DAPCEP stands for Detroit Area Pre-College Engineering Program. It is a summer program sponsored by Ford Motor Company and the University of Detroit Mercy that introduces Detroit area high school students to a college learning environment. Students take advanced courses in computers, physics, math and English. In teaching the English component of the program, my goal is to improve the critical thinking and writing skills of the students who are enrolled. To that end, students learn to write for different audiences, analyze elements of popular culture, investigate public space, and create texts such as video, websites and zines that perform the theories we discuss in class.

This past term, I taught the students some basic video editing using I-Macs. The students wrote, planned, performed, filmed and edited their own public service announcements. Their final products (seven videos in all) reflect their creators' age and inexperience, but the products also represent an engagement with technology and the production of public, visual texts. Two other groups produced newsletters, and their work is available through the links below.

Newsletter #1

Newsletter #2