Ithaca College

This past summer, Chris Sperry and Cyndy Scheibe hosted a campus event for a small group of educators from upstate New York who had already completed the Project Look Sharp Summer Institute or the Facing History course to deepen their classroom application.  

In the morning, Scheibe worked with teachers discussing the process of media literacy and its impact on classroom learning.  Sperry worked with teachers to deepen their work with the Facing History curriculum using Critical Friends Protocals for peer coaching.   In the afternoon three of the participants practiced leading media decoding exercise while the rest of the group role-played students in the classroom.  The group evaluated each session and synthesized best practices for leading a constructivist media analysis session.

Facing History and Ourselves, an organization that works to instill intellectual vigor and curiosity in the world’s secondary school students by providing ideas and tools that support the needs of teachers, has partnered with Project Look Sharp in the past. Sperry previously worked with a Facing History leadership team on integrating media literacy into the Facing History curriculum and methodology, and he has been using the Facing History curriculum in his high school humanities classes for thirty years. 

“There has not been another workshop in my 30 years of teaching that has influenced me as much as the summer week I spent at Look Sharp," wrote Mary Moyer, an elementary librarian. 

In order to accommodate busy schedules in a digital world, Project Look Sharp is planning a hybrid version of this workshop for the future.  

For more information, you can email us at looksharp@ithaca.edu or call 607-274-3471. You can also reach Chris Sperry at csperry@ithaca.edu and Cyndy Scheibe at scheibe@ithaca.edu. 

Project Look Sharp is Ithaca College’s Media Literacy Initiative. Project Look Sharp supports the integration of critical thinking through media literacy in school curriculum and teaching. They do this through developing and providing lesson plans, media materials, training, and support for educators at all education levels. The purpose of media literacy education is to help individuals of all ages develop the habits of inquiry and skills of expression they need to be critical thinkers, effective communicators, and active citizens in today’s world.