MUMBAI: Whistling Woods International (WWI), has signed an MOU with the Central Board of School Education (CBSE) to offer film and media studies as a part of the curriculum for 10+2 students. The course will cover five principal areas of mass media – film, TV, print, radio and internet.
The MOU was signed between CBSE chairman, secretary & chief vigilance officer Vineet Joshi and Whistling Woods International executive director Ravi Gupta.
The course aims to enhance media awareness in students and equip them to opt for a career of tomorrow. The pilot programme has been rolled out in 20 schools across India and it will cover over 11000 CBSE schools across the country next year onwards. At the moment, the curriculum is being offered at eight schools in Mumbai and Delhi respectively and four schools in Pune.
HRD minister Kapil Sibal said, “The course of Media Studies will bring democracy back into our classrooms. Not only will it give students options in the creative and soft skills areas, which were sorely missed at the Senior Secondary level, but it will also enable them to avail a basic ground understanding of the media & entertainment industry and also to be better evaluators of films, television & other media that they experience on a day-to-day basis. This is truly a unique occasion where one of the pioneers of the media & entertainment space, Subhashji is partnering with the government in a classic example of a new age PPP in education. I am sure this is going to give a huge boost to the media awareness of the next generation of consumers.”
Whistling Woods International founder and chairman Subhash Ghai remarked, “For too long now, less that 0.1% of the Indian population has been influencing the remaining 99.9%. This backward integration of media studies education into high school will truly empower the youth into better understanding of the primary areas of the media & entertainment industry that affects us all – namely print, TV, Film, Web & Radio. If they choose to take up a career in the same, they will definitely raise the standard of the media & entertainment industry; else they will better appreciate the content being thrown at them and hence demand better quality. I am truly grateful that CBSE has provided their support to us for this new education model. The curriculum has been designed based on detailed research on several media studies curricula across the world and will surely be beneficial to the students who opt for it.”
Interested students will have the option of opting for the course in either the vocational stream or the academic stream that CBSE offers. WWI and CBSE will share the curriculum development cost and WWI will be responsible for putting together the course material and textbooks. In addition, teachers for the course will be chosen as per WWI specifications. The institute will run a special training course in Mumbai and Delhi for teachers. Each teacher will be trained once every three-four months for a period of four days. To ensure that the right type of education and learning is imparted to students over the two-year course duration, teachers will have to undergo six weeks of training in total.
