Pushing Journalism Students Beyond Comfort Zones
A week’s worth of ideas, from icebreaker assignments to curricular change aimed at building a bolder journalism student
As journalism educators, we’re all familiar with the predictable stories that students turn in for class assignments: campus parking shortages, rising textbook prices, student government squabbles. How can we inspire students to venture afield and tackle more ambitious stories in the wider world?
This perennial question was the focus of my week at the helm of the Disruptive Educators Facebook group as a Tow-Knight fellow. Throughout the week, colleagues around the country shared pedagogical strategies ranging from introductory icebreakers to community-driven courses to complete curricular overhauls.
Many thanks to all who contributed ideas. Here’s an overview:
1. The Icebreaker
As an introductory assignment designed to start nudging students beyond their bubbles, you can’t go wrong with a social reporting exercise originally developed by Carrie Brown: the Twitter Scavenger Hunt. Brown and her CUNY colleague Jeremy Caplan recently updated the assignment as a broader Social Scavenger Hunt that includes a number of mini-reporting assignments where students share what they find not only on Twitter but also on Instagram, Snapchat and other platforms.
Last month at Boston University, Michelle Johnson incorporated Carrie’s assignment into a Social Media Scavenger Hunt that required her students to venture off campus. The assignment gave students new perspectives into the city where they live, learn and work. As one student wrote in her Storify: “I enjoyed pushing myself out of my comfort zone to interview strangers and reacquaint myself with the city I grew up in.”
2. The Class Project
Class projects are another way to push students out into the community, while building teamwork along the way. Southern Illinois’ Mark Poepsel said he coordinates with his advanced broadcast writing students to enter the NAB PILOT Innovation Challenge every year.
Two years ago, as part of another national contest, students in my Media Entrepreneurship course at Southern Methodist University developed a business plan for BallotBox.Me, an app designed to motivate high school students to become more politically active. To test their idea, my students visited a government class at a Dallas high school and interviewed the high schoolers about whether they’d use the app as it was designed. The high school students’ insights helped my collegians refine their business plan while also providing material for their pitch video.
Earlier this year, in an Investigative Reporting course, my co-instructor and I sent our students to a West Dallas neighborhood where residents were facing mass eviction. We paired the students, assigned them specific streets to canvas, and in some cases connected them with volunteer translators to assist with interviews.
In both cases, my students were energized by the experience and said they considered it one of the highlights of the semester.
3. The Community-Driven Course
A highlight of the weeklong dialogue was hearing from J-profs who structure entire courses around community-driven journalism. At the University of Wisconsin, Sue Robinson developed a service-learning course called “Journalism For Racial Justice: Amplifying Voices in Local Communities.” As Robinson described in a piece for MediaShift and a more detailed article in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, the course matched groups of her advanced journalism students with local nonprofits and community organizations. The college students taught teenagers and younger kids skills related to journalism, while they themselves learned how to approach news as a collaborative partner in their community.
Mike McKisson (University of Arizona) and Doug Fisher (University of South Carolina) described how they structure their reporting classes around coverage of neighborhoods, which reminded me of a similar community reporting project at TCU called The 109. John Hatcher (University of Minnesota Duluth) shared how he guides students to discover stories through community mapping in a course called Local Journalism, while colleagues offered additional examples of community-driven student news projects at the University of Massachusetts and the Durham Voice in North Carolina.
Carolyn Nielsen (Western Washington University) shared a Listening Post assignment she learned at Poynter designed to help reporting students “build inroads with people and groups that don’t often have their voices represented.” Susan Keith (Rutgers) described a colleague’s course called called Media, Movements and Community Engagement, while Laura Castaneda (University of Southern California) explained that she and colleagues are developing a required course called Engaging Diverse Communities in the Digital Era. “We have always used Los Angeles as a lab for our beginning reporting and newswriting students,” Castaneda wrote.
4. The Curricular Approach
And then there’s the most ambitious approach of all: Reworking your entire curriculum around the framework of connecting journalism students with the surrounding community. Hatcher shared a recent Kettering Foundation paper by Lee Becker that examines eight universities (Kentucky; Nevada Reno; Southern California; Rutgers; the New School; Marquette; Wisconsin; and Minnesota Duluth) that decided “to change their curricula to embrace citizens in a new way.”
As Becker puts it, “their experiments suggest that a more citizen-centered journalism, that is a journalism that is more cognizant of the needs of citizens and more embracing of citizens and their products, is in order.” At these eight schools, journalism students venture far beyond the campus bubble.
Join the Disruptive Educators Facebook group to share more ideas; learn more about the Disruptive Journalism Educators fellowship here.
