary filmmaking for this entire program. So I get the privilege of teaching dozens of different undergraduate students how to be filmmakers, how to tell people's stories and how to advocate for people's freedom. And since this class started in 2018, before I started, we've been able to get 12 people out of prison just because of these students' work. It's just like an incredible opportunity to be able to do this at my age.

Elaine (04:10)
Yeah.

Penny (04:11)
So if we were to rewind all the way back to ninth grade and you and I had a longer interview a while back where you talked about the freedom to create and film. Could you just talk about that? Because my principal gave me the freedom to create as a teacher, which I passed on to you and we believe that's a pretty important move for leaders to make.

Sully (04:31)
Yeah.

Uh, I mean, it truly was the spark and the spark to all of this and the spark to my work and what I'm doing now. When I first went to Kennet High School, I came from a Waldorf school, a very small Waldorf school from elementary, kindergarten, all the way up to eighth grade. And so this was a big shift for me. And one of the biggest ones was reading. I, and this is kind of I think it seems like a trend in Waldorf education from the people I've talked to, but my reading skills were not strong at all. And even with tutors I had as a young kid, still was not so strong. so when I got to Kennet High School's public schools English class, it was always kind of a point of anxiety for me as what, guess, 14, 15 year old, however you are a freshman in school. And it was... this opportunity to kind of turn that anxiety of reading and kind of this anxiety about English as a whole subject. And it was this, this opportunity that you gave me to kind of take that and try something else. And like, I didn't know I liked video at that point. I didn't know I liked making, like taking photos or anything, but it was like the opportunity for me to kind of explore that and try something else when this wasn't working, when reading wasn't working for me in the way, in the traditional way that then allowed me to kind of test out this other thing, which was video. And of course it just ballooned and caught fire and here we are. But it was that kind of, was that opportunity to try something else and to like, I specifically remember in watching back videos that he had captured from that class, I remember your encouragement of like, I would make something and it would be like fine. And I'm a freshman in high school, right? Like it's never going to be a beautiful, amazing film, but it was like your encouragement for me to dig deeper and like try something else. And when I take this path or that path and it was like your, I guess encouragement and maybe even like shared passion in me. And like, that was kind of also what fueled me to be like, yeah, why don't I try that instead? that, and cause you had visions too. You were like, well what if you do this? And it kind of felt like this collaborative thing.

Elaine (06:44)
In reading your essay, Penny and I were working on what are some very specific moves that leaders can make to improve the educational experience for our kids and get to know kids and be able to focus on their strengths rather than always their deficits. What I found really important for our viewers to hear is that the choice that you had to do the work and to learn the work really almost revitalized and sustained your capacity to do the work. When you say that when you were working on the ⁓ video for Penny's class, that you and your friend worked a week, whereas other classes and the responsibilities and the homework and whatever, it was you just wanted to get through that. And I was so touched by that because my work and... 2007 was the importance of engagement for kids, you know, that if they have the choice, if it's relevant, if it can be personalized to them, and then if you could get continuous feedback, that it resonated with students and they began to feel the success early on rather than wait for a grade or whatever. And I just wanted to validate how that had helped you in your future as well.

Sully (08:00)
Well, think that's totally the key because for me, and I'm sure so many other people like this, students, writing wasn't the issue and reading wasn't the issue. But it was, there was kind of this block and maybe it was this like reading anxiety, maybe it was just general school monotony in general, but like doing the work was never the issue. And so kind of sneaking in kind of like a Trojan horse in terms of the video work and getting me to do me as a student, like giving me the opportunity to do these projects and framing it as kind of a video. I mean, yeah, I was putting in triple the amount of time that I would have if I was going to write an essay. I was enjoying it. I was innovating on it. I was improving. And by the end, I would create something that was probably much better than I would have if I was sitting down and trying to write something. And it felt personal for me, too. It was that kind of opportunity to kind of tailor my own learning style based on how I wanted to learn, which really helped me.

Penny (09:04)
Absolutely. Was just thinking, I was struck so much solely by one of the people I studied under, talked so much about process, not product, that instead of always focusing on did you write the correct essay or did you do follow all the directions, you instead focus on the process of learning and the process of creating.

And the idea that, you know, your first video on the Percy Jackson book you were reading is funny, but it's not like it's beautiful filmmaking. Right. And that wasn't the focus. The focus was what are you creating? How are you telling this story? And then when we get all the way to the end of the year, which is the fourth time you're making a digital project and I ask you about what you're creating, you were like, well, I was going to do this, but I kind of ran out of time. And that's always a signal to me, that you just lost interest, right? So what else are you thinking about? And you go back in your notebook and you say, I found this entry that I really like, it's about war. And now I'm thinking that's all processed. You even mentioned in your essay, this line, you saw education as an opportunity instead of a chore. What a great line.

