Take Two Media Initiative

Our social structures have been tested by political turmoil, a racial reckoning, and COVID-19 misinformation. By age 18, 88% of young adults regularly get their news from social media, yet half of US middle-schoolers cannot distinguish advertising from real news, or fact from fiction. 

Creating a public capable of community, civic and democratic engagement  starts with educating youth to take responsibility for the content they consume, create and share. However, huge disparities exist in access to media literacy and skills-based learning that disproportionately affect Black and Brown children worldwide. 

Take Two Film Academy (TTFA) along with its non-profit Take Two Media Initiative (TTMI) bring media literacy and filmmaking education to low-resourced K-12 schools. Students develop “soft skills” like research and source analysis, along with “technical skills” like scriptwriting, shooting and editing teaching students the skills they need to thrive in a digital-first world.

We are working to solve the large gap in media literacy skills that are not currently being taught in low-resourced classrooms through addressing the inequalities in what we call education’s “missing middle:" schools that are equally deserving of engaging education, but do not receive enough funding from their PTAs or from government subsidies. In a typical TTMI school, 50% of the student population is considered poor or low income and the majority come from black and brown communities that are heavily affected by misinformation coming from social media and digital news channels. Digital platforms have moved us further into filter bubbles, unable and unwilling to consider another’s perspective. But without a shared sense of truth, consensus and compassion among the citizenry is unachievable. Such a sense of common truth requires equal and equitable resources to educate our youth in this vital new form of literacy.

A Take Two "Residency" offers a mix of digital and instructional learning. Our learning management system (LMS), Take Two U, tracks the common core K-12 curriculum. The educator is guided through step-by-step teaching guides and grading rubrics catered to their specific lesson plan. 

Teaching artists lead filmmaking and media literacy lessons either remotely or in the classroom. We employ local media and filmmaking experts and also offer volunteer opportunities for our corporate and philanthropic partners. Our goal is to create a stable of local teaching artists that can be booked by availability and school fit, judged by both skills and reviews by prior students and educators. 

A Take Two Residency kicks off with two days of media literacy training then 10-12 days writing, shooting, and editing their own films based on a unit of study. Sample teaching verticals include: 1) Historical Documentaries (Ex: The fight for civil rights) 2) Investigative Documentaries (Ex: The impacts of stereotypes on Indigenous tribes) 3) Personal Documentaries (Ex: Telling your family's immigration story) 4) Social Action Documentaries (Ex: Food waste). This culminates in a classroom film festival. 

To date, we have predominantly served schools within the greater New York area. More than 50% of children in the schools we serve are considered low-income and receive free or reduced lunch. Their backgrounds average 20 different countries per grade level with as much as 20% currently experiencing homelessness or living in the shelter system. Through our program, we are able to spark creative energy and inspiration in traditionally overlooked school environments. 

David J. Vazquez, Principal of Bronx Academy for Multi-Media, shares that “Take Two has been an instrumental partner in our historically struggling school’s re-branding and rebirth. The Take Two team invigorated dormant English and Social Studies curricula by immersing students in dynamic Residencies that challenge every student across the ability spectrum to apply critical reading, writing, and speaking skills in the formation of film. Media literacy has become an indispensable component of our instructional core. We recorded the second highest gains, as far as growth, throughout the district in both ELA and Math.” 

At Take Two we meet students where they are. For those students who consider themselves ‘bad writers,’ they have the new genre of script writing to explore. Visual learners love gathering B-roll, which deepens their understanding of the texts referenced during the research phase of the project.

Teenagers now spend over 8 hours each day on their phone consuming, absorbing, and sharing media through Youtube, TikTok, Instagram and the like. Rather than trying to limit student access to these outlets, especially those that do offer great learning potentials, we teach them to successfully and safely navigate their existing digital landscape. We enable them to activate their passion through the medium they know best.

Take Two aligns with the Challenge to increase independent engagement of students and teachers in remote and in-person environments. Throughout COVID, we successfully transitioned from in-person to remote to hybrid Residencies. Through “Universal Design for Learning” students have the opportunity for independent hands-on creation to maximize learning retention. Auditory learners absorb more information by watching documentaries versus reading textbooks. Kinesthetic learners come alive making a documentary versus struggling to put words to paper. Teachers are connected to this new medium in which students are already communicating outside of the classroom through an online platform, educating them alongside the students.

Our for-profit arm Take Two Film Academy has worked in the New York school system for over twelve years, building a successful track record and a deep network of relationships. We have implemented our programs with more than 100 NYC schools and through those programs engaged over twenty thousand students. We are an official MTAC vendor for NYC DOE and NY Division for Instructional Informational Technology. We are also a partner of Tribeca Film Festival's annual student film showcase, giving us an amazing network and brand awareness. Since launching the nonprofit three years ago, we have worked with 10 deserving schools to offer the same programs for free. We have data to prove the efficacy of our approach and a working version of the LMS. A robust technical platform will enable us to scale this service model to deserving schools across the nation at little to no cost to them.

