Story Booth & Expressive Agility project
Vanderbilt Story Booth and Expressive Agility Project
The Vanderbilt Story Booth project brings to Vanderbilt a highly customizable and mobile technology for collecting and sharing real time, authentic stories and voices (“the Story Booth”). The booth will provide opportunities to develop, share, and elicit stories in the classroom, as part of the Freshman Commons experience, and in response to real-time issues (e.g., “Election 2012”). The booth will also be deployed to foster faculty-student and student-alumni mentoring relationships (e.g., minority students in STEM fields) and for professional development of students and faculty.
Vanderbilt University is the first university to embed a Story Booth in the undergraduate campus experience. With a high-definition camera, the booth offers the opportunity to capture high quality video that can be used to convey the “real voice” of students, faculty, staff and the multi-faceted nature of Vanderbilt’s identity. The Booth can be selectively deployed, and will be designed to be mobile, handicap accessible, and able to accommodate two people for one-on-one interviews.
The Booth was launched at Vanderbilt’s October 2012 Home Coming to celebrate Vanderbilt’s Human Identities Theme Year.
A team of Mechanical Engineering Senior Design students will re-design our on-loan booth for their 2013 Senior design Project.
The Expressive Agility project
The Expressive Agility project complements the Vanderbilt Story Project by offering experiential workshops, course innovations, online video instruction, and creative campus innovation pilots focused on building individuals’ expressive agility—the ability to develop, reflect upon, and compellingly share one’s identity, stories, and ideas using an array of media, and the empathic listening and inquiry skills to elicit the stories and perspectives of others.
Campus Partners
The Vanderbilt Story Booth and Expressive Agility projects reflect the efforts of a wide range of campus partners to advance a common goal of developing individual and institutional capacity to elicit and express ideas, stories, and explorations of identity in compelling ways. Funding and/or support for the Story Booth has been secured from:
- Dean of Students
- Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt
- Vanderbilt News and Communications
- Creative Services
- University Web Communications
- The Ingram Commons
- The Writing Studio
- Office of Undergraduate Admissions
- Development and Alumni Relations
- Vanderbilt Center for Student Professional Development
- Owen Career Management Center
- Vanderbilt University Libraries
- Center for Teaching
- Faculty from Arts & Science, Blair, Engineering, Peabody, and VUMC
StoryBooth in the News