connecting media production to historical inquiry in a university curriculum.
Dr. Virginia Orzel of the SUNY Brockport Journalism, Broadcasting & Public Relations Department and I have received a National Endowment for the Humanities “Humanities Connections” Discovery Grant to help a group of faculty develop pedagogical skills and syllabi assignments that link media production training for students to historical inquiry. During 2024-2025, a group of 12 scholars at SUNY Brockport in History and JBPR will work on their own skills in video, audio, podcasting, digital mapping, website exhibits, experimentation with artificial intelligence, basic coding, social media, and other digital media production techniques. Participating faculty will then design assignments for students in history courses with the longer-term goal of developing a curriculum in “digital historytelling.”
As part of improving our own technical and pedagogical abilities, we will also explore the methodological and theoretical literatures of digital storytelling, digital history, digital humanities, digital journalism, and other relevant topics to more deeply grasp what it might mean for our students and us to connect the study of the past to professional, technical, and analytic skills found in journalism and the field of media production. What can digital “historytelling” be? And for students, whatever they wish to do professionally, in civic life, or in their personal lives, how can they expand their digital fluency, information literacy, career readiness, and historical consciousness by not merely receiving media passively, but creating media more actively and critically?