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Brooks receives national teaching award
by Mark Gabriel
Public education in Wilkes County gained the national spotlight when a local educator recently won a nationwide award for innovative teaching.
Jim Brooks of Millers Creek won the Commission On Media's annual Media Literacy Award for 2008 in November.
Brooks, a West Wilkes High School teacher in English, is the sole recipient of this year's honor in media literacy from the commission, which has a nationwide membership.
"It's always nice to have your work validated," Brooks told the Wilkes
Journal-Patriot today. "I was very pleased."
Brooks won the award based on a portfolio of his teaching work.
“The portfolio that was required included student work,” he said. “That was certainly nice, as well.”
Getting the award also helps bring national attention to the quality of education in Wilkes County, Brooks said.
“I think that we are doing things here that others are interested in,” he said.
“We are engaging students in technology in ways that are very relevant today.”
A teacher who is pursuing her doctorate in new media studies nominated Brooks for the award.
“She spent some time in my classroom last year and observed what we were doing,” Brooks said.
That teacher, Belinha Deabreu, is a doctoral student at the University of Connecticut who contacted Brooks on the Internet after learning about the classes he created for West Wilkes High.
Brooks said those classes are giving students the tools they will need in the future.
“Students are being asked to read and understand information they see on the Internet and other new media,” he said.
“You don’t read a web page the way you read a printed page,” he said.
“You engage the material in different ways.”
“So I think teaching students how to relate to these new materials is important.”
Brooks was selected for the award during a meeting of the Assembly on Media Arts in San Antonio, Texas in November.
The meeting was held by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the sponsoring organization of the Commission on Media.
The award is based on a review of each applicant’s portfolio by a panel from the Commission on Media, which serves as an NCTE advisory group.
Brooks has taught English for the past 23 years at West Wilkes High.
The two classes Brooks developed at West Wilkes High are Photojournalism and Introduction to Film.
They teach students about the latest communications media and provide them with opportunities to create their own projects in those media.
Brooks also has served as an advisor to “Cable in the Classroom,” the cable television industry’s educational initiative based in Washington, D.C.
Brooks has worked with that organization for the past two years as an advisor, developing curriculum materials for cable programming.
He currently is a regular contributor of teaching tips for that organization’s national magazine.
Brooks currently is working on his doctorate degree at Appalachian State University in Educational Leadership with a concentration in Media and Technology.
The NCTE was formed in Chicago in 1911 to create a national organization for English teachers. |
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