Adjunct Professor of Communication Arts James Wyckoff and students in his advertising workshop/production house class are designing a communications plan for a hospital in Limbe, Haiti.

The Ghana trip also marked one of the more creative endeavors of the Center for Global Health. The goal was to come up with an original way to teach children and their families about the dangers of malaria and the need for mosquito bed nets.

Lardner contacted Janice Sawyer, director of field placements and certification in the School of Education, to help create a culturally appropriate puppet show that could be shown in both days and evenings with no power. Sawyer enlisted the help of Dean Michael Uttendorfer (M.S. ’95), Wisser Library personnel Ken Distler and Joan Baron Drury, and adjunct faculty members Gail Sachs and John Kappenberg to write and produce the show.

“To write our story, we needed to find a character that audiences would recognize from their own culture,” says Sawyer. “It had to be a character they could relate to.”

Designing the puppets fell to Jennifer La Cava (B.S. ’10), whose NYIT degree in visual arts and education helped as she used balsa wood, dowels, and acrylic paints to create a cast of characters suitable for local audiences. 

“The puppets had to be culturally appropriate,” says La Cava, who studied African artists to develop a sense of the local artistic style. “For instance, the father is in casual dress to reflect everyday life and children are in school uniforms.”

In the show, the lead character of Ananzi the spider helps a family fend off Tum Tum the mosquito, who carries malaria. In the process, Ananzi—already known to Ghana residents as a wily, resourceful character—teaches the family how to use mosquito nets to protect themselves.

The show took place during NYIT’s summer 2011 visit to Ghana to local acclaim. A separate set of shadow puppets was created for evening performances, during which the crew used flashlights to recreate a homemade rear projection.

“We knew that without electricity the evening performances would be a challenge,” says Sawyer. “Using shadow puppets and flashlights was a simple way to improvise.”

Finding interdisciplinary approaches to helping global communities is also happening in the College of Arts and Sciences. Following the January 2012 trip to Haiti by the Center for Global Health (see sidebar), Adjunct Professor of Communication Arts James Wyckoff and students in his advertising workshop/production house class coordinated with Hospital St. Raphael in Limbe to develop initiatives to raise awareness and plan a communications strategy. 

The experience taught students about obstacles in working cross-culturally as it relates to bilingual communication and technological accessibility. “Week-to-week communication was very difficult because the client had little access to the Internet or phone,” says Wyckoff. “Decisions and ideas that could be made and conveyed in hours in the United States took days or weeks with the Haitian client.” 

The fact that all the materials provided were in French was minor, since the class included students from NYIT’s program with L’École Francaise des attachés de Presse et des Professionnels de la Communication in France.

However, Wyckoff was impressed with his students’ resourcefulness. Already they have developed identity, message points, and social media plans as well as redesigned the hospital’s logo, instituted a Facebook page and Twitter account, and finalized the design and copy for a website.

It’s yet another example of the Center for Global Health’s commitment to teaching students using unique learning opportunities, providing cultural context, and helping people around the world improve their local community.

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