Mosaic Spotlight: Derk Baartman

One of Derk Baartman's favorite aspects of the Mosaic Film Experience (Mosaic) is this: he gets to provide today's students with creative opportunities he wishes he had as a student.

Derk, Vice President of Mosaic, has been involved with the organization and its annual event for about eight years. When he's not running Mosaic's operations and programs, he's serving as executive producer of DB Studio, which he founded.This year, Derk is especially happy Mosaic could support teachers with a teaching curriculum based on the event. This curriculum, which is free on the Mosaic website, was created as a way to support teachers and offer a solution for teaching media literacy skills to their students.It's information that Derk wished he'd have had when he was a student, and he's looking forward to providing teachers with this resource, as well as hosting an event where students can "actually meet someone doing something they find interesting.

"This is a way to add to the educational structure of the annual Mosaic Event," Derk said. "The idea is that it's going to offer a unique learning experience. It's a way to connect students with careers they may not have even known of."Derk understands that media literacy is a major concept that today's students need training in."Social media has changed the way teens interact with the media, making the digital landscape highly complicated. The Mosaic Event’s educational component helps facilitate that lesson with students in a fun, engaging and conversational way," Derk said.

"The students of today aren't just consumers of media; they're creators. Now they have to be smart creators as well as consumers of what they're watching and putting out into the world," he said.Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, this year's Mosaic Event is going virtual. The event will be broadcast globally from 9 - 11:30 a.m., November 4, from Celebration Cinema North in Grand Rapids, Michigan.Although reworking the event to be online has been challenging, it's also creating a new opportunity to analyze the event, understand how to give audiences what they need, and reach more people. Because the event is all online, Derk is hopeful that Mosaic will gain more feedback online, making the experience better than ever."Organizationally, we can reach more people. This will give us a chance to figure out who our audience is a little better," he said. "We can learn a lot from engagement this year. We'll have more contact with people online - so we can reach more students - and we'll have more feedback online."