I love awards shows – the couture, the performances, the glitz AND the glamor. I also love the news. In January 2016, The Academy Awards gave me a unique opportunity to combine two things I love into an authentic, relevant project for my high school classroom: The Carter G. Woodson Awards – The Carters.

Jada Pinkett Smith, and her husband Will, decided to boycott the Oscars because of the lack of diversity among the nominees, and she posted a video on social media on the Martin Luther King holiday. Most of my kids only get snippets of news through social media, so they had heard parts of the story, but didn’t really understand. The first thing I asked them to do was to scour the Internet and social media to find out what was really going on. Hooking students in the beginning is crucial to Project Based Learning success, and this was Hook #1. Then I showed them a report from Entertainment Tonight highlighting Pinkett’s comments, followed by the official statement from Cheryl Boone-Isaacs, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. This response explained that a taskforce was forming to correct the lack of diversity by 2020.