Greetings, TPS Teachers Network! 

Are you a Pre K - 2 3 - 5 6 - 8 9 - 12 teacher hoping to include more film and related media in your instruction? Perhaps you are a Library or Technology staff member hoping to engage learners across your school or center. Even our STEAM ( Science Technology Art/Music Mathematics ) educators can find a home here in Teaching with Film. However you have found us; we are glad to have you!

The Teaching with Film group aims to:

• Support teachers in using film in the classroom across content areas and grade levels
• Explore how film can be used teach literacy and reading strategies (e.g. predicting, responding to text, questioning the text as well as graphic responses (storyboarding), soundtrack and music analysis)
• Engage learners with film for literary analysis (setting, characterization, point of view, symbolism, irony, etc.)
• Promote the use of film to teach media literacy and persuasion techniques
• Introduce educators to the vocabulary of film and/or extend knowledge of film language through more advanced terminology
• Share film and its unique history both in the United States through the Library of Congress primary sources and abroad

Who are your group administrators, you may ask?  You probably already know Mary Johnson , Coordinator of the TPS Teachers Network and Sherry Levitt , Executive Director of Teaching with Primary Sources, Virginia. My name is Jennifer Golobic , and I am high school teacher in Fairfax County Virginia.  For the past six years, in addition to teaching English/Language Arts , I have built and managed the International Baccalaureate Film Studies Diploma Program at Justice High School in Falls Church, Virginia, so I get to experience  teachingwithfilm everyday! I am also a Level III Coach with TPSNVA , so I have been lucky enough to tour the Library of Congress with Sherry and Cynthia Szwajkowski as well as serve as a panelist for the TPS Presentation: Using and Teaching with Audio Visual Primary Sources in May 2016. We certainly have some resources to share, but we are looking forward to getting to know you and to learn from each other about how to effectively use  film and  media in the classroom!

For my first share, I want to draw your attention to our group image. It is titled, "Susan Baptist, a projectionist, shows training films for the troops as well as more popular motion pictures" and is taken from the Visual Materials from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Records (Library of Congress).

We liked this image because it is accessible (Susan Baptist may not be a household name like Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, but her role is a vital one in getting the movies to the people), inclusive (the image depicts a woman of color in a role traditionally held by a white man) and recognizable (most people associate film and the movie-going experience with the motion picture projector). We hope you like it, too!