Teacher Feature March 2024: Adison Godfrey

Each month, we spotlight and celebrate a teacher in our community.

Adison Godfrey (she/her) is an English, Creative Writing, and Media Literacy and Mass Communications teacher at York Suburban High School (YSHS). Before teaching at YSHS, she worked as a graduate assistant at WPSU, an NPR affiliate station in State College, Pennsylvania, which fostered her passion for media literacy and broadcast journalism. Her goal is to share her love of stories with students and empower them to tell their own.

Discover Adison’s favorite StoryMaker lesson, her go-to media-making tools, and what she taste-tested that never made it to the market in our Q&A below. 

PLUS, don’t miss the opportunity to join Adison this Wednesday, March 13th for Fact Check! Teaching Media Literacy in Your Classroom. During this webinar, Adison will be highlighting how she’s integrated the MediaWise Toolkit into her curriculum. 

How long have you been using StoryMaker or SRL resources in your classroom? This is my second year (but my first year fully incorporating these resources and utilizing the SRL partnership). 

What’s your favorite StoryMaker lesson? I love the lessons that help make this process more transparent for students. This year, I taught the lessons on What Makes a Good Interview and Scriptwriting together, and it helped immensely. Those lessons gave students a better sense of what a good sound bite is and how to intentionally craft questions to get one.

What’s a media-making tool or resource you can’t live without? Can I share two?! 1) Wireless Lavalier mics have been an absolute game-changer this year. Thank you to SRL for the recommendation! 2) I love Hindenburg for audio editing. It’s the program I used when I worked for WPSU, so I’m biased, but I find it incredibly intuitive.

What’s your favorite StoryMaker lesson? There are a TON of resources. To avoid overwhelm, make your search smaller. Use the tabs to browse open prompts, lessons, tutorials, etc. Or, if you know what you need, utilize the search bar. There is a strong chance that if you’re looking for something specific (like when I had been looking for voicing tips earlier this year), there is already a related resource on StoryMaker. No need to reinvent the wheel!

Links to your students’ work: York Suburban High School Instagram and York Suburban Trojan News

What’s a dream story you’d like to report on or a person you’d like to interview?

When I worked for WPSU, I was in charge of interviewing authors who visited Penn State’s campus, which was a dream! I would love to do more interviews in that vein. Fredrik Backman, Elizabeth Acevedo, Clint Smith, Hanif Abdurraqib; stick an author in front of me and I will nerd out in the best way.

What are you currently listening to? I have a commute from Harrisburg to York every day. In the mornings, I’m usually listening to Noah Kahan or an audiobook (currently Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar). In the afternoons, I sometimes just enjoy the silence–iykyk, and I think my teacher friends will know!

Fun facts: 

  •  After graduating from college, I taught English at a university in Ecuador through a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship.
  • I’m technically a published author! I co-wrote a chapter in the book Reckoning With the Whiteness of English Education: Transformative Pedagogies in English Language Arts and Beyond (2023).
  • This is the most fun though: I am one of the few people in the world who has tried a sour apple Cheeto. My dad worked for Frito Lay when I was growing up, and he brought them home one day for us to taste test. Suffice it to say the product never went to market.

You can contact Adison directly to learn more about how she’s adapted StoryMaker to her classroom here agodfrey@yssd.org. 

Side note: a highlight of receiving a response from Adison is that her signature always includes great book recommendations, i.e. Currently reading: To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose. Just finished reading: Bright Red Fruit by Safia Elhillo.