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Pedagogy at a Crossroads

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A Student Perspective of the NCA Convention

Written by Peter Sands

Having attended the National Communication Association’s annual convention for my first year as a student, I was intrigued by the variety of topics covered in different calls. Being that I had primarily signed up for areas specific to what instructors at Augsburg were involved in, I spent the majority of my time sitting in for synchronous/asynchronous Zoom sessions focused on teaching.

Now, from the perspective of a student, you might not think that listening to a bunch of academics discussing their differences in pedagogical approaches to teaching during a pandemic would be all that interesting, but I was enamored with the amount of thought that goes into crafting our learning experience here at Augsburg and in other universities across the country. 

The theory that is poured into behavioral reinforcement of our learning practices as students is astonishing. From listening to Professor Groven distinguish our departments Senior Keystone course(s) from the likes of other institutions, to hearing Professor McNallie discuss different concerns/approaches of teaching public speaking courses online; there is definitely a divide amongst teachers as to what the most effective tactics are when mediating online learning in the midst of a pandemic and beyond. 

When making further distinctions concerning adaptations to online pedagogy, it was riveting to hear Professor Hanson discuss the idea of how these mediums, “perpetuate inequitable learning experiences,” especially amongst more privileged demographics. That is to say that many teachers might have to consider a students technological access and literacy when assessing their educational needs.

Seeing as how I have been adapting to remote learning practice since the beginning of the pandemic last March, I too was intrigued by the leadership and innovation necessary to persevere in the midst of these unforeseen circumstances. Moreover, as a student participating in these events, I thought about the importance of providing effective feedback when asked to review a course or teaching practices. We share just as much of a responsibility in shaping pedagogy as students, especially in the face of extreme technological change. So, be sure to fill out your Student Evaluations during the end of the semester!

I would highly recommend this event to future students as we continue to navigate an ever changing academic landscape. Having adapted to such immense change over the past year really gave meaning to the convention’s title, Communication at the Crossroads.

During one of the sessions, Professor Pat J. Gehrke of the University of South Carolina described the need to place more emphasis on teaching to these technological mediums as they continue to evolve. With no clear end in sight, these digital mediums will become an integral part of how many of us continue to communicate within our professional spheres. 

 

 

Throwback Thursday

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A Periodic Tale of Departmental Lore (Part 5)

Written by David Lapakko 

When Augsburg was a 4-1-4 school

During the last one-third of the 20th century, all five of the ACTC schools were on a 4-1-4 academic schedule. That meant students took four classes in the fall, four classes in the spring, and one class during the month of January, which was called “Interim Term” or “J-Term.” During Interim, students took only one course which often met for 10 or 12 hours a week, usually for 3 ½ weeks. To this day, Hamline, St. Thomas and St. Catherine’s still have a J-term, but Augsburg bowed out in 2002.

The idea behind Interim was to give students the opportunity to explore things that the standard academic calendar could not accommodate.  For example, as a first-year at Macalester, my Interim course was “Advanced Debate Study Tour,” which was a fancy way of saying we debaters traveled around the nation during the month of January going to speech tournaments. Travel was often a part of J-term courses; it was not uncommon to see a course such as “Discovering the Flora and Fauna of Hawaii,” the sort of thing that was, not surprisingly, a popular option for shivering Minnesotans. And other courses were “topics” courses that weren’t offered at any other time; my second J-term course at Macalester was “Marx on Politics and Religion,” and we met for long stretches at the professor’s home on a frozen lake discussing the works of Karl Marx.

However, over time, that “adventurous” feel to J-term got lost, at least at Augsburg. Rather than offering unique courses–for example, a course in communication ethics or political communication–departments felt squeezed. Students needed their required courses to graduate. And so many departments simply offered their regular courses in a very concentrated 3 ½ week session. After a while, all of this felt like a burden; only a few days separated J-term from spring semester, and students and faculty alike felt pretty stressed. More importantly, it wasn’t the original goal of J-term to provide the same old courses that are offered in the fall and spring. So Interim term went away, and we are now on a schedule that enables spring semester to begin fairly early in January, therefore getting us to commencement in early May, weeks before other 4-1-4 schools such as Hamline, St. Thomas, or even Gustavus and St. Olaf. And, the number of required courses for a bachelor’s degree dropped from 35 to the current 32.

