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The Teacher Salary Project – Another Great Video Opportunity!

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Emily Davis, production assistant for the Teacher Salary Project emailed me this weekend with the following message:

“Dear Gail Desler,

I am writing on behalf of Academy Award-winning filmmaker Vanessa Roth, co-founder of 826 National Nínive Calegari, and writer Dave Eggers. They are the Director and Co-Producers of the feature-length documentary The Teacher Salary Project. We wanted to reach out to you in the hopes that you may be interested in getting involved in our production.

The Teacher Salary Project will be a documentary film, a national outreach campaign, and the only digital archive of the stories of teachers’ lives. In the end we will have a community-built movement that tells the true stories of hardworking and effective teachers in order to change the public perception, support, and financial rewards that accompany the invaluable work of teaching. The film is based on a book co-authored by Nínive Calegari, Daniel Moulthrop and Dave Eggers called Teachers Have it Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers. You can read a Washington Post review of the book here <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/23/AR2005062301562_pf.html> .

We are excited to invite first-hand stories/ footage filmed by students about their public school teachers and the struggles of being a teacher. In this spirit, we are looking for public school teachers to help get their students involved. We found your name in searching for teachers that have already done some work with film or digital storytelling in the classroom, and hope that you would be interested in becoming part of this new and exciting way of filmmaking.

To learn more about the project you can check out our website at <http://www.theteachersalaryproject.org/>. To get an idea of what we are looking for, visit our student information page <http://www.theteachersalaryproject.org/studentvideo.html>, where you and your students can get some ideas for what we’re looking for and how to get involved in the project. If we are able to use your submission in the final film we will hold a premiere screening at your school!

If you think this is something that you might be interested in helping with, or if you could perhaps suggest others who you think might be interested, please let us know. I look forward to hearing from you.”

I was drawn in by the link to Rafe Esquith’s article and  also the connection to Dave Eggers (whose book What Is the What is in my Current Reads box). In this year of horrendous budget cuts, what better time to tell our stories, or, better yet, enlist our students to provide a window into the real world of classroom teaching.

*Image copied from http://www.theteachersalaryproject.org/about.html#aboutProj

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