My College Confessions site is back up. This was a project I started back in 2005 when I was teaching at the University of Arizona. Over two semesters, I invited students from our “Exploring Art & Visual Culture” classes (large lecture-format courses) to anonymously create and submit postcard-sized confession cards based on their secret desires, anxieties, fears, betrayals, etc. As the confessions came in, I then digitized the cards and began showing them in batches of 5-10 slides at the beginning of each lecture. I later uploaded a selection of these cards to my College Confessions website.
The project was inspired by Frank Warren’s Postsecret and participation was entirely voluntary. An interesting offshoot of the project was that attendance in my classes stayed unusually high. And because I always showed new cards at the beginning of each lecture, students consistently came to class on time–not always the case for large lecture-style courses.
You can learn a little more about the project from this Arizona Daily Wildcat story.
