The Duke Language, Arts and Media Program (LAMP) is a faculty-run program that supports innovative teaching. Our mission is to build critical thinking and strong, contemporary communication skills in our students. LAMP offers faculty workshops and other programming that advance three main learning objectives:
- Research across media - teaching students the critical use of media, such as print, video, audio, images, and social media.
- Composition across media - teaching students how to create and communicate knowledge across media, including oral presentations, written essays, audio (podcast), image (photo essay), and video (digital story).
- Public Engagement - helping students understand and gain practice in participatory citizenship through creating and sharing knowledge with publics beyond the classroom.
Made Possible by a Grant from the Bacca Foundation.
Initially founded as a pedagogy lab with faculty fellows Aria Chernik, Josh Clark Davis, Mark Ulett and media specialist Hannah Rozear under the leadership of Jennifer Ahern-Dodson in 2014, LAMP emerged as a collaboration with the Thompson Writing Program. Our genesis within the Thompson Writing Program came to influence our strong commitment to undergraduate education, our history of innovation in writing pedagogy, and our interdisciplinary focus, which includes faculty teaching and scholarship related to new media, public scholarship, and oral communication. LAMP currently operates independently of the TWP but remains committed to forwarding these ideals.
Kristen Neuschel and Denise Comer serve as the program co-directors of LAMP and Jennifer Ahern-Dodson serves as our associate director. Jennifer Ahern-Dodson led the TWP LAMP initiative from its inception as a two-year LAMP lab project, and, alongside Neuschel works with our current LAMP Bacca fellows (Larissa Carneiro, Laura Suzanne Lieber, Negar Mottahedeh, Joan Munné, Elia Romera Figueroa, Melissa Simmermeyer and Annabel Wharton) to research, design, implement, and assess innovations and adaptations that enhance students’ critical thinking and scholarship across a range of communication domains.