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By Teaching Standards Chairs Kristin L. Gustafson, University of Washington Bothell, and Lori Amber Roessner, University of Tennessee

Five scholars will share their mini, hands-on teaching modules featuring original and tested transformative teaching ideas and practices that address pedagogies of diversity, collaboration, community, and/or justice in August. These ideas include carefully curated student learning experiences, an online platform that tracks research data, and a program-wide course redesign that centers on who tells our stories. Come ready to learn more about how each teaching practice might be transferred to your institution or classes and what evidence points to marked changes for students.

We will moderate the panel at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in San Francisco, California. Winners will each present a mini, hands-on teaching module during a panel from 3:15–4:45 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 6, at the 2020 AEJMC Conference in San Francisco.

The five winners of the 2020 Jinx C. Broussard Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Media History are:
• Lisa M. Burns, Quinnipiac University
• Elisabeth Fondren, St. John’s University
• Andrew Offenburger, Miami University
• Joe Saltzman, USC Annenberg
• Pamela E. Walck, Duquesne University

Here are a few details about the projects and practices taken from the winning entries.

Burns’s project shows how a redesign centering on a collective memory framework in her university’s U.S. Media History course (now called Media, History, and Memory) helped students think critically about how those who control the narrative shape and reshape the storytelling of history. The focus on “who tells your story” creates more opportunities to examine diverse perspectives lost due to “collective forgetting and historical amnesia.”

Fondren’s project engages students in a three-part assignment focused on toxic debris from Hurricane Katrina dumped without an environmental impact study adjacent to a little-known Vietnamese community. The carefully curated learning experience engages students via a documentary film and viewing prompts, a group discussion, and collaborative development of a Twitter response campaign or thread.

Offenburger’s project uses an online platform that enable student researchers to take notes on primary sources, tag entries with metadata, cross-comment, see a project’s emerging trends in real time, run reports, track group members’ contributions and productivity, and evaluate student research. The system, called SourceNotes, builds on his past experience as a systems administrator and “offers students a practicum in the news media’s past while teaching the methods of careful research.”

Saltzman’s project weaves textbook reading materials with film and television program excerpts—all co-authored by himself and Matthew Ehrlich—to bring history alive through image, sound, and text. His “The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture” use the materials to approach issues that include gender, race, LGBTQ, justice, and ethics.

Walck’s project builds on her military reporting experience and invites students to capture an historical moment through a combination of journalistic interview and oral history. Working closely with the Heinz History Center, a local museum and archive, the journalism students in her “Covering Military and Veterans Issues” class collect oral histories from local Vietnam veterans and use the recordings to create podcasts.

Gustafson and the History Division created the competition to acknowledge and share best practices publicly that journalism educators and media historians use in their classrooms. The contest was designed to serve three AEJMC History Division goals: (1) help the division grow and diversify by inviting people from other divisions; (2) encourage pedagogies of diversity, collaboration, community, and justice; and (3) support an equal balance of History Division attention to teaching standards, research, and professional freedom and responsibility.

In addition to recognition at the panel, the History Division will celebrate the five winners at its Awards Gala after the business meeting Friday, Aug. 7. Winners will each receive a $75 prize at the teaching panel. One prize was to go to a student scholar or team entry with a student; however, there were no student entries this year. In addition to the conference teaching demonstrations, the winners’ ideas will be included on the History Division’s website and are featured in the Division’s Clio newsletter.

This year’s judges were John Ferré, University of Louisville; Melita Garza, Texas Christian University; Erika Pribanic-Smith, University of Texas-Arlington; and Yong Volz, Missouri School of Journalism.

“I appreciate all the efforts these instructors have made in engaging students with history and making history relevant, interesting, and meaningful as part of their learning experiences,” said Yong Volz, Missouri School of Journalism, one of this year’s four judges, of the “thoughtful and inspiring ideas.” Yong added: “I especially like how some of them utilized new technology (google street views, satellite images, podcast, twitter, etc.) when designing the assignments. I can certainly see how I would incorporate some of the ideas in my own teaching.”

This year’s ideas “ran the gamut from theory to software and from print to visual,” said another judge, Melita Garza, Texas Christian University. “Whatever your approach to teaching media history, you’ll find innovative leads to help you tweak the way you and your students evaluate the media past.”

“Reading these entries has been inspiring,” said John Ferré, University of Louisville, another judge. “I have come away with fresh ideas about ways to improve the courses that I teach.”

As journalism educators and media historians, we have excellent classroom practices and curriculum designs like the ones discussed here to share with one another. As teaching chairs, we continue to invite you to share your best practices that encourage pedagogies of diversity, collaboration, community, and justice, and as we continue to update our website, we request that you consider sharing syllabi, exercises and resources with our broader community. Send them to Kristin L. Gustafson at gustaf13@uw.edu or Lori Amber Roessner at aroessne@utk.edu.