{"id":6647,"date":"2013-10-31T12:05:39","date_gmt":"2013-10-31T18:05:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin2013\/?p=6647"},"modified":"2013-10-31T12:05:39","modified_gmt":"2013-10-31T18:05:39","slug":"summer-programs-enhancing-the-educational-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/2013\/10\/summer-programs-enhancing-the-educational-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer Programs: Enhancing the Educational Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

S<\/span>ummer programs offer an amazing opportunity to enhance the educational experience at Colorado College.\u00a0For students, the summertime is no lazy escape.\u00a0They pursue jobs and internships, and they catch up on the classes they couldn\u2019t squeeze in during the regular year.\u00a0Traditionally, much of this has been left to the individual student.\u00a0Colorado College can help provide a more complete structure for meeting student needs, by sewing more outside collaboration into the fabric of our academic mission.\u00a0We can do this by creating thematically linked blocks in the summer.<\/p>\n

Filmmaking in the summer programs is perfect for this. As part of our academic mission, student filmmakers are writers charged with telling stories about the wider world.\u00a0In order to find these stories, students must put themselves into new environments, and they must interact with people outside the college bubble.\u00a0For example, we had an anthropology student who happened to intern at the Colorado Springs Therapeutic Riding Center.\u00a0She\u00a0made a very effective film about a little girl who uses horseback riding to help overcome her severe disabilities.\u00a0The film is powerful, and the CSTRC uses it to explain their work.\u00a0The girl\u2019s family uses the film to explain her condition. Other students have made documentary films about local organic farming movements, Colorado refugee relocation organizations, small business development organizations, local school districts, local arts organizations, and many more subjects.<\/p>\n

Often, these films have come about because the student was already involved with the local organization in some way. We\u2019d like to take that a step further. We hope to develop summer filmmaking seminars that combine the level of community involvement we see in internships with the educational value of our concentrated Block Plan. We could do this by thematically linking two summer session blocks so that one builds on the other.\u00a0Our goals are practical and academic at the same time. In the first block, for example, the student could examine documentary film forms and genres and complete filmmaking assignments that reinforce ideas discussed in class, in field trips, and by guest speakers. At the end of the block, the student could begin to work with an organization, focusing on learning what the organization does by listening and doing. In cooperation with the organization, the student would then determine the best story and approach for a documentary film. They\u2019d return to campus and spend the rest of the two-block period pitching their story idea, getting feedback, conducting research, and writing, shooting, and editing the film, with a final public screening at the end of the course.<\/p>\n

Summer is our chance to innovate. We see filmmaking in summer programs as a great model for fostering student involvement in the wider community, as well as classroom work within a linked Block Plan structure that is distinctly CC.<\/p>\n

Clay Haskell\u00a0is assistant professor of film and new media.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summer programs offer an amazing opportunity to enhance the educational experience at Colorado College.\u00a0For students, the summertime is no lazy escape.\u00a0They pursue jobs and internships, and they catch up on the classes they couldn\u2019t squeeze in during the regular year.\u00a0Traditionally, much of this has been left to the individual student.\u00a0Colorado College can help provide a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6524,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[44],"class_list":["post-6647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-november-2013","tag-ideas-into-action"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/files\/2013\/10\/IMG_8978.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6647\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}