OCAD Student Forum 2007: What's In A Name?
After some commotion at the last Town Hall meeting, it is evident that OCAD's renaming needs a lot more assertive debate and critical problem solving. There are many issues that have arisen with the OCAD administration's drastic decision to re-name and re-brand the school, without any genuine communication, research and discussion with the OCAD internal and extended community for the making of this decision.
A completely student organized event, this meeting is an opportunity for students, faculty, alumni and professionals to truthfully address their opinions, concerns, suggestions and visions for the future of this school. We have a lot to talk about. Wise action will not be made if we do not dig into the root of the problem here. It's time to bring our voices together and listen to one another if we want to make any change that is for the best interest of this thriving community.
This heated session will be documented and its recording has the possibility to be publicized. Make a presence, voice your opinion, listen and be receptive to people with perspectives different than your own. It's time to be realistic, intelligent and more importantly democratic about this decision.
These are questions that we will be discussing...
1. Is the renaming necessary? Why and for what purpose?
2. Is it wise for OCAD to put "University" in its official identity name considering its studio based education and current circumstances?
3. If the re-brand and renaming is an absolute, what thinking must we go through to consider a new name and identity? How do we problem solve with our creative abilities to embrace the education and community here at OCAD?
Here is the pdf I had projected for this meeting.
Here is the full Town Hall meeting that took place a week prior to this initiative.
Here is the second half of the Student Forum on audio
4 comments:
This is a very effective community intervention. Congratulations for your efforts on this behalf!
You tell the story of an important community initiative through the voices of those that it will affect. It must have been difficult to select, pull and edit the shorter contributions for this assignment. From a technical point of view, the audio quality is very compressed, which may be a combination of the capture, the ambient quality of the room, and the export compression.
It's great to have this kind of material available to the community. Listening to your project, I get a sense of the key themes of the meeting and some important threads for future discussions, before any decisions about the school's name are made. A montage of voices, like Martha points out, can be a challenge to distill and edit, but it gives the flavour of dialogue and consensus of concern. Some sounds like applause do distort, perhaps because of the sudden increase in sound level. This could probably be corrected. It would be worth speaking to someone in INTM at the signout cage to see if you can get advice if you want to create more audio journalism projects like this one.
thanks for the comments Judith and Martha
I wish I could have stayed at the forum a bit longer and actually said something - there's always so much going on at once! You had some GREAT people show for that - totally loved how you put Sara on the spot and she had to split to the back with Doreen. Poor Sara didn't know how agressive some of us art kids can be when we feel we're being pushed aorund! Too bad it's not really all her fault, though... it's the Board of Directors that really is the problem...
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