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In the summer of 2023 BYKids and EMA brought together a virtual cohort, dubbed the Community of Learners (CoL), consisting of students and teachers from all over the country with a common mission: to explore and imagine what learning and teaching could look like. Together, they pushed the boundaries of typical standardized education to better center the voice and participation of youth while reimagining professional development for teachers.
The group originally started as a way to use BYkids resources to enrich their teaching and learning experiences. Throughout the 2023-24 school year, these teachers and students brainstormed ways to integrate BYkids films into classrooms across a range of disciplines—including science, English, and world languages—and produced lesson plans utilizing a variety of texts and innovative learning assessments to complement the films.
For the summer of 2024, three teachers who were part of the original cohort are preparing to become teacher ambassadors to lead the next Community of Learners. After implementing and designing curricula to integrate BYkids films in their own classrooms, they are now eager and ready to share what they learned last summer to invite more educators into the fold.
In high school English teacher Catherine Moore’s classroom at Moravian Academy in Bethlehem, PA, she strives to provide a space for students to grow to become good citizens of the world, not merely good at academics. By highlighting the perspectives of young people in their student-made films, BYkids has helped her students to see what youth-led change can look like and empowered them to see themselves as capable of enacting change in their own community. Using the BYkids film Another World Is Possible about eco-activism as inspiration, Moore designed a final project that invited each student to choose an issue they are passionate about and write a legislator of their choice about it.
“They chose something that was important to them, they used their voice. They acted, they did something, and they put themselves out there.”
Micah Schaffer, a film teacher at Trevor Day School in Manhattan, also experienced the transformative effects of the BYkids films on his students’ learning, helping them develop critical skills that are transferable from the classroom to the real world. “We try to foster in our students good citizenship, awareness, inquiry, curiosity, and analytical thinking. We as teachers need new ways to help foster those skills. These movies are really effective at helping build those in a very short amount of time with students,” he said.
This past school year he showed the BYkids film Walk on My Own, in which a 13-year-old Senegalese girl details the changes that have taken place in her town after it abandoned the practice of child marriage. Schaffer could feel how the film brought his students closer to the world around them and helped to narrow the gap of misunderstanding that often exists when there is distance from a subject. Experiencing life through the eyes of other young people enabled his own students to better understand different life experiences.
“There are so many human stories that are so close to us, happening all around us. Giving that awareness to my students, I think, has made them better citizens. It’s opened their horizons to the experience of others. These movies, the best thing they do is create empathy and connections to help connect our students to the world around them.”
As impactful as the films are for students, they also benefit the educators by creating an opportunity for them to express their ideas and exchange teaching practices. For Schaffer, the CoL has been a difference maker in the way he teaches, and the collaboration with other educational professionals has enabled him to introduce new perspectives to his classes. “I've been teaching for a long time, but being part of this CoL has given me even more confidence in how I approach students because I know that I have these people I can bounce ideas off of,” he said.
Along with Moore and Schaffer, high school English teacher Katie Collamore at Lincoln Sudbury Regional High School in Massachusetts is ready to bring those positive experiences from the 2023 CoL to lead a new Community of Learners this summer as ambassadors for the program. “BYkids and EMA really treat us as experts in our craft. They don't say okay, here's the rigid structure in which we're going to build this curriculum. They really trust us, they recognize and appreciate our hard work,” she said.
Unlike other types of professional development she has engaged in, it was that attentiveness to the energy and passion she was pouring into the CoL that encouraged Collamore the most. Her vision for the future of the CoL is for it to continue to be a place where teachers and students alike find hope and inspiration in the future that the BYkids student films bring to life.
“It's really hard to be a teacher right now. This is a community in which I think we feel empowered and we feel appreciated, that just might keep teachers where they are for longer and maybe even inspire the students in our community that they can also be teachers or go in this direction of trying to make change.”
