Real people. Real stories. One community.

Over the course of the spring semester, 18 JMU students in Dr. Allison Fagan’s English 360 class have been working diligently and passionately on a digital project that seeks to ethically elevate the stories of past and present immigrants living in the Shenandoah Valley community.

With the guidance and support of their teacher and multiple experts from the JMU Libraries, these students explored previously collected oral histories that have been archived in JMU Libraries’ Special Collections, learned about podcasting and storytelling, and applied theoretical concepts from the course to create a new podcast series called Harrisonburg360: Real People. Real stories. One Community. Student groups produced episodes and contextual information and shared them publicly via Harrisonburg 360 as their end-of-semester project. Starting at the end of May, each episode will also be shared weekly through all of your favorite podcasting platforms like iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

Engaging in a digital project like this is no small task, especially when groups were no longer able to work face-to-face – but in spite of the upheaval of the semester, these students and their teacher remained committed to completing this creative community-focused project. And perhaps more than ever, we all need to be reminded of the stories that come from all voices in our community.

To learn more about this work and other JMU cross-disciplinary collaborations with the Harrisonburg immigrant community, visit the Immigrant Harrisonburg website.