2022 Beacon Award Winner
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The winner of the 2022 Beacon Society Award is Anna Behrens.
The 2022 Susan Z. Diamond Beacon Award went to Anna Behrens of Keene, New Hampshire. |
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Anna is passionate about getting students at the elementary, middle, and high school levels connected to the Sherlock Holmes stories. To do that, she created a Sherlock Holmes club in the middle-high school where she works, attracting both middle school and high school members. The students have fun learning about the traditional Sherlock Holmes stories as well as recent pop culture versions such as BBC’s Sherlock. In one cool event, they dressed up and acted out The Red Headed League.
But her crowning achievement for 2022 was creating and running the Keene, NH Sherlock Holmes Week of activities aimed at kids and adults. Students created the plot for a Sherlock Holmes mystery, conducted experiments in a forensics lab, celebrated Dr. Watson’s birthday, watched the film Sherlock Gnomes, participated in an interactive Sherlock Holmes readers’ theatre, decoded secret messages, saw a mystery puppet show, and dressed up as Sherlockian characters.
One of our judges wrote: “What stood out to me from the nominator’s form was the variety of learning modes and media that Anna utilizes to introduce new audiences to Sherlock Holmes. The impact of her ongoing advocacy of Sherlock Holmes in the middle school where she works, and the breadth of individuals and institutions of all backgrounds represented in Sherlock Holmes Week truly embodies the ethos that the Susan Z. Diamond Beacon Award seeks to recognize.”
This year, Anna also joined the Beacon Society program committee, where she provided feedback on the Society’s library display project and made suggestions for a potential fiction writing contest.
But her crowning achievement for 2022 was creating and running the Keene, NH Sherlock Holmes Week of activities aimed at kids and adults. Students created the plot for a Sherlock Holmes mystery, conducted experiments in a forensics lab, celebrated Dr. Watson’s birthday, watched the film Sherlock Gnomes, participated in an interactive Sherlock Holmes readers’ theatre, decoded secret messages, saw a mystery puppet show, and dressed up as Sherlockian characters.
One of our judges wrote: “What stood out to me from the nominator’s form was the variety of learning modes and media that Anna utilizes to introduce new audiences to Sherlock Holmes. The impact of her ongoing advocacy of Sherlock Holmes in the middle school where she works, and the breadth of individuals and institutions of all backgrounds represented in Sherlock Holmes Week truly embodies the ethos that the Susan Z. Diamond Beacon Award seeks to recognize.”
This year, Anna also joined the Beacon Society program committee, where she provided feedback on the Society’s library display project and made suggestions for a potential fiction writing contest.