Community Classroom Offers Free Resources to Educators

ITVS’s Community Engagement and Education team recently attended conferences hosted by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), which draw thousands of educators from around the country. Learn more about ITVS’s involvement from Chi Do, associate director of communications, and Annelise Wunderlich, national community engagement and education manager.

A large crowd gathers at the National Association of Women’s Studies conference to hear speaker Angela Davis.

Angela Davis was the keynote speaker at the NWSA conference and spoke before a packed house about the need for women’s studies programs to embrace new voices and to stand up to the challenges facing women and girls today with renewed strength. Our Women’s Empowerment collection does just that. This free resource provides film content excerpted from ITVS’s award-winning documentaries exploring stories of women’s leadership and empowerment in Bolivia, Egypt, Israel and Kenya. Film clips are accompanied by standards-based lesson plans, discussion guides and action guides for use by educators as well as non-profit, international and community-based organizations. Women’s and gender studies professors we spoke to were enthusiastic about using these films in their curricula.

Across town at the NCSS, we gave out hundreds of free DVDs to social studies teachers hungry for high quality film content in their classrooms. Lesson plans and clips from HIP HOP: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, SENTENCED HOME, KNOCKING and our VOTE DEMOCRACY! collections were especially popular at the exhibit booth.

We also screened the film TAKING ROOT: The Vision of Wangari Maathai with filmmaker Lisa Merton appearing for the Q&A via online video chat. The next day we held a workshop about how to use this inspiring story of environmental activism in Kenya to connect students to local organizations focused on green issues.

Watch the video below to hear from a high school teacher who attended the screening:

Educators and staff for NGOs or community organizations can order FREE DVDs, or stream the film clips and download the lesson plans on our website. Learn more >>

We also launched our new social media sites for those interested in learning more about using film to further their work.

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Tags: education, environmental, social studies, teachers