The following are ideas from our 2019 award-winning members to consider implementing in your own journalism history classes.
Oral History Project
Primary Source Immersion Program
Communication History Encyclopedia
Teaching Black Press
The Ida Initiative
Oral History Project
Nicholas Hirshon, William Paterson University
Many media historians have limited opportunities to teach media history courses. But we can still introduce students to the subject we love, and inspire them to take a deeper interest in the history of journalism, by integrating oral history interviews into the courses we are assigned every semester.
As interviewing is a fundamental skill for aspiring journalists, oral histories are an appropriate assignment for students in any journalism course to learn how to research a subject, formulate questions, and conduct an interview.
In the fall of 2018, I assigned my students to conduct oral history interviews as part of a course at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey, twenty miles from New York City. First, I tried to make oral history more accessible to students unused to academic research by connecting the method to a piece of popular culture. I told the class that I often think about the lyrics to a song from the Broadway musical Hamilton. A sage George Washington, in the throes of the American Revolution, advises a young Alexander Hamilton, “You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story.”
I explained that we would be collaborating with an initiative in New York City named the Queens Memory Program, which collects oral histories from people in the borough of Queens. Students were assigned to interview members of the Long Island City Artists, a community of artists living in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City and operating their own gallery. Many of these artists were involved in the production and promotion of defunct news publications focused on the arts in Queens. The stories of those publications have largely been lost to time.
The students traveled to Queens individually to conduct in-person interviews with the artists, venturing into a neighboring community that was unfamiliar to them. Through their interviews they captured the histories of communities both geographic and artistic. Then they produced full, verbatim transcripts of their interviews to be catalogued in the digital archives of the Queens Memory Program. The artists involved in the project said they had never submitted to oral history interviews before, so their memories appear to have been captured for the first time through our project.
As I did, any media historian could partner on such a project with local organizations that either collect oral histories, as the Queens Memory Program does, or are interested in preserving the work of their members, as the Long Island City Artists are.
We may have no control over who lives and who dies, as Washington warned Hamilton, but our students can make sure more stories are told.
Primary Source Immersion Program
Gerry Lanosga, Indiana University
The middle of spring semester last year found me dashing back and forth between the Lilly Library and the Herman B. Wells Library to keep tabs on my History of Journalism students. The two libraries are a few blocks apart on Indiana University’s Bloomington campus, but my intrepid undergraduate researchers were separated by much more than distance. They were also hundreds of years apart as they dug into primary source collections. I was thrilled to watch them become physically immersed in archives, one student engrossed in an eighteenth century run of the Pennsylvania Gazette at the Lilly while a group at Wells pored over underground student newspapers from the 1960s.
This was quite a transformation from the first time I taught the course, an elective with an original work of historical research as the major assignment. Previously, students developed and worked on papers individually while classroom sessions focused on readings and discussion. In this traditional set-up, students typically took the path of least resistance, superficially dipping into online archives and churning out predictably superficial papers.
Frustrated by the lack of real engagement with primary sources, I also suspected my own stale approach to the course was part of the problem. So I jumped at the chance to reimagine the class when IU’s library system called for applicants for a pilot “primary source immersion program.” The program offered pedagogical support for incorporating primary sources into the classroom and connected faculty to more than a dozen repositories around IU, ranging from the University Archives to the Archives of African American Music and Culture.
It was an amazing exchange that energized both my teaching and my students. The research project is much more central to my redesigned course. While the class still surveys the sweep of American journalism history, it now focuses more intently on generating research questions and contextualizing primary sources. I require the research projects to be based on a list of journalism-related collections I generated as part of the immersion program. There are dozens of possibilities, including those eighteenth century newspapers; the personal papers of figures such as S.S. McClure as well as lesser-known Indiana journalists; and institutional collections such as the IU chapter of Women in Communications. The syllabus includes a robust orientation to these archives and three weeks of supervised research visits. Other important changes involve allowing students to work in groups and to produce multimedia projects as alternatives to a traditional term paper.
One thing I learned is that we often aren’t aware of the valuable primary sources that are right in our backyards. Compiling the list of collections was an eye-opening exercise for me. While IU has an impressive array of collections, smaller institutions also maintain archives and may contain surprising materials to build a class around. Local historical societies and state libraries can also be used. Whatever the source, it is critical to build substantial time into our courses for students to develop the historical thinking that comes best from truly engaging with primary sources.
Utah Communication History Encyclopedia
Kimberley Mangun, University of Utah
The Utah Communication History Encyclopedia (https://utahcommhistory.com) launched a decade ago, when I shifted the semester-end paper in my Mass Communication History course to a publication-quality, hands-on research project using primary and secondary sources and historical images. The published article becomes part of a student’s portfolio and something they can discuss in interviews and list on résumés and LinkedIn.