Sully (10:12)
I mean you inspired me to do it, but I found that that was how I could learn well and so in other classes I was doing this like I remember in history US history I made multiple videos instead of doing essays and I wrote whole scripts I did the whole thing and so this was like this kind of became my education model almost in a lot of ways throughout high school and even through college too was it was like how do I intertwine the things I know I love into it so then I can kind of fuel this curiosity I know that I will enjoy the process of learning.

Penny (10:42)
I was struck when you said that about your social studies classes where you were doing videos. I thought, you know, that happens where a teacher in social studies is approached by a student who says, want to do this. But I think what has to happen is for teachers to take the initiative to say, I want you all to try this. There's no penalty, but I want you all to have the joy of creating digitally.

It's such a part of our world. And every time I say this to educators, they'll say like, I can't possibly that's just too complicated. I'm like, but the kids know how to do it. And all you're doing is helping them learn how to tell that story. And I think that if we could switch from one student advocates for themselves and gets this opportunity to a teacher says, I'm going to take a really big risk and I'm going to say, you all can do this. Right. I mean, I've also thought slowly about the serial podcast.

Because I brought it in. I remember I had you guys listen to about the first half of one episode as a class. And then I said, you know, they're all here. And this could be your reading. You didn't just listen to episode one. You just kept going and going and going.

Sully (11:48)
I loved that podcast. And not to spoil the ending here, but Adnan and I, Adnan is now, well, spoiler alert for anybody who's listening and who has not heard serial, go watch it, go listen to it if you can. There's actually no watching component of it, but listen to it. But the spoiler alert is Adnan is now out. He has not been exonerated, but he will not return back to prison. And through my work with making Exoneree, Adnan and I are actually good friends. And I see him often.

Penny (11:50)
Yeah.

Sully (12:16)
And we, it's, crazy. It's this crazy small world circle back moment. That's just, yeah, insane. I can't imagine what freshman year me would be thinking.

Penny (12:25)
That is incredible. That you're friends. I mean, that just gives me goosebumps.

Sully (12:31)
Yeah, one of the of the analogies I come back to, I'm not a good runner. I wish I was tried. It's just not for me. But if I wanted to be an Olympic runner, I wouldn't immediately go out. And I've made this decision, I'm going to do it. I wouldn't go out and I wouldn't like apply for the Olympics or I would like go do a triple marathon or whatever. Like you start out with going on a walk, maybe.

Or like maybe you go on a trail run or something like that and you have patience and you trust this process and you imagine that you can be somewhere different. But it's like that kind of action and like you just start, you just do something that is so important. And so when I think of like giving students the opportunity to do a video project or something, setting that expectation that like it's not going to be amazing and it's not going to be an Olympic runner. It's not going to be this amazing documentary, you need to start with a little spark. Like when you're starting a fire, like you start with this spark. And so it's like, be okay. And maybe even strive for just starting that little spark and just this imperfect video. And that's the goal. And just know that if you can nurture that, if you can nurture that spark, it will grow and balloon into this big bonfire. But just like some little simple project is and can be enough. Totally.

Penny (13:49)
That is a really important point. Because one thing I wanted to think about, Elaine, when we were talking about this episode was that if a principal could give a teacher the freedom to design one unit that was different, that was outside of whatever the expectation piece was, what would you imagine if you could? And that's kind of the same thing he's talking about. What if it was something little? What if it was containable? By four weeks and you are gonna try to do this thing with your students to not only revitalize yourself as a teacher, but to give those kids an opportunity to do something very different.

Elaine (14:23)
⁓ And the encouragement that I see here and what I value so much, Sully, is it's the analogy that you made with the spark. All teachers don't know the interests of kids. And sometimes they think they don't have the time to do that. And so they start in with lessons. And I think that, you know, what I learned from Penny as well is those preliminary steps of getting to know kids. When I used to come and observe her in the classroom. She knew the kids like she knew you. And so I value that so much. And it's a small move. Any principal can do that. So those of you that are out there listening, you can do this for your teachers and encourage them to move toward this end.

Penny (15:08)
So Sully, who inspires you?

