Jeremy Stoddard

This is Prof. Jeremy Stoddard's fourth year teaching in the Curriculum and Instruction (C&I) program at William and Mary. One of his main areas of interest is the use of media to prep school-aged children to be democratic citizens. "Modern children are gaining all of their information through the internet and media," Stoddard says. His desire is to help teachers develop ways to use films to teach and to help children to interpret films and media-understanding that it has been dramatized. Stoddard hopes that helping children to recognize that any film's goal is to engage an audience, not to report pure historical facts, preps student to become independent critical thinkers. He is involved with several projects working toward these ends.

He co-authored a book, Teaching History with Film. The book is designed for in-service or pre-service teachers to create models for using specific, positive examples of teacher's powerful use of films in the classroom. It focuses on different ways to think about things when showing films. The book highlights the need to use films for a specific purpose, not simply because they are about the era the students are studying.

He is also partnered with Street Law, a non-profit organization dedicated to developing education about law, democracy and human rights, with their new movie The Response. This short movie is a courtroom style drama about Guantanamo Bay based on actual military tribunal transcripts. Stoddard contributed to the development of the curriculum that accompanies the film.