Well, it’s been quite a year here at the Education Department – we’ve been so busy we haven’t been putting posts up, which is very unfortunate. Our New Year’s Resolution? Stay active in the classroom and get active online.
So, with that in mind, there’s a lot to share about the year past, and about the coming year as well. My overall reflection for the year is that–in spite of Job Action, economic challenges and technical constraints–we are working within an incredibly dedicated and driven community! As part of our community outreach, we finished a lot of projects in Fall 2011, including:
Me in Media (MiM), a very cool project run by Vancouver’s own Schema Magazine and the United Nations Association in Canada’s Multimedia & Multiculturalism Project. MiM aimed to inspire dialogue around the inclusion of ethnic and cultural diversity in the multimedia landscape, encouraging youth to be active participants in reflecting their own identity and stories through media. In a very small amount of time (3 days!) they produced provocative, thoughtful and creative work.
Squamish Reconnect Alternative Program Video Project, where youth created short videos and learned technical, teamwork and digital filmmaking skills.
BC ProD Day Media Literacy Presentations at the annual conferences for CUEBC, the BC Teacher Librarians Association and the BC Teachers of English Language Arts. We shared our Consciousness in Consumer Society workshop and together workshop participants discussed criticality and active engagement in analyzing mass media messages.
The launch of our new gender and violence workshop, Watching Women Die: Mediated Gender and Violence, which was incredibly successful in our first presentation for Point Grey’s Grade 12 students in October.
Struggles and Successes in an FASD World: A short documentary produced by the students of the Vancouver School Board West Coast Alternate Program.
Surrey Learning Centres Documentary Filmmaking Bootcamp: The videos will be posted online shortly, and represent some of the best student work we’ve been privileged enough to have participated in. Eight documentaries with incredibly varied topics were produced, all exploring ideas of ethics and the complexity of ethical issues. Students created projects on homelessness, addiction, body modification, Occupy Vancouver, eating disorders, peer pressure and the legalization of marijuana.
Media Democracy Day Media Fair and Mediated Violence workshop, in which we shared information about our programming and facilitated our media literacy workshop with participants.
Whew! And if that looks busy, just wait for the posts to come! The Education Department is gearing up to begin another exciting year! We’re cleaning out all our computers and double checking our equipment as we prepare for many upcoming projects, including our annual Prince of Wales TREK video intensives, the VSB Artist in Residence program residencies, video production intensives with the City of Surrey Waste Reduction Challenge and the North Shore Neighborhood House and Richmond’s MacNeill Secondary Incentive Program.
Our big launch in January is the in-school portion of our new Integrated Media Literacy Project, working in 30 classrooms in 5 different school districts. Funded by the Vancouver Foundation and supported by SFU’s School of Communication, the project provides free, in-class Pro-D to Lower Mainland teachers taking on projects that use web 2.0 learning tools to transform their students’ learning experiences.
Things are shaping up to be another awesome year for the Education Department! We can’t wait to be back in schools in 2012, helping students across BC to produce challenging, thoughtful, and creative pieces of video.
Happy Holidays!
