Noelle Griffis introduces this issue of Student Voices with a discussion of her Fall 2020 course, Cinema and the City, providing context and an overview of her students' work, as well as links to her course syllabus and assignment. Griffis's course emphasizes the role that urban development has played in racial and economic inequality in the city and the ways these issues have been depicted—or neglected—on screen.
Helen Morgan Parmett and Conn Holohan introduce this installment of Student Voices. First, Helen Morgan Parmett discusses the themes of her seminar course, "Culture in the Mediapolis," from which student essays in the section are drawn. Morgan Parmett emphasizes the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic influenced the course and her students. Holohan then provides an introduction to the short films students' submitted as part of the section's special feature on student responses to the pandemic.
Sharon Albert & Amy Corbin end this issue with a discussion of the integrative assignments they designed around immigration and migration for their linked courses.
Dennis Hanlon and Amy Tibbitts discuss how they managed issues connected to team teaching, interdisciplinary topics, and diversely prepared student populations in their class on Spanish and Argentine cinemas of the economic crisis.
In this issue's On Teaching feature, Floris Paalman introduces a graduate seminar he taught on cinematic cities, and reflects on some of the lessons learned.
What are the best practices for introducing students to the complex of film and urbanism? Does that change depending on who the students are, or what the instructor is working on? In this installment of On Teaching, Nathan Holmes presents two different "Cinema and the City" syllabi that he prepared five years apart for use in two distinct institutional contexts.
In this On Teaching feature, Amy Corbin explains the conceptual process, materials gathering, and schedule structuring that went into the creation of her undergraduate course on "the inner city," focusing especially on how she encouraged to grapple with and unpack the assumptions behind the course's central term.