- Posted in All University
- Category: Campus News
LINCOLN UNIVERSITY, PA – Lincoln professors Murali Balaji and Letrell Crittenden, the co-founders of the Voice of Philadelphia, are working with two Philadelphia groups to teach media literacy skills to Philadelphia high school “pushouts,” young people who say they have been pushed out of the Philadelphia public schools.
Balaji and Crittenden, along with Lincoln mass communications senior, Macy Watts, spend Friday mornings developing the participants’ writing, audio and video production skills with facilitators from Philly Community Access Media and Youth Empowerment Services Philly. The project, called Drop Zone, is funded by a grant from the Philadelphia Enterprise Fund, a collaboration between J-Lab and the William Penn Foundation.
“This is really an opportunity for us to teach tangible skills to young people who feel as if they’ve been ignored by the system,” said Balaji, director of the Mass Communications Center of Excellence at Lincoln University. “They get to tell their stories, and by doing so, can help to prevent others from slipping through the cracks of Philly’s public schools.”
The project was conceived in response to the Philadelphia Public School Reform Commission’s report highlighting the high number of minorities dropping out.
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Lincoln University – founded in 1854 as the nation’s first Historically Black University – combines the best elements of a liberal arts and sciences-based undergraduate core curriculum and selected graduate programs to meet the needs of those living in a highly technological and global society. The University enrolls approximately 2,500 undergraduate and graduate students.
Internationally recognized for preparing learners and producing world-class leaders in their fields, Lincoln has created five academic Centers of Excellence-programs of distinctions. They are: Lincoln-Barnes Visual Arts, Grand Research Educational Awareness and Training (GREAT) for Minority Health, Mass Communications, Teacher Education and Urban Pedagogy and Business and Information Technology.