Music senior is division winner in CITL ‘Word Festival’ competition

Senior music major Megan Denslinger was recently announced as the Radford University Division winner in the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning’s “Word Festival” vocabulary video competition.

“I actually was not expecting to win, but I was really happy that I did,” Denslinger said. She created the video as an assignment for Dr. Bruce Mahin’s “Applied Composition” class, which required students to participate in the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning’s Word Festival Competition.

“This course encourages creative thought and it requires students to challenge themselves with a solution that is musical,” said Dr. Mahin. “I was certainly excited that one of my students won!”

According to the competition’s website, students are required to make a 20 second or less, live-action video displaying, pronouncing, defining and giving the part of speech for an individual word. Students were able to choose their word from an archived list of the New York Times’ “Word of the Day.” The definitions must be extracted from one of the three sources listed on the competition’s website.

Denslinger’s winning claymation entry depicted the word ‘decomposition,’ and included her own original background music. The video was developed using stop motion photography and playdough. The 20-second scene depicted grass, plants and animals forming and decomposing into pieces.

“I really learned about how to connect music to the visual art. This was my very first time connecting the two together,” said Megan.

The competition, now in its third year, was created by Radford’s Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. John Hildreth, Associate Director of the CITL, described the contest as a unique way to approach language learning, noting that there is even an expanding foreign language category in the competition. “It’s just a fun, cool way to approach learning,” said Hildreth.

Since Hildreth is one of the facilitators of the competition, he does not act as a judge, but he said that when he saw Megan’s video, he immediately thought it would be a winner because of its unique and innovative approach to the challenge.

“I would definitely thank Dr. Mahin for inspiring us to do the competition,” said Denslinger. She says she really enjoyed the project and can see herself creating more videos like this in the future. She will be graduating from Radford in the spring of this year with her bachelor’s in music.