In the end, I don’t miss the burdens of Interim term, but I do miss the adventurous spirit that was its signature component. But we all have more time off between terms, and it’s hard to complain about that!

 

Throwback Thursday

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A Periodic Tale of Departmental Lore (Part 4)

Written by David Lapakko

Five schools in one

Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, and even into the early 2000s, one precious document was distributed each spring to every student at Augsburg, Hamline, Macalester, St.Thomas, and St.Catherine’s. Why these five schools? Because they were, and actually still are, members of the ACTC (Associated Colleges of the Twin Cities), a consortium of these five institutions.

The document we all received was a thick tabloid newspaper called the ACTC Joint Class Schedule. This newspaper contained a list of what would be offered for the following year at all five of these schools, as well as in every academic department. (For example, the communication studies offerings for all five schools, complete with times, instructors, and classrooms, were listed for both fall and spring semesters.) So, if an Auggie wanted to take a communication course at St. Thomas, or a course in Chinese at Hamline, or a Women’s Studies course at St. Catherine, all they needed to do was check the Joint Class Schedule–and when the time came, they would simply cross-register for those courses. It was a way to share resources and provide more options and more flexibility for students.

In its heyday, cross-registration was much more common than it is now. Hundreds of students from each campus would cross-register, with the biggest pipeline running between St. Thomas and St. Catherine’s. I am always fond of mentioning that I had a student–we’ll call her Yumi, since that was her name–who was a Hamline student. She took Argumentation from me at Hamline, Intercultural Communication from me at Augsburg, and Persuasion from me at St. Catherine’s. Three comm courses at three different schools! (Back in those days, I took adjunct teaching slots when I could to pay the mortgage and provide for the family.) There were even ACTC shuttle buses with regular schedules that took students from one campus to another.

Although you wouldn’t know it, today you can still take courses at these other four schools. Check the Augsburg catalog–it explains in a couple of paragraphs how you can do that in certain unique situations. But the ACTC cross-registration program is at best a shadow of what it once was: a vibrant, exciting opportunity to shop for courses and in essence, become a student, at least temporarily, at any of five different schools. It was a real selling point for each of the schools, and I mourn the loss of classes at Augsburg that included frequent visitors from these other campuses.

Next time: Augsburg’s J-term–life in a 4-1-4 world

 

APA Resources

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Written by Peter Sands

Hey Auggies, as many of you are aware, the department uses and requires the American Psychological Association (APA) style for assignments. Being that APA is the one of the most common guidelines for written work within the academic world, we thought it would be helpful to provide students with some APA resources.

Proper utilization of APA Style is an important skill to have; it helps make your writing more clear, while also maintaining transparency about your source material. For those of you who are more familiar with APA Style, the American Psychological Association recently updated their style guidelines from the 6th to 7th edition, so this might be a useful refresher.

Helpful Resources:

For a thorough overview of the style and citation resources check out the American Psychological Association Website.

If you’re looking for more concise documents focused on specific elements of APA the American Psychological Association Instructional Aids/Guides provides reference documents, sample papers and more.

Purdue OWL In-Text Citation Basics is another great resource for learning the fundamentals how to cite sources within your text, such as how to cite multiple authors.

Purdue OWL Formatting and Style Guidelines provides a comprehensive overview of the foundational principles of APA Style and more. Margins, font, and major paper sections are all explained here.

And lastly, here is some sound advice advice regarding APA Basics from the University of Southern California Libraries. This page is packed with helpful resources, examples and advice regarding citations and formatting.

