Walden Media Offers Summer Film Institute For Massachusetts Teachers
July 1, 2005
BOSTON - For two days this summer and one day in late November, 30 Massachusetts public school teachers and Walden Media are going to the movies! Now in its tenth year of offering a statewide program of free, graduate-level institutes designed to increase the content knowledge of Massachusetts educators, the Massachusetts Department of Education has partnered with Walden Media to offer educators a course on "Film Literacy" through its Summer Content Institutes program. The course will serve as a forum for examining the uses of film in the classroom, an opportunity for Massachusetts teachers to exchange ideas with colleagues, and a means of re-considering the visual media's impact on learning as a form of literacy itself. Teachers will be reading three novels commonly taught in elementary and/or middle school and a collection of short articles, and viewing Walden Media film adaptations to explore the importance of media literacy and how film and books can be used together to meet state and national standards.
Randy Testa, Ed. D., Walden Media's Vice President of Education and Professional Development, will run the three-day course that culminates with participants preparing a final project for use in their classrooms on film adaptations and their use in schools. This content institute will be held at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, in Cambridge, MA and participants will be eligible for PDPs, professional development credits. Testa, a former third grade teacher, holds his doctorate in Teaching, Curriculum and Learning Environments from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and is the former Director of Elementary Teacher Education at Dartmouth College. For more information about the Massachusetts Department of Education and its summer content institutes, please see www.doe.mass.edu.
