ITVS Community Classroom lesson plans pair educational film modules drawn from ITVS’s acclaimed documentary films with standards-based lesson plans, activities, and other interactive content.
This lesson highlights the qualities of resiliency needed by teens to overcome adversity and risk. Students consider their own level of resiliency and explore ways to strengthen it.
From the Women and Girls Lead, Vol. 3: Women, Girls, & the Criminal Justice System Classroom collection
Students will examine how school discipline policies that rely heavily on suspension and expulsion can be an obstacle to student success and explore alternatives, especially peer juries, conflict management, and other youth empowerment models.
Students will be introduced to Brazilian visual artist Vik Muniz and the motivation behind his art project “Pictures of Garbage.” They will also meet some of the residents and works of the world’s largest landfill, located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They will explore the artist’s responsibility to the communities s/he represents.
Students will investigate Pakistan’s struggle to maintain a lasting democratic government, and look at various experiences in Benazir Bhutto’s life that shaped her as a leader.
Students will study the context in which Benazir Bhutto became the first woman leader of a Muslim nation, and the complexities of being a female leader in a Muslim country.
Students will look at how bullying can be an obstacle to Latino youth, especially with regards to immigrant, undocumented, racial, socioeconomic, and LGBTQ groups. They will explore how the arts can be a powerful way to bring different voices into dialogue, and how they can be tools for increasing self-esteem and combating stereotypes and negative images.
In this lesson, students will make personal connections with a family that has been traumatized and displaced by conflict in their homeland, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DR Congo. Doing so will help put a human face on a far away and unimaginable conflict that is the deadliest since World War II. Students will then investigate various events in DR Congo’s history, determine the causes and impact of the war, and analyze the effects that war has had on women in particular. (includes 2 film modules)
This lesson takes a global look at the range of democratic governments in different countries, from new and transitional democratic systems to more established ones. (includes 1 film module)
In this lesson, students will analyze how digital media tools work in less developed nations or areas where media access is limited. In addition, they will evaluate the savvy, resources, skills and support needed to develop effective media outreach. Students will also explore social networking and video as empowerment tools—and then create their own. (includes 1 film module)
In this lesson, students will examine the crisis of domestic violence in America and its impact on all areas of society. Using personal stories from the film module and the lesson plan as inspiration, students will research resources in their own states and neighborhoods and develop a plan of action that could help an individual in their community who is in a similar situation.