Newswise — To help his students build on--and showcase--their persuasion, creative thinking and problem-solving skills, Rowan University communication studies professor Ed Streb has turned their attention to a familiar venue: the modern day shopping mall.
In what is the senior capstone course for communication studies majors, Streb is challenging his students this spring to focus on the culture and the messages inherent in shopping malls...and to create communication strategies for their future by identifying the 10 biggest challenges shopping centers face over the next decade.
Those challenges include everything from safety issues to competing with the prevalence of online shopping to identifying how shopping centers can--and should-- position themselves.
"Some of the best minds in the business are trying to figure these things out," said Streb, one of only a few professors belonging to the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC), which boasts 57,000 members and identifies itself as "the global trade association of the shopping center industry."
Culminating a semester's worth of research, Rowan students will present a white paper to ICSC in New York City later this spring. They'll outline their list of the 10 greatest challenges facing shopping centers in the next decade and present their ideas on how to deal with those challenges from a strategic communication standpoint.
"Our students are looking at malls from a rhetorical perspective," said Streb, who received a $5,000 grant from the ICSC to defray costs for the course and its trips.
"They're communication experts. They don't yet have master's or doctoral degrees, but they are creative thinkers and problem solvers. This class is an opportunity for them to really apply what they've learned over the past four years."
Through the course, which has already included a research trip to the mega Tyson's Corner mall in Virginia and phone conferences with the senior vice president of The Gap, the founder of Build-A-Bear Workshop, mall managers from as far away as Colorado and Utah, and several prominent mall architects, students are gaining a genuine understanding of communication messages.
They're realizing, too, that shopping centers need creative, smart people to survive and thrive.
"I'm looking into going into retail management," said senior communication studies major Amanda Pfeil, who works 25 hours a week at New York & Company in the Deptford Mall, about 10 miles from Rowan's campus. "The class helped me realize how much research goes into shopping malls. And I'm surprised how much of a popular culture phenomenon malls are."
"There's a lot more to the shopping center industry than meets the eye," Streb said. "I don't think that the average person understands what goes into the design, development, and day-to-day operation of their local shopping mall.
"Our students are gaining a real appreciation for that," he added. "And there may be ideas they present to the ICSC that they haven't thought of before. There are real, creative challenges in that business."
Streb, who has focused the course in past years on comic books and video games, is challenging the students, the first generation to both wear Baby Gap and eat Auntie Anne's pretzels, to examine malls—and mall culture—critically and creatively.
He's done the same. In 2002, he spent 96 straight hours at Canada's West Edmonton Mall, which boasts 800-plus stores and services, an indoor water park, a major amusement park and a hotel.
Last spring, Streb, who has taught popular culture for three decades and has eaten more Chick-fil-A sandwiches than he can count, toured 17 malls in four states in six-and-a-half days with the ICSC.
"I see the mall as a potential venue for excitement and entertainment," said Streb, who, in his long career at Rowan also spent a semester working at Marvel Comics and a day exploring the headquarters of the National Enquirer. "I don't see it as a necessary evil, as some other academics do."
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