Two fundamentals to consider when rethinking basic journalism courses

As part of my Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism Disruptive Journalism Educator’s Fellowship I wanted to apply a design-thinking process to rethink the “intro to news reporting” course. As I began working on my project I identified two important fundamentals that journalism educators need to consider.

From my personal experience, courses that are designed based on clear outcomes are more successful in terms of student learning. Why? Because clear outcomes provide a path for instructors to develop assignments and assessments. One class, in one semester cannot possibly teach students everything they need to know. But if you start with a set of desired learning outcomes, determine how you will assess those outcomes and then map lectures, class discussions, assignments, etc. to the outcomes — voilà, you and your students will feel more successful! See an example of a learning outcome, related activities, assessment and resources from my intro to news writing course (image 1).

When you see the skills and concepts listed out like this it’s easy to see how the intro course could look so different across various journalism programs. Those differences are also highlighted by the various course titles used in the major, including:

to name a few.

Over the past couple months I’ve developed a POV on the intro course: It’s too traditional, it doesn’t serve all students and it’s impractical to expect anyone to learn all the concepts in just one course. And that lead me to these questions:

I’ve reviewed 10 intro course syllabi and discovered that “gathering” is often lumped together in learning outcomes as part of the “reporting process.” But it’s actually quite a complex concept, and really the foundation of journalism. So I thought it deserved further exploration and definition.

So I took a deeper dive into the concept of gathering and deconstructed it (image 2). Again asking members of the Disruptive Journalism Educator’s Facebook Group to contribute to this brainstorm.

The consensus on the Facebook Group seems to be clear — as Jude Mathurine (Cape Peninsula University of Technology) wrote, “research, gathering is an entire function on its own.” Mindy McAdams (University of Florida) feels that “role of media” doesn’t stem from gathering but instead, role of media and gathering are two concepts that intersect. (I’ve revised the visual to reflect this and also moved “building relationships” to stem from “sources” concept. See image 3.)

I would love to hear your feedback, suggestions, etc. via the comments or email to me abaird [at] laverne.edu. What gathering ingredients would you keep, change, replace in image 3?

Reporting can be a messy process, same with course design! In her book, Birsel uses the example of deconstructing the ingredients of chicken noodle and reconstructing it by reimagining it as something else — a soup pop. This reconstruction merges two familiar ideas to create a new idea.

I’m not sure what the “soup pop” of intro to reporting will look like, yet… But I’ll be blogging about it. Stay tuned!

I’m a 2018 Tow-Knight Disruptive Fellow working on a project to reinvent intro journalism courses. Learn more about the other 2018 projects.

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