Throwback Thursday

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A Periodic Tale of Departmental Lore (Part 3)

Written by David Lapakko

During the ‘80s and ‘90s, many of our faculty often worked six days a week. Why? Because in the early ‘80s, Augsburg created Weekend College, a school for “working adults,” with 3 ½ hour class sessions on either alternate Friday nights, Saturday mornings, Saturday afternoons, or (gulp) Sunday afternoons. WEC, as it was called, was a huge financial success; during its early years, WEC and a similar program at St. Catherine’s pretty much owned that market of 30-year-olds with full-time jobs in the Twin Cities–and beyond! (We had WEC students who commuted from as far away as western Wisconsin and northern Michigan.) And although the average age for a WEC student was in the low 30s, one WEC student–a retired airline pilot–finished his degree at Augsburg at the age of 69.

In its heyday, (especially through the mid-‘90s,) total WEC enrollment was in the 1,500 range, and the presence of non-traditional age students on campus was evident; Augsburg became their weekend home, especially since many of them took more than one course each trimester. At one point In our department, we had 150 WEC majors and 150 traditional day school majors! It was quite a task to manage, since the only full-time faculty available to advise these 300 people were Deb Redmond and David Lapakko. Suffice it to say that we didn’t schedule half-hour meetings with each of them!

Augsburg Weekend College Catalog ’92-93

WEC students tended to be very good students. They were old enough to have both the skill-set and the motivation to succeed in college.  According to data collected by Augsburg at the time, WEC students had GPAs that averaged half a grade higher than day school students. In most cases, day school students were able to cross-register and take a certain number of WEC classes. We often thought that was a good thing: those thirty-somethings were good role models for our traditional age students, even though sometimes the WEC students seemed to prefer being in class with only people in their age range.

By the turn of the century, WEC was facing many challenges–most notably, an increasingly competitive marketplace in which many schools were offering options for working adults.  WEC enrollment started to dip, and that dip became a slow and steady downward slide. As a result, in the last five years, WEC has now become “AU,” or the Adult Undergraduate program. And rather than being a weekend program, AU is a weeknight program, with only a few hundred students and a reduced number of majors, including the elimination of Communication Studies as one of those majors.

For at least three decades, though, WEC provided an important boost to Augsburg in a number of ways, and we all have those WEC students to thank for keeping Augsburg vibrant and financially solvent. Every time you walk into an Augsburg classroom, thank a WEC student! The main reason we now have tables and chairs in every room instead of those individual student desks is that WEC students thought the individual desks were too confining and reminded them too much of high school. That alone is reason to worship their memory.

Next time: When Auggies took lots of courses at St. Thomas, or Hamline, or Macalester; the ACTC cross-registration years.

Throwback Thursday

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A Periodic Tale of Departmental Lore (Part 2)

Written by David Lapakko

Surprise, surprise–not that long ago, communication technology was quite different in our department and on this campus. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, we had this amazing piece of machinery called a VHS player. With it, we could see instructional videos in class and record student presentations–how cool was that? But, this equipment had to be housed somewhere. 171 Foss, which is now a suite for the offices of our department faculty, was Augsburg’s A/V headquarters for many years. If you wanted to show a video in class, you needed to reserve a cart–a tall, gangly thing that had a large TV monitor on the top shelf and a VHS player on the shelf underneath. These top-heavy metal behemoths were on wheels, and there were perhaps a dozen of them.

Throughout the day, you’d see A/V student workers pushing these carts all over campus to classrooms where they had been reserved. It didn’t matter if there was a blizzard or a thunderstorm; someone had to push them through the snow, across the streets, and over the curbs. And, you counted yourself as fortunate to get one, because sometimes they were all in use in particular time slots. Back then, if you wanted to record student presentations, you could go to the library and check out a camera. But there were not things like mp4s, or online links, so if students wanted to see what they had done, they needed to get the VHS tape and find a place to play it.

