Help students build social, emotional and cognitive skills by using a six-stage process of collaborative media production
When teachers and library media specialists use a student-centered approach to media production, learners create to learn, developing cognitive, social, and socioemotional competencies through creative media production that can support academic achievement across the subject areas. This model consists of six stages where students collaboratively learn to produce media messages. Based on five years of research in K-16 education, this model provides a roadmap for curriculum design, assessment, and pedagogy that focuses on a student's cognitive, social, and emotional learning process.
Since 2018, Yonty has been working with TrueKids1, a youth media organization based in Taos, New Mexico to provide professional development for K-16 educators using media in their classrooms. With a civic media goal, we applied the Media Production Hive as the educational framework. The hive model allows every educator in public, charter and private schools as well as out of school organizations to foster cognitive, social and emotional skills. The students collaboratively produce media towards social change in their own communities. Some of the projects included kindergarten public speaking exercise about the weather and seasons changing,a podcast series of 6th grader about homelessness, a PSA for suicide prevention by middle school students, a whole high school website design initiative to educate the community about recycling and reusing opportunities, collaboration between journalism and media undergraduates and high school students on an apocalyptic movie warning about the environment and sustainability. Each year, all the participating schools come together to share their work in a public showcase. Our evaluation of the program shows how the Media production Hive successfully meets the teachers where they are, ranging from educators who fear to use technology to professional producer who came to be teachers. Students artifacts and their own reflections are evidence of the cognitive, social and emotional process they went through as producing collaboratively a civic-minded media artifacts.
This program is offered to school districts and communities as a professional learning program. Contact Yonty Friesem at yonty@mediaeducationlab.com for more information.
