Welcome to POV Watch Club! 

Since February 2021 PBS has teamed up with POV to bring a documentary from television’s longest-running showcase for independent, non-fiction films into your home. As an initiative meant to support educators, we also release our “After Shows” the last week of every month - a pre-recorded discussion that makes critical connections between the films and education and offers practical tools to use these resources in your own classrooms. Each “After Show” comes with links to free lesson plans, reading lists, and discussion guides created with you in mind. So far, our team has brought seven intimate stories through documentaries that highlight contemporary social and cultural issues and countless ways these “texts” can be useful to you in your teaching practice. 

As you are asked to return to the classroom we thought we’d switch things up this month and bring you a “Back to School” mash-up of highlights to help lighten you and your students’ load. For September’s Back-to-School Special edition of Watch Club we will highlight memorable moments from previous Watch Club after shows and share tips to help you bring documentaries into your classrooms this year.

Beginning in October we’ll be back with our regularly scheduled programming: sharing free access to POV documentaries and engaging educators, activists, and documentarians in conversations about racial and social justice and critical media literacy. Our October feature will be Fruits of Labor; Ashley, a Mexican-American teenager living in California, dreams of graduating high school and going to college. But when ICE raids threaten her family, Ashley is forced to become the breadwinner, working days in the strawberry fields and nights at a food processing company. 

We will provide you with free access to a POV documentary highlighting intimate storytelling and contemporary social issues. By signing up, you'll be added to the PBS LearningMedia Watch Club list and receive access to new content each month.

The last week of the month, we will release an “aftershow” - a short segment that highlights how this film can be used in classrooms and dives into relevant social issues in each film. By joining, you'll also receive access to free lesson plans, reading lists, and discussion guides created with you in mind.

Still looking for more information? Visit PBS TeachersLounge for additional details.