Welcome to the Be The Hero! Educator site- an initiative of Paul Zappa from NIRODAH

 

 Be the Hero! was developed and trialed by the Victorian Women's Trust and found to be effective with  mainstream groups of boys in years 9 and 10. Following feedback from the trial it was expanded to a 4 session program.

This website has been created by Paul Zappa  to support educators in their delivery of the program for a  wide variety of groups of boys and could also be used to expand the program to run for a whole school term.  Paul is an experienced educator who has been training leaders to implement the program on behalf of the Victorian Women's Trust.

The emphasis of this site is to provide access to ‘pre sourced’ teaching aids that assist the facilitator in engaging young people by using more film, music and articles, and in so doing connecting with many young people particularly those who respond better to visual information rather than reading narratives.

The teaching pedagogy then becomes one where the student is engaged and educated through informative moving images and use of expert commentaries from around the world in conjunction with the excellent content of the original Be The Hero! site.

With this addition, the teacher does not have to be the ‘expert knowledge holder’ and is able to move through the program more as a ‘3rd party navigator’ rather than a holder of all knowledge.

This site includes links to various forms of digital technology such as YouTube film and music, web sites, video clips and examples of advertising from around the world. While the Be The Hero! site utilises many links to other websites and some video and audio sources, the intention here  is to engage more young people by embracing even more this visual mode of communication.

It is strongly recommended that facilitators use a media download tool (found through most search engines) to download the You Tube sites to their own computer before using them in the classroom. This will prevent slow buffering and will stop a link being made to an unwanted clip after the segment is played.

It is important to note here that these are recommendations from an experienced teacher, but were not part of the original trialled materials of the Be The Hero! program. These innovative practices should assist with the delivery of the program and will continue to be updated as other educators add resources that they have found to be useful, but there is no research about the effectiveness of these teaching aids apart from Paul's experience in teaching the program  and the extremely positive feedback from both students and staff about their usefullness.

 It is also important as we do develop additional materials that we are mindful of retaining the feminist principles that underpin the work of Be The Hero!.


Hopefully the content and teaching style of this site engages your students who might otherwise be inclined to empathise with the above cartoon. 

This clip is one of a number of motivations for the teaching pedagogy underpinning this site. 

Enjoy it with your students and challenge them to create something similar.