Student Spotlight

La Traviata’s Violetta with a Facebook page?  Dr. Germont with a Pinterest page?  School children interacting with these characters?  How can that be?  Actually, it’s part of an innovative new educational program devised by School of Communication and Media students in a transmedia class and now being implanted by no less than world class cultural icon, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, which is bringing the concept to schools in the New York Metropolitan area this fall.  This article spotlights not one, but the three students who are doing some truly extraordinary work as a team.

School of Communication and Media students Chelsea Kelsey, Taylor Murphy and Megan DeRitter are responsible for embarking on the new educational frontier for the Met Guild.  The concept, known as transmedia, will marry 21^st century storytelling techniques with 19^th century storytelling techniques.  The combination will allow public school children to learn about character, story, design, and historical setting, in an immersive, participatory way.

Transmedia is the method of telling a story across social multiple media platforms and digital technologies.  The three students are in a section of Transmedia Projects, which became a core course in the School of Communication and Media two years ago to teach communication and media students about how storytelling can take advantage of today’s dynamic and ever-changing nature of media today. 

Chelsea, Taylor and Megan began collaborating in September on how to tackle the transmedia campaign for the Met’s opera, "La Traviata."   Students in a previous semester made the original pitch to the Guild, and now the project has gone live.  The three will be working closely with area public school music teachers whose students range from elementary to high school. 

The highlight of the semester so far was a September visit to the Guild’s office in Lincoln Center, where Chelsea and Taylor made their initial presentation to the communication and educational program officers, Stuart Holt and Carrianne Bennett.

As the students told Holt and Bennett, one main objective will drive the program:  to enhance each student’s understanding of opera by making the characters, setting and plot come to life via social media platforms.

"We really want the students to be not only involved, but excited about the opera.  What could be better than actually making them story collaborators," says Taylor, whose area of concentration is Communication and Media Arts.  "There’s no better way to reach today’s youth than letting them tell a story on the digital platforms that are second nature to them."

Larry Weiner, who is the course instructor, puts the project in context. "These are three college students who are doing work ultimately for the Metropolitan Opera.  Not only that, they are, in a very real way, revolutionizing the way opera is being taught.  It is very, very exciting to watch."

The two main platforms that will be utilized are Facebook and Pinterest.   The three students have created, and will run, the main characters’ Facebook pages, in which they will post comments, questions, concerns, anything that furthers character development and story, and interact with students’ comments and replies.  The project will take place over the course of a school semester, so the social media postings have to parallel what is being taught about the opera during a given week.  In order to make La Traviata’s characters more complete, or three-dimensional, the opera’s main characters will also have their own Pinterest page, which features pins of what kind of clothes they would wear and what type of furniture would be in their homes, as if they were actual people existing in the present day.   The Facebook postings will cover such topics as the development of plot through the eyes of the characters, and filling in possible back story ideas.

The semester will culminate in December when the public schools will travel to famed Lincoln Center to see a performance of "La Traviata."  The SCM team will be there as well.  The Met’s production of "The Masked Ball" will be next semester’s Transmedia project.

Chelsea and Megan are studying Public Relations, while Taylor is focusing on Communication and Media Arts.  Although these majors may be slightly different, they have one common goal while conducting the transmedia campaign—that the elementary students can learn about opera in a fun, modern way.