What's the Story? The Vermont Young People Social Action Team is a course supported by Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English that combines social issues with multimedia for students from 8th grade to 12th grade in Vermont. Tim O'Leary, a technology innovation specialist, and Bill Rich, a former English and Social Studies teacher, lead the team of teachers from all over the state that provides transformation, student-based learning for anyone interested in pushing themselves and making a difference in their communities.

 

The course is a full year, and throughout the year each student chooses a topic that you do about two months of research on that you then use to create groups based off of the different issues people picked. People can switch topics or convince others to join their topic. Once groups are established, the teams meet and start planning who to interview and how to stay in contact, with the guiding support of their mentor. Four times throughout the year, the entire program has an overnight retreat filled with team collaboration and planning for the months in between the retreats. Students contact people they want to interview to create a document about their topic and then use media kits provided by the program to film interviews and b-roll. They then produce documentaries and other multi-modals like websites, presentations, etc. Once created, the teams go public and use their productions to create a difference in the Vermont community. After the course is over, students have the opportunity to join and pursue and new topic, join and continue working on their previous topic, or join as a student mentor and help the new cohort of students.

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If you have any questions or would like any additional information, click here.