When students enrolled in the \u201cWriting Cultural Criticism for the Media\u201d course began working on their online journal project in January, they already had a sense of the threat posed by the novel coronavirus.<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of the class involves encouraging the students to behave like cultural\u00a0critics, to keep their eyes and ears open, and to pay attention what’s happening in the world \u2014 locally, regionally, nationally, globally,\u201d says Assistant Professor Anthony Kinik in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film, where the course is housed.\u00a0\u201cEvery week we spent a certain amount of time discussing such issues, just as you might if you were a part of a publication. Not surprisingly, coronavirus began to be a weekly topic of discussion in January. By early March, it had become the dominant topic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kinik had taught COMM\/FILM\/PCUL 4P59 a few times before conceiving of the idea of having the students produce a complete journal of cultural criticism.<\/p>\n
\u201cStudents were required to submit a\u00a0minimum of three reviews to the journal, and they were asked to revise their work, update it, professionalize it and make it as\u00a0dynamic as possible with hyperlinks, photos, videos, gifs, graphs and charts,\u201d Kinik says. \u201cThey confronted the question: what makes for compelling online content?\u201d<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s group of 25 students was only the second class to take on the challenge of producing a full edition in three short months, but they were the first to attempt it in the midst of a pandemic.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe course included a workshop element where students would submit reviews for the entire class to read and discuss,” says Kinik. “The class became an editorial board of sorts. In [early] March, the students began spending a chunk of every weekly session breaking off into different groups to work on editorial, design, social media and multimedia\/proofreading.\u201d<\/p>\n
The collaborative students were just starting to pick up momentum, Kinik says, when in-person classes were suspended and the workshops had to be scrapped.<\/p>\n
\u201cSuddenly we were put in the position of doing these things remotely, at a distance from one another, and there was a real risk that the entire project might fall apart.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the group worked hard to stay on track.<\/p>\n
Using online forums, chat rooms, email, and other supports, the students found a way to keep their editorial process intact.<\/p>\n