Michael Brown Edmonton -- Done right, teaching can have an impact beyond...(More)

Michael Brown Edmonton -- Done right, teaching can have an impact beyond the lecture hall. Done exceptionally well, those lessons take on lives of their own. That's what has happened with the Psychology 400/409 Honours Seminar II full-year course Connie Varnhagen taught last year -- its effects are still being felt today. "The goal of the class is to help students develop professional skills in communications, information literacy, time management, team work -- all that sort of stuff," said Varnhagen "As professionals they need to be able to transfer their research to a lay audience. You can't go tell your grandmother that you're studying aggression in convict cichlids because grandma's not going to know what you're talking about and why you would be studying fish." "You have to be able to talk about what you're doing in any science in terms that any layman can understand and that helps society advance." As one of their major assignments, each of three groups of students selected a target age group and a relevant health topic for that group. The students then translated the latest research on that health topic into an appropriate visual medium for their audience. One group selected children and stress. They realized that they needed to target parents and decided that a public service television announcement would be the best medium for disseminating information about stress among kids. Working with KidshaveStressToo.org, a program of the Psychology Foundation of Canada, a local filmmaker and child actors, the group produced a 30 second public service announcement that is currently airing on City TV Edmonton and Calgary. "There are so many pressures on kids that we thought it would be good just to raise awareness of it," said Emily Handford who, along with Karen Ross and StephanieYan, produced the dramatic commercial that puts children in adult situations, to communicate the fact that children suffer from stress as much as adults do. "It already had a well-developed website around it so we decided to make a commercial around it, to hopefully send people to the website and raise awareness about it." With a budget of $500 and the help of local filmmakers Tyler MacIntyre and Ian Ketehu, the threesome went about begging and borrowing their way to a television commercial. "Karen had the idea of having kids dressed up in actual office attire," said Handford, whose team borrowed kids from their own families and a local theatre group. "The idea was these are some things that cause stress in adults, and although that doesn't cause stress in kids it kind of grabs people's attention." The group consulted with U of A sociology professor Lisa Strohschein, who conducts research into the effects of divorce and different stressors on children, to help develop the commercial's theme, and then put it into script form on the advice of Silvana Babchishin, a television commercial writing instructor. From there it was a day of lights, camera, action. "Our hope was to get it on TV eventually," said Handford. "At the end of class we had the commercial done, and Karen did a lot of work over the summer to finish off the process of getting it on TV." Because KidshaveStressToo.org is a non-profit organization, the commercial is categorized as a public service announcement, which TV stations run for free. As luck would have it, City TV agreed to run the announcement in its Edmonton and Calgary markets 12 times a week from October - December. "It was kind of cool when I came across it on late-night TV, but my sister phoned me and said she saw it on Ugly Betty in prime time on Sunday night," said Handford. "That was more than we ever hoped for." The TV exposure was just one of three success stories that last year's class produced. Another group selected the diagnosis of schizophrenia in young adults for their project. With the help of the Edmonton Chapter of the Schizophrenia Society of Alberta, the students designed a series of facts-and-myths posters entitled Let's Talk Schizophrenia that was displayed in a poster campaign in the City of Edmonton's transit fleet. A third group selected the issue of HIV/AIDS among seniors. Working with pharmacists and several local HIV/AIDS groups, the students developed a brochure, AIDS Doesn't See Age, targeted specifically for older adults. Connie Varnhagen's home page: http://www.psych.ualberta.ca/~varn/ KidshaveStessToo.org(Less)