About The Cagli Project

Now in its third year, the Cagli Project uses the format of a Professional Semester in Media. The course is a hybrid that combines classroom instruction and lab work with aspects of internship and practicum courses, including field work in a setting unfamiliar to student participants. The program is to be thought of less as a class and more as a professional enterprise, where students are employees working to produce a dynamic web documentary and faculty members serve as supervisors, charged with first training employees to master certain trades and then working with them to apply those skills.

Students participating in the Cagli Project are assigned up to 15 hours a day to do work on the project. This includes time spent in class, in the field researching and producing stories, and in the lab completing assignments and coordinating the elements of each story. Students should be prepared to perform a variety of assignments and chores to support the effective functioning of the project.

This year there are six specific course modules: Storytelling, Photography, Videography, Web design, Intercultural Communication and Italian language and culture. Students will work to master these five elements and work as a team to produce four distinct web presentations. Students will also be evaluated for professionalism and initiative, two vital aspects of expert journalism.

Because of its setting, students will have a unique opportunity to learn how to access a foreign culture and to acquire practical language skills, rapidly--using an immersion technique. The ability to assimilate quickly and to hone in on another culture’s values are indispensable tools for anyone preparing for a career in a field where globalization and multi-culturalism are becoming increasingly important. At the micro level, students will learn how “to read” another culture on its own terms thereby eliminating cultural bias. At the macro level, students will be ready to become facilitators in the inter-cultural dialogue that the modern world requires.