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Welcome to my blog. I document my adventures in travel, style, and food. Hope you have a nice stay!
Welcome to my blog. I document my adventures in travel, style, and food. Hope you have a nice stay!
CWK Blog Post December 2022
With the mid-term elections days away, we have been reflecting on how the stories of our communities are uniquely linked to elections. Elections are an expression of the values of a community, and they, therefore, have the power to shape, if not determine, a community’s narrative. Lester Young, New York Board of Regents Chancellor, talked with us about the need for communities “to be empowered to influence the decisions that impact their lives and the lives of their children.” In part, that empowerment is possible through understanding that the importance of voting is “the importance of holding elected officials accountable for meeting the expectations of the community.”
But if each vote is, in essence, a chance for us all to help write the story of our community, what is the heart of that story? Alison Yoshimoto-Towery, Chief Academic Officer of Los Angeles Unified School District, posited to us that “school is the center of our community” because of the interactions between students and adults taking place there that “affirm students’ hopes, affirm students’ capabilities, affirm students’ dreams [to] make a difference in [their] lives.”
Bolstering those interactions are organizations like the YMCA, whose primary focus, as described by Suzanne McCormick, President and CEO of the YMCA USA in our Defining US podcast this week, is “on youth and youth development [and] helping communities be the best they can be.” Suzanne also talks with us about the need for “bridge building” as the “most important thing we can do for kids, students and families.”
“Bridge building” is also a critical step in linking our many communities to learn each other’s stories so we can contribute meaningfully to the narrative of our larger community as a nation. It’s a step that the community of Fairfield takes as they gather for a screening and panel discussion of our documentary Defining US: Children at the Crossroads of Change.
And it’s a step you can take by exploring CWK’s many channels. Because CWK’s work touches and connects many communities, we have the ability to tell stories that help viewers stay informed and “build bridges.” That understanding is vital to helping you write your community’s story on Election Day.
Ensure your child’s media diet is as nutritious as you’d like!
CWK Blog Post November 2022
Nutrition is an essential component of success inside and outside of the classroom. But along with concern about consuming healthy foods and combating food insecurity, consider, too, the media diet our children are consuming.
We are all accustomed to hearing statistics like those in a 2018 Ofcom report: that by the time the average young person is 18 they will have spent 35,000 hours on media. Eight out of ten 3- to 4-year-olds use YouTube to watch cartoons and other videos. 52% are online almost 9 hours a week. Put more simply, we know that K-12 students are consuming large amounts of streaming content and we know that multimedia content is an essential tool for education. But with a massive menu of streaming content available to us, how are we to know which media are truly as mentally nutritious as we’d like?
Ensuring that the content we serve inside and outside the classroom is –whether meal-sized or merely a snack-- relevant, authentic, and evidence-based is essential to providing a well-rounded media diet. Unlike other web-based portals, or curated play-lists on video sharing platforms, CWKTV is the largest proprietary, nonfiction, evidence-based streaming service in the country. We tell stories about educators and students to lift their voices up and have positive impact through a curriculum designed to teach how to develop critical thinking, build deeper relationships and teach how to better understand others and ourselves.
CWKTV is a unique storytelling destination for educational change and positive outcomes that cannot be simply replicated or assembled from typical mainstream content. Users of the CWKTV library, built from 15 years of evidence-based research, learn directly from educators, students and families telling their stories first-hand. While anyone can create content passed off as curriculum, CWKTV media is actually served in schools nationwide, most notably the New York City Department of Education.
School systems turn to CWK not only because they rely on evidence-based research, but also because of the immense time we spend with educators. We interview them,
they serve on our advisory boards, and they provide us with access and profiles inside of schools. And because their journey is our journey, this work creates real impact.
As you peruse the ever-growing menu of seemingly socially responsible media and bite-sized curricula, remember to check the nutrition label on any content you serve to students. Empty (mental) calories may not directly harm school-aged children, but they certainly won’t create change for good, supporting confident, 21stcentury literate students.