Telling Our Stories

EQUITY & INCLUSION SPOTLIGHT: DR. SONIA DE LA CRUZ, TELLING OUR STORIES

TELLING OUR STORIES: DR. SONIA DE LA CRUZ Telling Our Stories: Student Experiences at UW Tacoma is a collection of video stories and reflections, created by undergraduate students in Dr. Sonia De La Cruz's course, TCOM 347: Television Criticism and Application. Students worked in teams to document and produce short digital stories highlighting the experiences of other UW Tacoma students with regards to one or various aspects of their identity, whether related to race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, disability, place of origin, etc. With support from the CEI, the goal was to create a body of work that reflects how a student’s identity, and overall way of seeing the world, affects their college experience. Through this work, students engaged in conversations about their own social identities and their positionality in relationship to the people they interviewed.

Faculty collaborators have received a SIAS Interdisciplinary Teaching and Scholarship Grant to enhance this project, autumn 2020, with shared lesson plans between TCOM 347 and TSOC 265: Race and Ethnicity in the U.S. What started as a classroom project has grown into an interdisciplinary curricular initiative that includes on-going collaboration with the CEI for future productions that will enhance student learning and result in a body of qualitative research that becomes part of UW Tacoma’s cultural history as an urban serving institution. The collection of digital video stories will become a depository of student narratives for CEI training purposes and for staff, faculty and administration reference. View this project: https://uw.pressbooks.pub/tellingourstories