Event

IB FILM: Teaching and Designing a Western Curriculum in a Japanese Secondary School Context

Saturday, March 13th, 2021, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Speaker: Cassidy Marra

In the spring of 2019, I was hired to be a Film Studies teacher in the International Baccalaureate (IB) Program at Fukuoka Daiichi High School. There was no textbook, no curriculum, and the students were all Japanese sixteen year-olds with Eiken Pre-2nd and zero knowledge of film. The only thing I had were three externally assessed projects that the students needed to complete in English within the next fifteen months. This is the story of how I scratched together a Film Studies curriculum and helped my students pass the class.

In this workshop, I'll be sharing my experiences and challenges in creating a Film Studies curriculum at a Japanese high school. Although the subject matter in my class is "film," I think that the ideas we discuss here can be applied to any subject that is taken by non-native English speakers but taught and assessed in English. The curriculum I've designed is very much a work in progress and in constant need of retooling. As you learn about the standards of the IB Film Studies course, I hope you'll share your ideas.

Some of the topics we'll examine are:

• What is the IB program? What are the IB FILM assessments?
• What is the core content in IB FILM?
• Film Lesson Planning: Examples of IB FILM lessons
• Reverse-engineering the assessments: how I teach students to "beat" the assessments and why that's a good thing
• Specific challenges teaching a Western curriculum in a Japanese school context

Cassidy Marra
I've been a language teacher in Japan, Australia and Canada since 2005. I'm not a researcher nor am I a language acquisition theorist. I'm just a simple practitioner. I look at the task that my students need to complete, I assess the obstacles in completing that task, and then I do my best to help the students surmount those obstacles.

Online: The Zoom link will be posted on the Fukuoka JALT website ( https://fukuokajalt.org) the day before.

Organization: Fukuoka Chapter of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (Fukuoka JALT)

Cost: JALT Members: free
Non-members: 1,000 yen

Venue: Online: The Zoom link will be posted on the Fukuoka JALT website the day before

Location: Online, Online Events, Online Event

Contact Fukuoka JALT

Trevor Holster