This Educator’s Guide was organized while researching in India as part of the Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching Program and Teacher Travel Grants from the National Education Association and Teacher Travel Fund.   This manual is licensed under Creative Commons, which means that one may use any part of it but with attribution.

As the Curriculum & Media Arts Coordinator at Gordon Parks High School, development of Civic Engaged Digital Storytelling (CEDS) was a way that staff and students could interweave curriculum with the life of Gordon Parks, the late, great African American filmmaker, photography, writer and activist. We developed a curriculum vision and were able to complete compelling multi-media projects and that resulted in significant student and community impact. However, our efforts were always hindered by a lack of systemic tools, trainings and guidance. There simply weren’t models available within traditional education that achieved the results we were aiming for, and that realization informs this Teachers Guide.

Educators may find this manual useful for school curriculum, inspiration, and for organizing CEDS approaches to curriculum in schools. This document was built on the foundation of training m

Gordon Parks was born in Kansas, but spent his teen years in St. Paul.

anuals and processes developed by Video Volunteers (VV), a human rights NGO based in Goa, India, whose work I observed prior to writing this guide. Their work has been inspired by alternative media organizations worldwide  like The Op Ed Project, V4C network, Small World News and Witness. It has been no small feat for Video Volunteers to build one of the largest and most successful Community Media programs in the world. VV’s training programs are, along with vision, the corner stone of this success, and these programs can be translated to schools.