New Lesson Plans Arrive for Pushing the Elephant

ITVS Community Classroom announces the launch of an exciting new resource for teachers, NGOs and youth serving organizations, based on Pushing the Elephant, which aired last week on Independent Lens.

This powerful family portrait is set against the wider drama of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

When civil war came to Rose Mapendo’s Congolese village, she was separated from her five-year-old daughter, Nangabire. Rose managed to escape with nine of her 10 children and was eventually resettled in Phoenix, AZ.

More than a decade later, mother and daughter are reunited in the U.S. where they must come to terms with the past and build a new future.

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Tags: classroom, college, congo, education, high school, lesson plans, teachers

The Egyptian Uprising in Context

ITVS FILMS AND RESOURCES HELP PLACE CURRENT EVENTS INTO HISTORICAL CONTEXT

ITVS has a history of working with international filmmakers as well as community organizers, educators, and activists to trace the evolution of democracy movements worldwide. Find useful content and resources that will bring the current situation in Egypt into historical context, on our new page Egypt & Democracy.

Tags: Alexandria, cario, democracy, discussion guides, Egypt, lesson plans, middle east, Mubarak, obama

Hey Teachers! You’ll Dig This

If you’re a teacher, we know times are tough. You are struggling to enrich your classroom, but beset on all sides by budget cuts, growing class sizes, and a dearth of basic supplies. Fear not – the new ITVS.org will help you find free (yes free) standards-based resources for your classroom that will engage and inform your students in new and innovative ways.

Our newly redesigned website is now a content destination for educators and youth-serving organizations. It now hosts our complete collections of lesson plans, activities, learning games, and film modules drawn from the Emmy Award-winning PBS series Independent Lens and ITVS’s Global Perspectives Project. You asked for it, and we listened: While we’ve been producing these resources for years now, the new ITVS.org website makes them more accessible and easier to use than ever.

The search and sort function in our section for educators will allow you to find the appropriate resources that align with the subject matter in your syllabus right from the landing page. And our crisp new online video player will allow you to stream film modules in your classroom right from our site.

Now you have even more options — our lesson plans are available on the site as HTML pages, you can still download them as PDFs, or get them on a DVD you can order online.

So what are you waiting for? Get your hands on our free resources and watch your students respond when they make connections between the facts in their textbooks and the films, games, and exercises we’re offering 24 hours a day.

Tags: classroom, education, Free, lesson plans, students, teachers