Dr. Valerie Francisco-Menchavez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Work. Recently, she pioneered a storytelling project in her Race and Ethnicity class that encouraged students to create conversations on difficult topics such as race and privilege with members of the campus community. She also rolled out an infographics project called “Each One Teach One” that resulted in students becoming more critical consumers of information.
[Students] are always making memes, or Vines, or all of these things. So I think if we meet them halfway in the middle and ask them to take their academic knowledge and remix it into formats that they’re so familiar with already, I think we’ve got something really interesting.
Listen:
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complete Valerie Francisco Podcast Transcript here
From Our Conversation:
Valerie: I’m not proposing that we sort of switch and everyone should do digital story telling instead of having papers.
Sam: Yeah.
Valerie: In tandem with sort of the traditional academic learning styles and learning assignments, I think that it’s an added bonus for [students] to be able to talk about what we’ve studied in their own way, right? And that’s sort of what our role is as educators, we want our students to sort of internalize what we’ve taught, and sort of, you know, push it out in a way that they understand, and I think that the video projects did exactly that.
Maria: Yeah. And I’m really curious to hear about your infographics project that you rolled out last semester. That too was another innovative use of new media. So how did that one role out? And what were you thinking when you chose to do that type of project?
Valerie: I was thinking, for my global sociology class, that the video project wouldn’t be the type of instructional technology that would meet the objectives I wanted, because I thought that, when we’re talking about global issues, I feel like folks think that globalization is somewhere sort of in the sky, and not close to us, that happens to us every day. And I wanted a sort of a visual map for students to be able to share with their brother, share with their parents, share with their friends, like, this is how export processing zones, or manufacturing, like sweatshops work. And here’s a sock first, it was a piece of thread first, and then you know, sort of, have that kind of map for them to share. And so I thought that the infographics method would be a good one because, most students can sort of do it, right? I think that one of the objectives was to be able to gain some skills from the assignment, but also to start to explain what we were discussing in class through a visual sort of format.
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