Sully (15:11)
That's a good question. I mean, there's a lot of people. There's so many people. I would say one of the biggest and most influential inspirations in my life is a guy named Omar Al-Shulgri. Him and I both worked on Tim Young's documentary together. And I'll be honest, when we first met and we first started working together, I hated him. He was like arrogant and he was like, he had this thick Swedish accent and he was like pushing me around. It was this whole thing. And I finally like sat down with him was like, Hey, we're like, we're both adults, we're college students like let's let's be civil. And after that, I mean, it's been sunshine and roses and we're like very close friends now. But it was through working with him that I learned his story. And his story is really remarkable. And I recommend that everybody listening go look him up on YouTube online. He has many different TED talks. But his story is he grew up in Syria. He grew up on the on the coast of Syria. And in 2011, when the Arab Spring broke out, he started protesting freely, asking for freedom, free speech, just simple, simple rights that us in the United States sometimes hold for granted. And he was pretty immediately arrested by the dictator, by the regime. And he was arrested, I believe it was a dozen times or so, but the last time. And these are just like a day or two, they do some light torture and then they let you go. And the last time... he was arrested. He was arrested for three years. His parents were told that he was killed in prison. And in Syria, it's twice a day torture. It's you're starved to death. Omar was in these prisons for three years in the most notorious of these prisons. He was able to get out through a mock execution, which is an insane story on its own. But then he traveled through Europe with tuberculosis and walked through Europe until he finally came to Sweden where they took him in. He learned English in Sweden and that's why he has a Swedish accent, which is kind of a crazy detail because he's a native Arabic speaker. But he is a big inspiration for me. He inspired me to do this work in Syria, inspired me to help people abroad, is just, yeah, truly just such an inspiration to me. He has overcome so much adversity in his life and all Syrians have truly. Mean, this past December, they overthrew a dictator. The Arab Spring was successful in Syria. It took 14 years, but it was successful and it was a revolution, really. It wasn't a coup. It wasn't a violent takeover. ⁓ And now this country is trying to build the first Arab democracy and it's a really beautiful thing. But I would say Syrians and Omar specifically inspire me all the time, all the time.

Penny (17:46)
I love that. So now you're teaching, Sully. I'm really curious about how you approach getting to know your students and doing this work with them.

Sully (17:55)
In my, in the Syrian emergency task force role that I have, I have a leadership role and I have volunteers and interns that I manage. That role, it's like literally my whole job there is figuring out where these people, where their interests lie and what they want to do. And I just brought on a volunteer just last week. And like one of my first questions to her was like, what do you want to do in 10 years? And she was like, I want to be an anchor. I want to be news anchor for Al Jazeera. I love interviewing people. And so now I've put her on this project where she's writing a whole story on one of these key revolutionary characters, Syrian Revolution characters, and she's running with it. She loves it.

Elaine (18:36)
Love the way you connected that descriptor to leadership, even though the process that you have is very succinct and in a way that you're going to get the outcomes that you want. I'm fascinated and I really appreciate your connecting that to the leadership role that you have.

Penny (18:53)
So we often end with this idea of what have you been reading, not only because it inspires us and things that we want to read, but we love the idea that if you build readers for life, they read.

Sully (19:03)
Okay, what am I reading? Well, I read constantly every day. I read, I'm always reading the news and what's going on. But in terms of pleasure reading, I'm on, let's see, I think I'm on the seventh, I'm on the seventh Outlander book right now. I read this Stephen King novel on, it was like revision history on the JFK assassination and that kind of hook-

Penny (19:26)

Sully (19:30)
And it was that that kind of inspired me to look for other books that were kind of Going back in history with this kind of sci-fi bit and now I'm on the seventh book of Outlander ⁓ Yes, pretty crazy and it's it's fueling this side of my brain that loves history and is curious about history and I've kind of I feel like I've reached this age where a lot of people are like guys I think specifically are like starting to get interested in like Revolutionary war history and stuff and so it's just kind of .. It all blends together into one. So that's what I'm reading right now.

Penny (20:00)
The thing that I love about so much of this transfer from what you learned and what you're doing now and the work that Elaine and I are trying to do is that if we really believe, and I do, that the power of a school lies in the students. The next closest piece are the teachers. And what happens so much is that teachers are excited about doing a project and told we can't do that. That's not part of your curriculum. That's not part. And just the idea of what's possible when you free teachers to do the good work they want to do. That's what you make me think of every time I think of you.

Elaine (20:35)
I that too, Sully. It really has been a privilege to talk to you.

Sully (20:38)
It's so amazing to talk to you all.