In the meantime, technology was revolutionizing faculty offices. Throughout most of the 20th century, students would have to be very lucky to contact their professors. They could try them during their posted office hours, or they could phone them, but if the person wasn’t in, they were pretty much sunk. But then, along came voicemail! Now we could leave recorded messages for faculty and staff, 24/7. Especially in the early ‘90s, voicemail was all the rage; my goodness, you could program the phone to include all the phone extensions in your department, and send them all a group voicemail message. Now, of course, we would send such a note via email, but that wasn’t an option back then. Still, we felt quite privileged to have such state of the art equipment–including overhead projectors in every classroom!

Next time: When “working adults” roamed around campus by the hundreds–the glorious era
of Weekend College.

 

My Favorite Equipment

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Written by Wyatt Beckson 

It’s me again, Wyatt Beckson, a graduating senior. I know this pandemic hasn’t been the friendliest to us, especially those of us graduating this year. Nonetheless, we can still reflect on the benefits this department and university has provided us with, including the film program’s equipment – available to all majors/minors in the program.  

For me, the Canon XA40 is about the most practical and versatile camera that I’ve used from the equipment room. This camera is very compact, making it very easy to handle when using handheld shots. Additionally, the touch screen design makes handling and manipulating the in-camera settings very manageable. Another aspect of this camera that I like is the two XLR audio ports, allowing you to utilize any of the XLR cables we have available, enabling you to hook up literally any applicable microphone directly to the camera. If you haven’t tried this tactic yet, using this methodology takes away the extra tedious step of syncing your audio, which could take hours. What’s more, you can do all of these things while shooting in beautiful 4k imagery!

I know you might be intrigued, but are probably wondering about the drawbacks of using this camera. Luckily enough for you, I can honestly only think of just one. This one major drawback isn’t even that big of an inconvenience. The thing to keep in mind when using the XA40 is that the video output for this camera will be a single AVCHD folder. This means that no matter how many clips of video you take, you will always only end up with one file that also has an undefined file size. Having that said, always be mindful to upload your files to a hard drive with plenty of space, just for insurance.

I hope I’ve provided you all with an at least decent source of advice or perspective. Hopefully, with this information, we can all become more practical filmmakers and scholars.

Your resident film major,
Wyatt Beckson ‘20
He/Him/His

 

How to Stay Busy as a Film Major During Quarantine

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Written by Wyatt Beckson

During this time of social distancing and self-isolation, I’m sure one of the biggest questions you’re asking yourself during this social fiasco is “how do I stay busy?” Like you, I’ve asked myself that question plenty of times. However, through my own experience, I’ve devised a plan that, hopefully, at least one of you can use to your advantage. This is my list of six things you can do to stay busy during quarantine!

#1 Watch Netflix

Yes, I know this might seem pretty obvious as a film major, but hear me out!  There’s an insane amount of genuinely amazing films out on Netflix RIGHT NOW! If you’re looking for something funny, The Hangover is right up your alley! If you’re looking for something more serious, There Will Be Blood is the perfect gem for you. Want to relive the plight of high school? The Perks of Being a Wallflower is right there waiting for you. Is there a side of you that makes you feel like a mob boss? Goodfellas is here to make you question what the word “funny” really means. Do you have an itch that just won’t go away, and only a Spaghetti Western can relieve you of that irritation? The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is the itch cream to soothe your desires. There’s more you can explore on your own! Trust me, there are films you never thought you would have found! All you need is time (and you’ve got lots of it) in a time of social distancing!

#2 Tune into one of the Film Department’s weekly Film Fridays

I know I’ve mentioned Netflix earlier, but perhaps you’re more of a social filmgoer like myself. If that’s the case, I have a convenient solution! Every Friday at 9 pm, for the rest of the semester, I will be hosting a Netflix watch party, showing a different film each week! All you need to do to join is have Google Chrome as an internet browser, download the extension “Netflix Party”, and I’ll send you the link to the watch party!

#3 Write that script you never had time to produce

As I mentioned before, we have plenty of time to kill during the quarantine. Why not use it to your advantage? Now is the perfect time to write that script that you’ve been holding back on! Even if you use baby steps, using this time to accomplish that goal will give you something to do, and give you that burst of relief once you finish it.

