film shorts as text

From Bill Boyd @ the Literacy Advisor:

The short film is an ideal medium for developing the “traditional” literacies of reading, writing, talking and listening, a “short” film being a complete text lasting anything up to 30 minutes, but for our purposes ideally no more than ten or fifteen minutes, which means it can be shown two or three times in the course of a lesson if necessary. This is preferable to using an extract from a feature film as it doesn’t require an understanding of the whole work from which it has been taken, and there is a huge range of texts available, from animation to live action, fiction to documentary.

With a minimal understanding of the language of film, teachers can use short films to introduce and reinforce concepts related to reading and writing printed texts, such as narrative viewpoint, plot, characters and setting, as well as developing a greater understanding of the medium of film itself, the medium with which most of us engage most frequently. It is important to emphasise the similarities between printed and moving image texts, as well as the differences, since ultimately they are both about telling stories, and why we tell stories is arguably the reason for studying any kind of texts at all!

At the National Film Board site you can watch full-length NFB documentaries, animations and dramas online - beta.nfb.ca/

story circles

Happy May Day Everybody! International Solidarity!

May 16th is the 2nd International Day for Sharing Life Stories.

This day is an opportunity to celebrate and promote life stories, as a way to encourage critical thinking, cultural democratization and social transformation. The International Day is organized by The Museum of the Person International Network (Brazil, Portugal, USA and Canada) and the Center for Digital Storytelling (USA, Canada, Denmark, Czech Republic, Ireland and Portugal)

The chosen theme for this years' Day is Journey for Justice – Migration and Refugees. The Human Rights Commission of U.N. estimates that there are currently 21 million refugees in the world. According to the International Organization for Migration, there are 200 million international immigrants all over the world. We want to hear the stories of people who have experienced migration in order to develop dialogue about this important matter in our societies and promote social change.

Besides that, we could not leave aside the importance of any other person’s life stories. So, whatever your work with life stories is, join us! The idea of this website is to show these stories and to promote a space for listening and exchanging experiences. Post your stories, listen to other stories, and celebrate this day with us!

Find out more and add your activity for this year at ausculti.org.

Here is a video from an international story circle that happened last month.

Queen Rania of Jordan was announced as the Honorary Chair of the Global Campaign for Education's Big Read in Johannesburg. She met Basetsane Khumalo, Gcina Mhlope and Simphiwe Dana before reading her story to children from Soweto and Alex.

Find out more and add your stories at www.campaignforeducation.org/bigread