Cal U students present digital Mon Valley stories
Students in California University of Pennsylvania Honors Program English courses taught by Dr. Christina Fisanick will present digital stories of the Mon Valley at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday in the Performance Center, located in the Natali Student Center.
Admission is free and the public is welcome. Cal U President Geraldine M. Jones is scheduled to make opening remarks.
More than 30 honors students worked with historical societies throughout the Mon Valley to produce the digital histories, which develop writing and critical thinking and editing skills, digital literacy and more.
This marks the fifth year of a collaboration between Cal U’s digital storytellers and the Senator John Heinz History Center Affiliates Program, of which the local historical societies are members. Over the past five years, students have provided an overview of each society as well as a feature on noteworthy artifacts or collections.
“One of the underlying objectives of this project is to entice people to visit these sites, both online and in person,” said Robert Stakeley, who directs the affiliates program.
This semester, students worked with historical societies in California, Donora, Monessen, Charleroi, Dravosburg, Brownsville, McKeesport and Monongahela, as well as Rivers of Steel Heritage Corp., and the Cal U archives and special collections, housed in Manderino Library.
To mark the fifth anniversary, “A Town Called Donora,” which was created by former students Corrine Dowlin and Rachael Fawley, will be shown. The video, viewed by nearly 7,500 people online, is used by the Donora Historical Society and Smog Museum to introduce visitors to the 1948 air pollution disaster.