Reimagining Journalism Education: Notes from our AEJMC preconference

What does it mean to do “journalism education” at a moment when many agree that the very idea of “journalism” is in need of reimagining?

On August 6th, a steamy Sunday in Washington D.C., 33 people gathered for the “Reimagining Journalism Education” pre/unconference to brainstorm around this question at Medill’s DC Bureau. We were nearly evenly divided between journalism educators and researchers based in the academy, and journalists and representatives of journalism support and community organizations.

The preconference was our fifth convening as part of our Engaged Journalism Exchange project that aims to connect researchers and practitioners working to make journalism more engaged and equitable. This year’s session, co-organized by Andrea Wenzel (Temple), Jacob Nelson (Utah), and Letrell Crittenden (American Press Institute), was held ahead of the AEJMC annual conference in collaboration with the Participatory Journalism Interest Group and the Community Journalism Interest Group. We had support from our co-sponsors the American Press Institute, City University New York, Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Temple University’s Klein College, University of Pennsylvania’s Media Inequality and Change Center, and the University of Utah.

The event began with “provocations,” where people working in this space briefly shared how they are thinking about integrating best practices for equitable journalism and community engagement into journalism education. For the rest of the event, attendees met in small groups to raise and discuss the messy questions this work raises. What follows is a partial recap of what unfolded, as well as some notes on themes raised and loose threads that may benefit from follow up and possible ongoing collaboration.

Provocations

• The provocations began with CUNY’s Carrie Brown, who shared insights from her work running a program focused on engaged journalism. She talked about crafting a curriculum that seeks to meet the needs of students and also teach them skills that will make them marketable to employers.
• Next, University of Utah’s Marcie Young Cancio shared how she had developed Amplify Utah, to train and connect community college journalists with a range of local newsrooms — and how she was now also thinking about the relationships between community colleges and four-year programs.
• The provocation that followed came from Lehigh University’s Brian Creech, who shared his perspective as an administrator about the practicalities of supporting transformative curriculum and initiatives.
• Rutgers-Newark’s Carla Murphy then shared her perspective as someone who recently arrived in academia after working in the news industry. She offered ideas about how journalism education could better center journalists of color and support (and fund) their work as educators.
• Finally, Free Press’ Joseph Torres shared how Media 2070 has been working to translate their work exploring journalism’s history of harm into curriculum by collaborating with educators across the U.S. — and the opportunities and challenges of collaborating on curriculum.

After the provocations, participants joined these speakers in smaller groups to brainstorm and discuss the questions each raised.

Unconference sessions

Following these small group discussions, we invited participants to volunteer topics or questions they wanted to discuss with other participants. These prompts included projects people were already working on or ideas that had surfaced in earlier conversations.

• Here we heard from American Press Institute’s Letrell Crittenden about challenges and opportunities of integrating diversity, equity, and inclusion into journalism and journalism education (and critically clarifying what DEI even meant).
• Angélique Fenton shared how the organization she co-directs with Andre Simms, DayOneNotDayTwo, was collaborating with Temple University on a collaborative solutions journalism class and project exploring the role of community members in shaping and owning their own narratives.
• City Bureau’s Documenters Network director Max Resnik led a discussion around participatory journalism networks including ones that involved rural communities.
• And CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis invited participants to join him in rethinking what terms might replace “journalism” given the practice of journalism for many was either associated with harm or was not well understood.

Cross-cutting themes and loose threads

Looking back at the day’s small group discussions, large group debriefs, and a multitude of post-it-notes, some themes emerged that we think deserve additional thought and follow-up. What follows is inevitably a very partial snapshot of the discussions. Our hope is that, as a group of practitioners and researchers who care about pushing journalism and journalism education toward greater equity and community engagement, we may continue to consider these themes and that they may inform our work.

We need to clarify and rethink journalism education terms.

A theme that came up in several of the small group discussions was how our efforts were at times limited due to a lack of shared language between academics, practitioners, and students. Many of us used the same words, like “engagement” or “DEI” or even “journalism,” but attached these terms with varied meanings. This left the possibility for misunderstandings as well as missed opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. For example as Nina Kelly, a participant with a background in urban planning explained, “engagement” could mean very different things in these different worlds.

“We all use these words in different ways,” Murphy noted when summing up her breakout group’s discussion, “and we practice them in different ways.”

The very word “journalism” was flagged for critical reconsideration for a similar reason. Brown said her group discussed how it wasn’t clear that the word meant the same thing to many younger people who associated it with “a dying industry.” She pondered whether it might be more productive to speak not of a “journalism” crisis but of a “civic information crisis where we’re trying to address gaps in the community’s knowledge or the community’s ability to solve its own problems?”

Brown’s group discussed whether it may be helpful for educators to open the boundaries of conversations with students who were more focused on social media pathways than traditional journalistic careers. For example, “Can you be an influencer for your community?,” might be a question educators could be exploring with students. Brown posed the question: “Can we take that interest and desire and then help shape it into something that is more constructive for the community and also, eventually, ideally leads you down the path where you can get a job?”

Later after Jeff Jarvis initiated a group discussion around alternatives to the “journalism” term, Murphy recounted various challenges to crafting new shared language. She paraphrased Resolve Philly’s Derrick Cain who noted that, “Changing a word doesn’t change the narrative.” He suggested that a more productive alternative would be to, “reimagine the word journalism and explain it in a way that resonates for communities” — and to include “participatory” and “collaborative” as characteristics of that reimagined word and practice.

Murphy noted that Fiona Morgan and others had underlined the “night and day” gap between everyday understandings about journalism held by members of the public and “our conversations in these rooms.” Ultimately the group’s discussion did not settle upon a new definition for journalism, Murphy explained, but they raised and highlighted elements that needed to be considered “on the way to” a new definition.

