altJschool and the future of learning how to be a journalist
Meet Caroline Cabral and Erika Soderstrom. They are the top journalism students at Southern Oregon University. And they have a problem.
Some context: at SOU, we offer a minor in journalism, but not a major, so Caroline and Erika are both earning degrees in Communication with a concentration in Social Media & Public Engagement. Our SMPE curriculum offers the benefit of digital-first DNA, and we teach several courses in journalism practice. But we don’t have the resources to offer many advanced courses in journalism that might help students like these get to the next level.
Meanwhile, Caroline and Erika are doing All The Right Things out of the classroom: they are writers who have embraced multimedia storytelling, they are co-editors of our online student newspaper (The Siskiyou), and they have secured strong internships this summer. Caroline heads over the hill to the Klamath Falls Herald and News via Oregon’s prestigious statewide Charles Snowden Program for Excellence in Journalism; and Erika joins Jefferson Public Radio, our region’s NPR affiliate. Both are juniors, so they have the time to achieve even better internships next year.
SOU is relatively nimble by the standards of higher ed, and so we have been able to launch some innovative courses in media practice, including Mobile Photo & Video, Strategic Social Media, and VR Documentary Production. These courses attract robust interdisciplinary enrollments, and fill basically as often as we can offer them. But we find it challenging to staff and enroll some advanced journalism topics at SOU. These include 400-level reporting and investigative topics.
How might we help students like Caroline and Erika? Committed to sustaining strong journalism on our campus and beyond, I struggle with this problem deeply. And I doubt that I’m alone. Even larger schools struggle to staff and enroll some journalism topics, and would probably welcome a flexible, scalable solution to offer innovative courses.
Which is why I am honored to have received the Tow-Knight Fellowship in Disruptive Journalism Education for the second year in a row, including a small grant to work on a proposal or prototype in this area.
My pitch emerges from the conversation at 2017’s ONA Educators Meetup in Washington, DC: how might we work out the obstacles and perhaps build a prototype for altJschool, an initiative that supports journalism courses taught by the most innovative faculty, offered for credit, and shared by colleges and universities large and small?
altJschool could also become a platform for deploying and scaling projects undertaken by my Tow-Knight fellowship colleagues, including curricula on reinventing the basics (Staci Baird, University of La Verne), traumatic event coverage (Stephanie Anderson, Murray State), community-first podcasting (Jonathan Groves, Drury University) and full-stack coding for journalism students (Lisa Williams, Boston University).
Does altJschool sound like something that might help students at your program? Which 21st-century skills or topics are challenges at your institution? What opportunities or obstacles to sharing curriculum with other campuses do you see? What is your expertise in innovative journalism, which might be of value for other institutions? Please join the conversation on Facebook or Slack, or hit me up via Twitter (@erikpalmer) or email (palmere@sou.edu).
I look forward to presenting a way forward at this year’s Online News Association annual conference in Austin, TX, Sep. 13–15. Erika, Caroline and other of SOU’s top journalism students will be with me, and they welcome the chance to share their stories.
