The Journalism Education Association has selected five new curriculum leaders to work on the next phase of the curriculum initiative.

These new curriculum leaders will work in one of two areas — differentiation or usability — to improve how JEA’s hundreds of lessons can be used in a variety of classrooms with students of all levels and to better integrate these resources into a more user-friendly curriculum for members.

Newly appointed curriculum leaders are:

Julieanne McClain, CJE — Usability
Julieanne McClain, CJE, teaches journalism and advises the Talisman, a student newspaper at Rutherford B. Hayes high School in Delaware, Ohio. She is the Vice President of the Ohio Scholastic Media Association and is a 2014 Rising Star Award recipient. She was the photojournalism module leader for the JEA Curriculum Initiative during the initial two years of the program. In her school, Julieanne launched a Sophomore Journalism curriculum, in which tenth grade students can take Journalism as their primary English credit instead of a more traditional English course. She and her students are proud of their NSPA First Class ranking, an All-Ohio ranking through OSMA, and a 2nd place Best in Show appearance at a recent national convention. However, just as important to her are the skills her students are building when it comes to creating a quality publication and learning about what it means to be a discerning citizen in an increasingly digital society.

Andrew Young — Differentiation
Andrew Young is in his fourth year advising The Round-Up yearbook at Woodland Junior High School in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He has been named a 2017 Rising Star by JEA. His staffs have been recognized in the JEA Middle School/Junior High Media Contest, Arkansas Scholastic Press Association awards, Walsworth Photo Contest, NSPA Photo of the Year honorable mentions, as well as with three Walsworth Gallery of Excellence Awards. He is currently serving as the interim secretary on the AJAA Executive Board, has written articles for Walsworth’s Idea File magazine, and recently presented a session on advising Junior High/Middle school at the Dallas JEA/NSPA Fall National Convention. Andrew has also presented at the annual Arkansas Association of Middle Level Educators on the importance of teaming in the middle grades and on curriculum building.

Sergio Yanes, CJE — Differentiation
Sergio Luis Yanes, CJE, began teaching English and journalism in Florida in 2006 and began advising student media in 2011. He currently teaches journalism at Arvada High School in Colorado, where he also advises the Arvada Argos/BulldogTV (BDTV) convergent media program as well as the Arvadan yearbook. His students and staffs have won various awards at the state and and national levels. Beginning in 2014, he helped develop and revise online curriculum to help teachers in Leon County Schools (Fla.) earn a gifted/talented endorsement to their professional certificate. He also developed and refined the CTE journalism pathway for Jeffco Public Schools (Colo.) to incorporate convergent media and to provide more professional experiences to students.

Rachel West, MJE — Differentiation
Rachel West, MJE, is in her 16th year of teaching. Most of her teaching experience was teaching English and Journalism in the highly ethnically and socioeconomically diverse Stockton Unified School District (CA), but last year she took the plunge and moved to Northern China to teach Chinese nationals at an American-style high school. She is also finishing up her Doctorate in Education in the area of Curriculum and Instruction. While working with English as Additional Language students in Stockton, she became very aware of the need to differentiate instruction….and the past nine months made her realize her experiences were just the tip of the iceberg! Receiving training from the Teachers’ Training Center in the area of EAL in the Mainstream, West is excited to combine her new passion for EAL differentiation with her love of curriculum in this role..

Beatrice Motamedi, CJE — Usability
Beatrice Motamedi is executive director of Global Student Square, an international student journalism network that helps high schools connect and create digital stories on global issues. A former staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, UPI and WebMD, Beatrice spent 10 years as a classroom teacher in public and private high schools, where her students won more than 200 awards, including the Wikoff Award for Editorial Leadership, the NSPA Pacemaker and numerous Best in Show awards for website design and multimedia storytelling. A Certified Journalism Educator, a Dow Jones News Fund Distinguished Adviser and California Journalism Educator of the Year in 2012, Beatrice served as California state director for JEA from 2013-17 and speakers chair for the JEA spring conventions in 2013 and 2018. She was a 2015 Knight Fellow in journalism at Stanford University, where she co-directs Newsroom by the Bay, one of the nation’s leading summer digital media camps for high school students. She is a 2017 Globalizing the Classroom fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. Beatrice has a deep interest in project-based learning, experiential learning, service learning, mobile journalism and anything that turns classrooms into newsrooms.

Leading the team are curriculum coordinators Shari Adwers, MJE, and Abrianna Nelson, CJE along with Educational Initiatives Director Megan Fromm, MJE. To read more about the initiative or to access the members-only repository of lessons, visit the curriculum site.