Educational Goals & Scope
We designed Ordinary Extraordinary Junco to entertain, educate, and inspire both public and student audiences learning in both informal and formal settings.
We kept high school (9-12) and college (undergraduate) and science standards in mind as we created the project, with the goal of making the film useful to students and teachers.
We designed our feature-length (88 min.) project in a modular format with 8 shorter “chapters” (3 to 20 min.) specifically to facilitate their effectiveness in classroom (or homework) usage.
Each of the film's six chapters reveal the process of science, exploring key themes in biology along the way. Most chapters walk viewers throught the scientific method, and bring to life the research methods and data used by scientists.
We considered both National Science Education Standards (NRC) and AAAS Benchmarks in Science standards when we wrote and produced our segments, and we currently reference these in our study guides.
Importantly, a newer NGSS-aligned curriculum unit has also been developed for teaching evolution using juncos and our films. This unit has been implemented successfully in hundreds of classrooms nationwide, and is part of a large, collaborative education research proejct. You can find links to that incredible resource in the top of our resource list.
We view the Ordinary Extraordinary Junco educational resources as an “open-source” project, and invite contributions from any and all educators. The initial resources we developed were to encourage and facilitate educational use. We welcome we welcome any contributions to expand, refine, and create new materials to accompany our film project and will do our best to help share those with other educators.
See Resources + Curricula for a list of materials available to date.
See Topics + Keywords page for a sampling of subject areas featured in the film.