Awardees: Marc Los Huertos, Joanne Randa Nucho, and Kara Wittman
Marc Los Huertos, Stephen M. Pauley M.D. ’62 Associate Professor of Environmental Analysis
Professor Marc Los Huertos holds the Stephen M. Pauley Chair for Environmental Analysis at Pomona College. He is the author of a textbook titled Ecology and Management of Inland Waters, which concentrates on the geology, ecology, and management of inland waters in California. With a group of faculty from the Claremont Colleges, Professor Los Huertos co-manages a program called EnviroLab, where he has led student-faculty research trips to Borneo, Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, and Japan. Los Huertos’ research focuses on agricultural practices to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. He also works with farmers in several regions to develop techniques to reduce the impact on soil, air, and water quality.
Joanne Randa Nucho; Associate Professor of Anthropology, Chair of Anthropology, and Coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies
Joanne Randa Nucho, an anthropologist and filmmaker, is the author of Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power (Princeton University Press, 2016) and associate professor of anthropology at Pomona College. Her films have screened in various venues, including the London International Documentary Film Festival in 2008 and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in 2017.
Kara Wittman, Director of College Writing and Assistant Professor of English
Kara Wittman is Director of College Writing and Assistant Professor of English at Pomona College, where she also directs the Center for Speaking, Writing, and the Image. She specializes in critical pedagogies, visual, oral, and written rhetoric, narrative theory, the history and theory of the essay, and nineteenth-century British literature. She’s published on clarity, originality, and the politics of noticing, as well as small forms of writing: marginalia, phatic utterances, and talking birds. She is the editor, with Evan Kindley, of the Cambridge Companion to the Essay.
Title: Enhancing Verbal and Visual Communication Outcomes to Social Justice
Goal: To help students gain the skills required to create quality media productions, including skills in producing, videography, editing, and audio production/post-production (in collaboration with the Center for Speaking, Writing and the Image)
Project Description
Building upon a recent ideological mission shift in the Center for Speaking, Writing, and Image, Marc Los Huertos and Joanne Nucho hope to bring attention to the digitized world’s increasing demand for image fluency within their respective courses. Their courses, EA085 and ANTRO189, both offer a social justice theme component that enables dialogue around the intentionality required in image-based communication. However, the ultimate goal is to support additional courses in coordination with the Center for Speaking, Writing, and Image by providing required equipment and potentially trained speaking/image partners.
“Our goal is to train students to produce ethical, accurate and compelling verbal and visual content that links course content goals with communication outcomes.”
-Marc Los Huertos, Joanne Nucho, and Kara Wittman
Embedded with regular feedback and assessments, the courses proposed will be designed around developing the technical skills required to create quality media productions—skills in producing, videography, editing, and audio and post production, developing proficiency with professional software for video and audio editing, gaining working knowledge of how to use various media file formats, conversion protocols, and storage frameworks, and perhaps most importantly, generating a “critical understanding of the contextual factors that shape the message and story development in video for a diverse audience.” Outcoming graduates met with the realities of our 21st century, wherein information is continuously disseminated through social media, will be all the better for removing the burden of teaching visual communication to media communication studies; indeed, image-based communication has been proved to be a vital skill that—with some work and experimentation—can be incorporated into a broader range of courses.