Processes for supporting community-centered journalism education

Many of the projects presented in the room were in effect focused on redefining journalism by doing, but this work was not without complications. Because of this, the day’s conversations also explored the challenges of supporting, sustaining, and expanding innovative collaborative approaches to journalism education. Several participants shared initiatives where educators worked with community stakeholders to collaborate on journalism education and community journalism projects.

Free Press’s Vanessa Maria Graber shared some of the takeaways from a group discussion initiated by Marcie Young Cancio of the University of Utah and Amplify Utah–a project that connects community college students and media outlets. With so many stakeholders involved, there were intertwined questions around funding and collaboration: “We’re all competing for the same money, which inevitably means we have to collaborate. So what makes a successful collaboration?” Graber’s group mapped out on post-it notes elements of “successful community collaboration” which included a focus on media literacy, sustainability, impact tracking, and participation from “a cross section of the community you’re serving.”

These elements were explored more in a later discussion with Fenton and Simms from the organization DayOneNotDayTwo. They have been recruiting a cohort of paid community fellows who will take a solutions journalism course at Temple alongside Temple students (a class I’m co-teaching with Simms) and collaboratively cover the North Philadelphia community, a community that has historically been marginalized in news media. Fenton underlined that for these kinds of initiatives it was critical that community members participated in the process of designing the projects: “If the community hasn’t been involved, then the plan isn’t complete.”

Fenton shared how her group, which included several who had worked on community media training at PhillyCam and other organizations, had explored ways to make reporting skills more accessible to community members. She suggested that universities had the potential to think more creatively about how they leveraged their resources and facilities: “If I’m not mistaken, university runs from August to May. So there’s several months that are available that people can volunteer their time and really give back to their community.”

Of course getting a university to be open to such arrangements is not always easy.

Conversations also explored the logistical and bureaucratic realities of attempting community-centered initiatives from within universities. Creech shared his perspective having been connected to such efforts in an administrative role at his previous job at Temple University. He noted the need to think through how projects are supported and staffed: “Often this work within universities is supported by or allocated to permanent staff instead of faculty to do or supported by permanent staff, who within universities often are not empowered to be change makers or to challenge operations within a university that they see as being ineffective.”

He suggested that one way to troubleshoot this dynamic was to secure outside funding “to preserve some autonomy for that staff.” Creech’s small group discussed ways community and journalism stakeholders seeking to collaborate with universities could be strategic to seek ways to “make universities more welcoming to the kinds of things that lead to more equitable outcomes.”

They discussed the value, for example, of external partners and university point people developing MOU’s (memoranda of understanding) to help ensure mutual accountability (and noting the possibility for arbitration if a problem arose). They also shared how it could be valuable for community or other outside partners to work with a faculty member “who has a research or outreach agenda that matches with your mission,” who could learn how to navigate the academic structures.

Collaborating to push journalism toward reparations and equity

Pushing journalism curriculum and journalism more broadly to grapple with a history of racism and harmful relationships with communities can be challenging and lonely work at many institutions. Perhaps for this reason, some of the participants at the forefront of this work were the most active in calling for greater support and funding for collaboration in these areas.

Torres shared how Media 2070 had begun collaborating with colleges and universities on the development of courses and curriculum, but noted that this work took more time and resources than was often allocated to them. Likewise, Berkeley’s Lisa Armstrong shared how she has been working on creating a curriculum that focuses on reparations, but she has been left asking, “where does funding come from for these types of projects?”

Armstrong noted the barriers to one faculty member changing the curriculum of a a department or school, but suggested, “if there’s a movement of professors at different schools, and it’s like 30 people in different places all working on the same curriculum, then maybe there’s power in numbers in terms of saying, ‘No, this needs to change and here’s why.’”

Crittenden explained how he had seen the challenges of being the only person pushing for this work in both academic and industry spaces, where resources and funding was often limited. He proposed that there could be value in connecting both academics and practitioners working on equity and inclusion in journalism, in “some sort of regular exchange.”

He also suggested such a group could push back in places like Florida and Texas where this work was under threat and “where our colleagues are about to run for the hills.” He offered to help coordinate such a collaboration that could continue connection with participants and others and create a space for mutual support and resource sharing.

Next steps

We are deeply grateful to all the participants who shaped these discussions (many more than who are quoted here) and who are in their own ways already reimagining journalism education. For our Engaged Journalism Exchange project, we plan to circle back to some of the suggestions and ideas that were shared and we invite further input from anyone, particularly working on:

• Clarifying and reframing what we mean by “journalism” education to be more legible to marginalized communities and students. “Civic media” and other terms are out there, but they too often have different meanings for different constituencies. We’d love to hear how educators are navigating this.
• Best practices for getting universities to share power with communities. We’d appreciate hearing from people who have had success helping university-community partnerships become sustainable in ways that are equitable to community stakeholders. We’d also welcome learnings around how to navigate university red-tape when trying to create more equitable relationships with community partners.
• Best practices for getting university departments and schools to adopt a journalism curriculum that is more community-centered and equitable. We’d also like to hear from educators and journalism support organizations that would like to collaborate on making journalism (and journalism ed) more equitable. We will work to nudge forward the suggestion for a collaborative community of practice focused on this work.
• Funding for more equitable journalism education. We’d like to hear from foundations and other funders in this space about how they are seeking to incentivize universities and others to pursue this work by supporting educators seeking to collaborate on curriculum development, community-centered partnerships, etc.

Our Engaged Journalism Exchange project also welcomes suggestions for our next gathering planned for August 2024 in Philadelphia. We’ll work on following up on suggestions in the meantime. We’re grateful for all who have supported our project and this work!

-Andrea, Jake, & Letrell