The News Juicer Foundation is the nonprofit side of the company Thinking Habitats; my role in the nonprofit is working on curriculum research and design for the learning program ‘Front Porch Experience’ which is intended to be offered to middle school/high school teachers. The Front Porch Experience is designed to teach news media literacy, community awareness, and to develop students’ critical thinking and reading strategies. The learning programs from Thinking Habitats are built on 12 years of research and practical teaching expertise. I also help with the grant research to provide funding for the nonprofit. Later, I will assist with teacher trainings, focus groups and other sessions (data collection), data analysis, the website for the nonprofit side, and more.
The mission of the News Juicer Foundation/Thinking Habitats is to empower people to conceive democratic, peaceful, sustainable solutions – both in their own lives and in their communities. And to ‘unbox’ people’s thinking.
So far I am really enjoying connecting with my other DCERP fellows. I am excited to possible meet some if not all of them in person and to hang out virtually as well as discuss important topics and learn together. I’m actually on one of our virtual ‘game nights’ as I type this :). My collaborative learning group has a focus on arts and culture and right now we are just discussing what our potential focus would be and what ideas we have!
Hey Maia!
This foundation sounds so cool! I think that media literacy is such an important skill right now and I think its really awesome that not only do you get to help shape how students will learn how to be media literate, you also get to see the implementation of your work in teacher trainings. It seems like it’ll be a really rewarding and awesome summer 🙂