#4 Make a short film

Listen, I know we don’t currently have the resources provided by the equipment room to check out, that grade-A equipment like we normally do. However, a good amount of us have a camera on our phones, enabling a lot of us to shoot something, even if it is in the comfort of our own space!

#5 Offer up your skills as a freelancer

While this might not be the most favorable choice by many, we certainly have to acknowledge that the employment market is suffering, and will continue to suffer as a result of the coronavirus. With this in mind, if you’re looking for some extra money, freelancing is certainly an opportunity for you to make some. Luckily, we live in the age of the internet. This means that a lot of things are happening over the internet! And they need videos! Take advantage of that opportunity and make some cash while you up your skills as a filmmaker!

#6 Brush up on your other creative outlets

At least in my own experience, I know a lot of filmmakers who have other artistic passions and desires. One of my best friends, Lukas, is also a singer/songwriter, and loves to draw on the side. Like him, I also draw during my spare time. This is where I’d like to encourage all of you to either find a new creative outlet, or brush up on an existing one, just for the sake of relieving anxiety and passing the time. Maybe like me, drawing is your thing. Maybe it’s something different, like graphic design, photography, poetry, music, painting, knitting, or something completely different! Now is definitely the time to find something creative that you deem is therapeutic to your wellbeing. There are plenty of scientific entities supporting this idea. If it helps me out, maybe it’ll help you out too!

Hopefully, there is at least one thing on this list that can help stay busy during the quarantine. Believe me, I’m well aware that this is not an easy time, and likely, it’s gonna be something we’ll have to endure for a while longer. As so many people have said before, as long as you can keep your mind and body running, we can march through this ordeal through the very end. Stay safe, stay busy, and as Dory says, “Just keep swimming”.

 

Your resident film major,

Wyatt Beckson ‘20
Film Production Major, Graphic Design Minor
He/Him/His

 

Student Production Award for “College Life”

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“College Life” by Darton Weaver

Darton Weaver took home a Crystal Pillar for the short documentary “College Life” Friday night at the 2020 Student Production Awards.

The Upper Midwest Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences recognizes outstanding achievement in student production annually through the work of their foundation.  The event was live-streamed; you can watch the announcement online: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=325889398385339

 

Alumni Spotlight: Linh Dao

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Written by Preston Peterson | Photos provided by Linh Dao

Linh Dao poses next to a lego version of the Target dog at Target HQ.
Linh Dao taking on her first day at Target.

Linh Dao is one of our newest alumni and is already a success story! She graduated in Fall 2019 with degrees in New Media and Graphic Design. Linh has just started work as an Inclusive Marketing Council Assistant with BrandLab at Target. The position involves helping build cultural competency as well as working on projects having to do with brand safety, communication strategy, and risk management.

Linh Dao and Jenny Hanson pose for a picture in Haggfors Center.
Linh Dao (left) and Jenny L. Hanson (right) at the UFVA Conference in Minneapolis.

Linh’s advice to current students is to make connections with professors as well as to be a part of as many internships as you can. During her time at Augsburg, Linh followed her own advice and took many opportunities to get experience before graduation. She was an Event Planning Intern for The Arc Minnesota and a Graphic Design Intern for both the Metropolitan Council and Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota. Linh held similar roles on campus, such as Social Media Chair for Augsburg Student Activity Council and President of the Augsburg International Student Organization. She also made valuable connections with faculty. Linh worked on an URGO project in 2019 on information bias and data visualization using Google Maps with Director of Film and New Media, Jenny Hanson. Linh is presenting her project at the Pop Culture Association National Conference in April.

When asked about how her major prepared her for her job, Linh said “Graphic Design teaches me how to “make” the message and “create” the visual. New Media guides me on how to “re-fashion” the message, “deliver” it to the receiver, and “interpret” how the message will be understood.”

To connect with Linh, you can find her on LinkedIn.