Publications and the Bradford Media Literacy Screening day

The last two days has marked the end of the media literacy year for the students of the Bradford primary schools. Over the course of two morning and two afternoons all 30 schools came to the Media Museum to introduce and screen the short films they had made over the past months. The quality of the films was mixed (as expected), but it was wonderful to see how excited everyone was to see the films on the big screen.

Yesterday at the Leeds Young Film Network meeting I heard that Leeds is now thinking about running a similar scheme as part of their Young people's film festival. It's great to see that the scheme is spreading and they seemed to be keen to collaborate.

In two weeks time (on the 7th) the Media Literacy teachers are meeting for one last time to evaluate the scheme. I hope to gather the last questionnaires and writing levels then. Fingers crossed at least most of them bring the required material!

In the meantime, I have been busy starting and editing a few journal articles I'd like to send off in the next weeks. The first one is a condensed version of my Master's dissertation which looks at how, why and when teachers use films in lessons. Cutting 20,000 words down to 6,000 is really hard but I am proud of the final product. The article has just gone off to two tutors for review and hopefully I'll be able to submit it next month. Two further ones on the PhD and the Free School experience are in the pipeline.

Unfortunately there have also been some sad news: After several weeks of trying to negotiate/ collaborate with the New Schools Network, my friend Natalie and I have decided that we are going to withdraw from the Free School School application process. Things got too stressful and after not being able to satisfy one of the main criteria we decided that this was going to be the end of the road for us. I am still incredibly grateful for the experience and look forward to continue to write about Free Schools- it's a fascinating research topic!