Academic and professional publisher Sage has bought Learning Matters, the independent education publisher founded in 1999.
The sale, for an undisclosed sum, was announced jointly by Learning Matters founder and managing director Jonathan Harris, and Ziyad Marar, global publishing director, at Sage. Harris will continue to work with the company as a consultant. A Sage spokesperson said Learning Matters will stay at its Exeter home until December 2011 with details of a future transition plan to be ironed out.
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Thanks to this wall posting on Facebook, Primary Source has introduced me to another fabulous non-profit organization: Learning Matter
s. Learning Matters is an American media production company focused on education with the mission to encourage and enrich public dialogue about education, youth and families. They have produced more than 30 documentaries and filed hundreds of reports for PBS NewsHour, one of the USA’s most trusted news programs in television. Learning Matters posts all their documentaries and reports on their website where they can be viewed for free or downloaded as podcasts.
Primary Source flagged Learning Matters’ documentary Empathy 101: A refugee curriculum informs South Bronx students and commented that “it is a powerful example of global education in action”. The synopsis for the documentary reads:
For many high school students, the struggles of others are often distant problems. In urban inner-city schools, where students have tough home situations and little exposure to the outside world, this is particularly the case. But at Banana Kelly High School in the South Bronx, high school teacher Lauren Fardig aims to change that.
Producer John Tulenko went to Banana Kelly — situated in the poorest Congressional district in America — to film a piece on a remarkable curriculum developed by the Morningside Center. These ninth grade students went through several phases of activities related to refugees, discovering important life lessons in the process.
To watch the documentary click here. It is 8 minutes in length and my kids were just as entranced when watching it as I was. A comment posted to the page by Steve, sums up my thoughts on this fabulous documentary as well:
This is a fine and very important piece. Kudos for Ms. Fardig’s work and for Mr. Tulenko’s reporting. This brief film exposed the fallacy behind the current education reform theory. The work these students did will not show up on any standardized test, but the content mattered deeply, the students learned a great deal, and the skills that they used will be helpful for everything else they do. This is what true education needs to be. It is everything test prep is not: important, inspiring, mindful, challenging, and powerful.