In the rare cases when media literacy is taught it often begins with a lecture on the topic followed by an assignment to write an essay with validated sources. We instead teach media literacy and its value through the media itself. Students know how to make short classroom films because they spend hours at home making them for their own social purposes. We invariably find them eager to take the creation process into their own hands to see what they can create on their own. 

We meet students in an arena they are already using to build their literacy, skills and knowledge in multiple disciplines with one interactive and engaging project in their core curriculum. From idea generation to reading, researching, writing, and creating a final project, students gain strength in all areas of traditional education while learning the value and importance of content creation. 

Moreover, the burden of incorporating media literacy into classrooms today falls on teachers who are already stretched thin. They and their students need an LMS that offers a guided momentum-building student experience coupled with periodic opportunities for teachers to engage teaching artists to lead classroom instruction or conduct office hours. Beyond the teacher-student relationship this affords the opportunity for partners to donate both volunteer hours and financial resources to fuel the hiring of local artists from under-resourced communities.

With each Residency we serve an average of 120 students. Our goal is to launch an additional ten Residencies in the 2021/2022 school year while building an optimized LMS system. By the end of 2022, we will have reached 3,000 students. With the help of partnerships like the MIT Solver community and securing contracts with Departments of Education, our goal is to be in at least 10 states serving 500,000 students by 2027.

To date, we have over 1,000 post-Residency surveys giving us feedback on specific Take Two instructors and curriculum as well as insight into the long-term value created by the program. We evaluate based on 5 key criteria we call “AACEE”: Attendance, Agency, College Readiness, Engagement, and Equity. We base those against CPMLE (Core Principles of Media Literacy Education) and ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) standards. To date, we have used this data to build a formal relationship with the New York City’s Department of Education. Simply put, our customers have great confidence in us.

With educational partners like Emerson and MIT, we want to build out this analysis and use these success metrics to expand into additional DOEs across the country. By partnering with acclaimed academic institutions, we will give definitive research showcasing students’ ability to evaluate their subject matter retention, understanding of media consumption and inspiration to become smarter digital citizens. We also track teachers’ reports on the effect of Take Two’s methods on student engagement versus traditional subject matter instruction, as well as if Take Two has given them tools to integrate media literacy into their classrooms.

We have 3 people working on strategy and administration, and a stable of 10+ teaching artists that execute the programs. 

Through Take Two’s work over the last decade, we have built a deep understanding of and network within the New York City Department of Education. To date, the Academy has worked with over 100 schools and 20k students. This offering has been directly translated into offering free residencies to deserving schools. We have the experience of navigating DOE contracts and delivering in-person, hybrid and remote education that can allow us to scale countrywide. With robust data collection to show, we believe we can be leveraged across the nation as the preferred provider of media literacy education.

We are a small organization to date and do not have a full-time leadership team outside of our founder Megan Kiefer. With the infusion of capital and partner resources, we will launch a recruiting search for an Executive Director who is intimately aware of and embedded within the communities that are most in need of this type of offering. This search will be informed by the principles of inclusive hiring practices. Additionally, we plan to hire teaching artists directly from these communities and will be representative of them, so that we are consistently hearing from the educators on the ground as to what their students need to thrive. 

Take Two has demonstrated its success as a service based model and it is time to move to a technology first model to scale to meet the overwhelming need of the moment. MIT is a pioneer in the research and application of new educational models. Gaining access to the experience and mentorship of the MIT community on the product side as well as our business model would be a huge asset for us. Additionally, connecting to Solve members to develop corporate sponsorship would dramatically increase the number of students we are able to serve.

Our organization is made up primarily of educators. We are looking for partners who can assist in thinking through strategic growth strategy and give guidance around the product build for the expanded LMS, as well as any feedback to our educational partners around their impact measurement strategy.

We would love to work with Solve corporate partners like Comcast to support media literacy efforts in their local communities. Their foundation “focuses on connecting and strengthening communities by supporting programs that expand digital literacy, promote community service, and build tomorrow’s leaders” which perfectly aligns with TTMI’s work. Connecting with Solve philanthropic partners like the Gates Foundation would give us insight and implementation tactics into adapting US-centric technology programs internationally. There is alignment with previous Solve winners ranging from Baan Dek to Century Tech for mutual learning opportunities as well as partnering on global programming. Lastly, we would also love to work with members of the MIT Media Lab to imagine new and innovative ways to 1) use media for educational purposes and 2) collect and showcase the data we gather.

Media literacy is one of the most valuable skills a student can attain to prepare them for their educational and professional goals. By teaching students media literacy, we open a world of research-based careers for social and digital platforms as well as educational advancement goals like pursuing college and graduate education. Our filmmaking course gives them the creative skills needed to pursue careers in film, advertising and more. We will use the ASA prize to build out content centered around career exploration directly into our LMS to complement the units of study customized by core curriculum.