There are two resources on this page. Scroll down to the section if you are an educator who wants to:
Teach students to do interviews and make their own radio stories
or
Use Radio Rookies stories as a teaching tool
TEACH YOUR STUDENTS TO MAKE RADIO STORIES
Our curriculum “Radio Rookies: The Basics of Audio Journalism” covers interviews, audio commentaries, montages, and narrated features. To receive a PDF and editable Word document of the curriculum, please let us know a bit more about yourself: http://www.wnyc.org/crowdsourcing/educators-survey/ and we will email you.
You should feel free to use this guide as a template from which to base your own lesson plans tailored to the specific needs of your classrooms and subject areas.
If you are thinking about using the curriculum or already using it, please join our “Radio Rookies Educators” Facebook group to give and get feedback on the process and share what your students produce!
Here are some Radio Rookies resources that are accessible online:
- Interviewing Skills
- Choosing a Topic
- DIY Toolkit- A comic book, collection of videos, and worksheet handouts that teens can use themselves to make radio stories or educators can use to supplement the lessons they teaching.
* Additional resources:
- StoryCorps Education: Helps teach students basic interviewing and storytelling skills
- Generation PRX: Resources to help you teach and learn radio
- Teen Reporter Handbook: Radio Diaries DIY Handbook
- A Kid’s Guide to Recording Stories: Helpful for kids of all ages, from Transom
- Teach Youth Radio: Storytelling Resources for Educators: Lessons with a journalism and data focus
USE RADIO ROOKIES STORIES AS A TEACHING TOOL
Youth produced radio documentaries are valuable curriculum resources because youth voices are too often excluded from mainstream teaching materials. The Radio Rookies approach places youth voice at the center of issues-oriented instructional programs. Radio documentaries foster academic engagement by capturing the interest of students and inspiring them to question and share their beliefs and perspectives about contemporary issues.
To give you a sense of the kind of stories that may be useful resources in your teaching or work with youth, here are some pieces other educators have used in their classrooms to spark conversation:
The N-Word: It Represents Hatred
Coming Out in The Age of Lady Gaga
Seven Schools Later: One Student’s View of Segregation
Nine People, One Bedroom: A Teen’s Take on Life in Poverty
Students are pushed to ask themselves:
- What do I think about this issue?
- What has been my personal experience with this issue?
- What about my experience leads me to agree or disagree?
Integrating Radio Rookies documentaries into educational programs allows youth to do more than simply hear the opinions and viewpoints of other teens. Through listening, discussion and debate, and writing about the issues presented in these stories, students learn to share opinions and articulate their own perspectives. Ultimately teen listeners learn to validate the power of their own voices and stories to influence other people’s ideas about the important issues affecting our local, national, and global communities.
Our site organizes stories by topic, so you can easily search existing stories to see if there's something that fits with upcoming lessons: