Community Classroom
The Year of the Girl Begins: Girl Scouts of the USA 52nd National Convention
The Girl Scouts of the USA is a major partner for the Women and Girls Lead campaign and last week, they invited ITVS to be a part of their National Convention in Houston, TX. Celebrating the launch of their 100th anniversary activities, the Girl Scouts announced that 2012 will be The Year of the Girl! Women and Girls Lead presented two campaign films: Strong! and Pushing the Elephant, and trained more than 100 girls to use digital storytelling tools. Today’s post from ITVS National Engagement and Education Manager Annelise Wunderlich highlights the digital storytelling trainings.
Photo by Julie Wyman
I have a confession: I was never a Brownie, or a Daisy, or a Girl Scout. In fact, as a girl in grade school I suspected those groups of not being “cool,” and I was intimidated by their uniforms covered with mysterious and colorful badges. Now, that was admittedly a very long time ago — and the Girl Scouts has surely evolved as an organization since then. But nothing prepared me for just how cool the Girl Scouts actually are.
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Live Chat on Fostering Digital Citizenship
ITVS Joins Leading Bay Area Media Groups to Celebrate Teachers
This past month, over 100 media-savy educators attended the first Bay Area Media Innovators in Education event in San Francisco. The event was co-hosted by ITVS, KQED, BAVC, and the San Francisco Film Society.
At a time when school budgets are tight, it is rare for teachers to get treated to wine, gourmet treats, and free media content. But ITVS and four other leading Bay Area media organizations decided they deserved some pampering and inspiration.
This past month, over 100 media savvy educators attended the first Bay Area Media Innovators in Education event at the Lab art space, co-hosted by ITVS, KQED, BAVC and the San Francisco Film Society. The event was a showcase for educational resources from each organization, and featured a panel discussion with four teachers who are using media creatively to engage their students.
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Community Classroom Profiles the Best. Teacher. Ever!
Last month, Community Classroom unveiled the winner of the Best. Teacher. Ever! Contest: Negussie Tirfessa, Ph.D., Professor of Physics, Manchester Community College. As a followup, we asked Independent Lens viewer Cordelia Vahadji to interview her nominee, so that we could discover what makes this educator so inspirational to his students, and that physics is fun.
Teacher:
Dr. Negussie Tirfessa, Ph.D., Best Teacher Ever!
Dr. Tirfessa was born in Ethiopia. He received a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Physics at Addis Ababa University in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He taught Physics at the same university for six years and came to the U.S. to study at Ohio State University in 1995. Dr. Tirfessa graduated with Ph.D. degree in Theoretical Nuclear Physics in 2001 and joined MCC as an instructor of Physics in January 2002. He currently lives in Manchester, CT with his wife and two children.
Student:
Cordelia Vahadji attended Smith College, majoring in biology. She completed internships at Smith, Yale, Princeton, the NIH, and the Association for Women in Science, as well as an NSF teaching fellowship. She worked as a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins. Recently she has switched her career focus to mechanical engineering.
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LEADING THE CONVERSATION: Young Women’s Voices in the Media
ITVS, POV, BAVC, and Youth Radio will co-present a live chat on the future for women media makers, this Monday, July 11 at 3PM PT / 6PM ET.
The media industry is still largely a man’s world. In commercial film, only 7 percent of directors, 13 percent of writers, and 20 percent of producers are female. How will the next generation of women media-makers confront that reality? ITVS, POV, the Bay Area Video Coalition, and Youth Radio will partner to present a live chat on Monday, July 11 at 3 PM PT / 6 PM ET with talented young women from around the country who have won acclaim in the youth media world and beyond. The conversation will be moderated by independent producer Jen Gilomen (co-director of Deep Down).
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And the Best. Teacher. Ever! is … drumroll, please…
ITVS Community Classroom announces the Audience Winner for our educator contest
Well, it was not easy. We received moving stories from around the country about teachers who go the extra mile to illuminate young minds.
Teachers like Beatrice Pfaff, an American Sign Language Instructor in Indianapolis who inspires her students to overcome the isolation they can feel from being deaf, or P. Curry Leslie, Jr., a much-loved television production instructor in Raleigh, NC who has mentored hundreds of young people who have gone on to successful careers in journalism. Or elementary school teachers like Virginia E. Mahaney and Mary Causey Hamilton, from Wilbraham and Cambridge, Mass., who both reached out to a student in need of validation and helped her find her own strength.
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How to Raise a Feminist Baby Boy
ITVS Education Manager Annelise Wunderlich decides she’s not afraid of teaching her son the F-word.
Annelise Wunderlich with her eight-month old baby boy Tiago.
When I told my husband about the title of this post, he raised a skeptical eyebrow. Really? Feminist? What did I mean by that, exactly? I think he envisioned me forcing our eight-month old son, Tiago, to wear pink leggings, read Betty Friedan before bed, and sing along to Ani DiFranco in the car. Was I proposing that we raise Tiago to feel guilty about his masculinity, or to resist patriarchy at the playground? Not that my husband isn’t a big supporter of women, but couldn’t we just let the baby learn how to chew first? Have I been in Northern California too long?
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Women’s Voices Rising
By Annelise Wunderlich, Education Manager at ITVS
Here is a startling fact: the number of women in prison in the United States has increased by 800percent over the last three decades. It’s a disturbing trend — but fortunately there are some inspiring individuals and organizations out there working to reverse it.
Adriana Escobar (photo by Van Nguyen-Stone)
Community Works, one of our educational partners for Community Classroom, is among them. When their youth programs manager Manijeh Fata invited me to see their theater ensemble Rising Voices last month, I knew it was a chance to see the life-changing potential of storytelling at work.
Rising Voices is a paid internship program for previously incarcerated young women ages 18 to 25, located at the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department Women’s Reentry Center.
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Best. Teacher. Ever! The Nominations Are In
The Best. Teacher. Ever! contest winner will be announced next week.
Thank you all for the nominations for the teachers who changed your lives for the better. We’ve been moved and inspired by the stories of those special educators out there who accept long hours, not-so-great pay, and limited resources because they want to see young people thrive. They all deserve our prizes and then some!
But, we’ve got to narrow it down to five finalists and then let you — our viewers — decide the top winner. We’ll announce who they are next week, so stay tuned.
In the meantime, we hope all teachers out there have a relaxing summer break ahead of them.
Look Who’s Tweeting Now…
ITVS Education Manager Annelise Wunderlich profiles one of our newest followers on Twitter: Teresa Ann Isaac, the former mayor of Lexington, Kentucky and a major advocate of women’s leadership.
We met Teresa Ann Isaac via Twitter, when she messaged about the live chat we co-hosted with PBS NewsHour last month on Bhutto and women’s leadership.
Turns out, Teresa Ann Isaac is a pretty amazing woman leader herself. She is the former mayor of Lexington, Kentucky and since 2005, the U.S. State Department has sent her to train women leaders in Chile, Argentina, Namibia, South Africa, Pakistan, and Uganda, as part of a democracy project.
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