Digital Delights

To help students apply that lesson to the world, my colleague worked with a local organization that offers training to job-seeking immigrants in our city. His course provided disposable cameras to immigrants in a training class at the center and asked them to use the cameras to depict the everyday realities of their lives in the United States, and to write essays about their photographs. His Spanish students then took on the role of teaching assistants at the training center. The immigrants made presentations in oral and written forms, and ultimately Loustaunau's class worked to create an exhibit of the photographs and essays in our library.

Students who might have been abstractedly interested in theories and artistic strategies for empowering marginalized people now could understand how those strategies made sense in our local city and, I expect, in the cities to which they return every summer, or move after graduation. Those students will see the immigrants in their midst in a new way, and perhaps begin to see them at all for the very first time.