Our purpose in coming to Cagli was to start an on-going web documentary on the city with the expectation that future groups would add to the content. We refer to our work as “documenting Cagli.” We produced about 40 feature stories -using text, web design, digital photography, audio and videos- with links to each other in true web fashion. However, a better metaphor for what we are doing might be the pointillistic structure of a mosaic. Each of our stories is a colorful addition that will combine in an emerging picture of Cagli with each subsequent visit.

The course, Professional Summer Semester in Media, was designed to simulate a professional work situation. The faculty were organized like a media production company with each faculty member acting as a producer in charge of a team. Students attended classes in the morning learning HTML programming, the basics of still and video photography, and journalistic techniques for creating text for the web. (We had hoped to get them started using Avid software for video editing, but our computers balked and luckily we had a Mac with iMovie to save the day.) In the afternoons, with the help of interpreters, Alessandro Mencarelli and Linda Di Nardo, students fanned out across the city of about 9,000 inhabitants searching for and developing stories for the web.

In addition to developing a unique approach to documentary journalism, we feel the program is offering some lessons for international media education. There are many programs that use a macro approach, taking media students to visit the media centers of various countries to study the various national media systems. In English-speaking countries, American students can get to do internships under various academic programs. The model we are creating has students actually doing journalism in a foreign, non-English-speaking environment. This teaches them how to quickly access and function within a foreign culture – lessons that can be applied to any culture.

Even more important is the “Small Places” approach to journalism education, international or otherwise, implicit in The Cagli Project. Too often our models are drawn from major media functioning in various media hotspots, where government and corporate public relations operatives are the intermediaries in the news and information processes. We are in the initial stages of developing a micro approach to international media education that emphasizes working at the grass roots level first and, perhaps, foremost.

The resulting experience for the Loyola students has been immersion at its best. Programs based in multi-lingual cities must sequester students with homestay families in order to achieve immersion, but even this is a rather one-dimensional experience. In Cagli, our students were in apartments scattered about town and among townspeople eager for them to embrace the Italian culture. Cagli became “home,” and all returned eagerly from their weekend forays to Rome, Florence and Venice.

As our stories will show, we have been fascinated by the richness of life and culture we have found in Cagli, which is set amidst some of Italy’s most aweseome scenery. We expect to come back.