Community Classroom Offers Free Teaching Resources

This Long Island hip-hop group helped set a high bar for sampling artistry with their debut album 3 Feet High and Rising, released in 1989.

George Clinton helped invent the genre of funk with his groups Parliament and Funkadelic (collectively known as P-Funk); his music has been sampled in several important hip-hop songs.

Can you own a sound?

That is the provocative question raised in a new resource from ITVS Community Classroom: four lesson plans and film modules for Copyright Criminals, an innovative and dynamic documentary that explores the origins of sampling culture in hip-hop music, copyright, creativity, and technological change. This curriculum is an invaluable tool for teachers or media organizations seeking to promote media literacy and ethical media production practices among youth.

The film explores how hip-hop rose from the streets of New York to become a multibillion-dollar industry, and what happened when record company lawyers got involved and everything changed. Students will develop not only a deeper historical understanding of “remix” culture, but also contemplate where it is headed. Featured artists include Public Enemy, De La Soul, and George Clinton, as well as several prominent entertainment lawyers and media scholars.

These exciting resources examine copyright law in the history of “borrowing” sounds in music, and raise thought-provoking questions about what is creative and what is criminal. The lessons are directed toward grades 9 through 12, and college students for use in the following subject areas: media studies, media literacy, social studies, history, sociology, media production, music and language arts, business, and legal studies.

Best news of all, all of these resources are FREE to educators and youth-serving organizations.

Check out our FREE resources >>

Watch a video preview of the film below:

Tags: copyright, education, free teaching materials, law, pbs, public media, teachers

Community Cinema Welcomes New Producing Partners: Louisville Film Society and KET

Producing Partners are local community organizations that co-present Community Cinema screenings across the country. Ken Wilson of Louisville, Kentucky with the Louisville Film Society shares some of his thoughts about becoming a Community Cinema and Community Classroom partner. BETWEEN THE FOLDS shows Thursday, Nov 19 at 3:30 PM at Fern Creek Traditional HS 9115 Fern Creek Rd. The film will be followed by a community discussion.

The Louisville Film Society in Louisville Kentucky

The Louisville Film Society has wanted for a long time to have a presence in local high schools – to foster both filmmaking and film appreciation. We found an ideal connection at Fern Creek. Fern Creek High School is a Louisville public school in a lower-middle class area where there is very little cultural activity.

With the encouragement of FC’s principal, Dr. Houston Barber, we have formed a film club and have begun turning their little-used auditorium into the site for our Community Cinema showings. Students have been given duties in publicity, set-up of equipment, and announcements and panel participation. One project we are planning to give the students is the shooting of an opening “Welcome, turn off your phones, here are our sponsors…” video. Eventually, students in the film club will be making films for a student film festival that will be part of the Louisville Film Society’s Flyover Film Festival, held in June. We are hoping their exposure to the subjects and techniques of the Independent Lens films will broaden and deepen their work.

Kentucky Educational Television

The alumni association at Fern Creek is very active. We are hoping that our monthly Community Cinema screenings will bring them back to school to engage with current students. We hope to raise students’ awareness of artistic, political, cultural questions and connect them to the wider community – and to raise the community’s awareness of those kids’ potential as creative, aware, productive citizens. We want to make enlarge the scope of Louisville’s artistic and intellectual life, and put film at the center of that life. We want people talking about, creating, and enjoying film and film’s subjects.

We want Fern Creek to become a cultural center for the area, and for it to become a destination for people from other parts of the city. The nature of Community Cinema – the range of its subjects and approaches – makes it a perfect catalyst for that kind of change. Ultimately the high school community will connect with the adult world around it – not in a hierarchical way, but as intellectual equals wrestling with interesting and important questions and issues. And as more and more people from outside the neighborhood hear of these screenings and discussions, Fern Creek will begin to matter more to the whole city.

We are partnering with the University of Louisville, with Kentucky Educational Television, and hope to have connections with film groups in Lexington and Paducah, Kentucky. As we begin to bring in panelists and organizations from around Louisville and Southern Indiana, we know formal and informal connections – with students, between organizations, and with the LFS – will begin to happen. We also want kids to make connections with students from schools around the city.

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Tags: education, film society, KET, Louisville

Community Classroom Engaging Seattle Teachers Through Film

Community Classroom currently offers a diverse selection of FREE DVDs and online modules designed with teachers, students, classroms, and community learning in mind.

The Seattle International Film Festival presents myriad year-round events, workshops, and films

On Tuesday, Dustin Kaspar, Educational Programs Coordinator for the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) presented Community Classroom to a group of teachers from various Social Studies departments throughout the Seattle Public Schools system. Local ITVS National Community Coordinator, Patrick Baroch, provided each teacher with a free DVD and information about upcoming events.  Free Community Classroom materials feature curricula paired with specially edited video modules taken from the best of Independent Lens and other cutting-edge documentaries, Web original projects, and online activities. All activities incorporate national standards, teaching strategies, worksheets and extension ideas. These FREE resources are a powerful tool for teaching and learning around issues crucial to educating young people in classroom and community settings. Kaspar said, “The training was a rousing success, and teachers were very excited about the availability of the free DVDs.” Teachers learned about the diverse calendar of films at SIFF Cinema, the film festival’s year-round cinematheque who also partners with Community Cinema. Kaspar shared a clip from Community Cinema selection MARCH POINT (which was shot by teens north of and in Seattle and Washington, D.C.) as an example of youth using film to tell their story. The teachers took their materials back to their schools to share with colleagues and students.  Turn your classroom into a Community Classroom.

Tags: Community Classroom, education, seattle, seattle international film festival, teachers