Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Students Produce Media for Senior Projects at UCCP


Clockwise from left: seniors Khalia Brooks, Lori Burton, Malcolm Walton, Gregory Coney and Daveer Fincher.

Inspired by last year's success of two media-powered senior projects created with the support of UCCP, this year we partnered with Pennsylvania Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development (PHENND) to provide a series of workshops for high school seniors focusing their projects on media, music or culture. As part of the series, from March 4 to April 15th, UCCP worked with 5 students from Parkway Northwest, South Philly, Parkway West and Simon Gratz High Schools whose senior project topics ranged from Hip-Hop to reality TV to media's influence on anorexia.

The students came to Temple University once a week for 6 weeks and learned concepts of media literacy and representation, talked about the challenges of making a documentary with Madea Gboyah and Ted Lacey - last year's UCCP Senior Project stars (now freshmen at Temple), developed skills in video production, went to a documentary screening at University of Pennsylvania, and collectively planned, shot and edited their own short film called "Making of a Video Vixen" that ties together the media critiques of everyone in the group.

In addition to fulfilling the required 15 hours of senior project fieldwork, all of the participants said that the UCCP workshops were "really helpful and relevant" to their topics, and each student was able to take away something from the experience, whether "how to convert YouTube videos" or how to view advertisements and movies with a more critical eye. The workshops were facilitated by Natalia Smirnov, UCCP's Media Productions and Communications Coordinator with support of Fritz Lubin, UCCP Leaders Corps member.

For more information, contact Natalia Smirnov at nsmirnov@temple.edu.

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