Undergraduate students identify a topic of interest and explore it using media artifacts. For example, some have studied Salt Lake City’s broadcast history. Others have explored newspaper coverage of the state’s national parks, ski areas, cultural events, and recreational venues. Still others have examined queer zines published in the 1970s. The students’ communication history-related research on people, places, issues, and happenings in Utah has enhanced their knowledge and become a resource for readers near and far. To date, the website has had more than 90,000 visits with nearly 140 countries represented.
The research process begins with a one-page, single-spaced proposal that includes an overview of the topic and a bibliography containing eight primary sources and two scholarly secondary sources. I offer feedback and then guide students through the research, drafting, and revising process for the remainder of the semester (roughly six weeks). Each person writes a 1,000-word article for publication in the encyclopedia, which is on WordPress. Students illustrate their work with at least two archival images they have located and obtained from my institution’s Special Collections Department or the Utah Division of State History. This helps them learn about copyright permissions and captions/credits. Very useful, too, is an in-class presentation by the librarian for scholarly communication and copyright, whose discussion includes a tutorial on the Public Domain Slider (https://librarycopyright.net/resources/digitalslider/index.html). Depending on class size (which has ranged from 25 to 60), students give a brief oral presentation about their research at the end of the semester to faculty, invited guests, and library staff.
Anonymous feedback from students helps illustrate the transformative nature of the encyclopedia project. One wrote, “Each student got to choose a topic that thrilled and interested them. Each student got all the one-on-one attention and help they were willing to ask for. And each student got to be PUBLISHED ONLINE by the end of the semester! It was an enormous, over-the-top opportunity.” Another wrote, “I have a new appreciation for history, especially because of the article assignment we had to do at the end. It was an eye opener!”
For questions about the Utah Communication History Encyclopedia and its components, or to discuss ways to launch a similar online project in your media/journalism history course, please contact me at Kim.Mangun@utah.edu.
“To Plead Our Own Cause”: Teaching Black Press to African American Students
Dr. Shearon Roberts, Xavier University of Louisiana
Over the past five years, I transformed a traditional Converged Media Writing sequence to connect cynical African American students who felt disenchanted about entering careers in journalism because they felt unseen, their communities misrepresented, and their voices unheard when they look at the news today.
After five years of a community partnership with the three African American newspapers in New Orleans, students at Xavier University of Louisiana, a historically black university, produced more than 450 news stories published in the Black Press. The experiment not only got them to relate to the journalism profession, but to learn the history of the Black Press, why it was needed, what it achieved, what it still achieves, and why it is still thriving and needed.
By the next decade, the Black Press would be in existence for two centuries, yet our journalism programs fail to expose African American students and students of color to its history and legacy. Through this curricula collaboration, these young Black students saw and envisioned themselves as “soldiers without swords” the mantra of the Black Press.
A collaboration with the Black Press brings students out of the classroom and into the heart of working for and with their own community. In covering the Take Em’ Down Nola’s marches to remove Confederate Monuments in New Orleans from 2016 to 2018, my students connected with activists who trusted the Black Press to properly tell the story of this movement that first started in the 1970s, was covered then by the Black Press, but had only caught the recent attention of the local mainstream media in the city.
When the city became the first to remove Confederate monuments in the nation, my students wrote about this historical moment in the Black Press, as part of this collaboration. This was an introduction into writing the first rough draft of history, but not through the eyes of the city’s white Democrat mayor, who had coopted the movement, gaining him significant national attention, but through the eyes of the African American activists who had fought decades to have their children go to schools, parks, and public spaces that were not named after Confederate symbols.
This is just an example of the living, breathing history lesson that a collaboration with the Black Press offers young journalists of color, who are about to enter mainstream newsrooms, but hope to challenge how narratives are made, who gets to tell which stories, and how the contributions of people of color are so easily erased from the history books.
The Ida Initiative
Amber Roessner, University of Tennessee
Inspired by a conversation with Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s great-granddaughter Michelle Duster, The Ida Initiative is an online pedagogical site for an interdisciplinary project designed to inspire scholarship and spark conversations about the life, work, and legacy of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and other like-minded social justice crusaders.
Since 2013, students in the University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism & Electronic Media have engaged with the experiential learning project that offers participants hands-on experiences with primary and secondary sources that culminates in historically-informed, journalistic-inspired content.
After her experience with the Ida Initiative, one student wrote a reflection essay about the lessons her new mentor Ida B. Wells-Barnett taught her. “In our current social situation, people of color are being assaulted, killed, and widely discriminated against for the color of their skin. When I started high school in 2012 and began exposing myself to the media, only a few months had passed since the shooting of Trayvon Martin and the atrocities did not stop there, and have not stopped.
In her time, Ida B. Wells brought the horrors of racism and violence to light through media, and I think if she were here in 2018 she would continue her work in advocacy journalism,” she wrote, indicating that exposure to primary and secondary sources surrounding the life of Wells-Barnett had helped her to not only understand the present moment, but also to propose a journalistic solution.
Based upon his experience with the Ida Initiative, another student decided to focus his College Scholars thesis on “The Advocacy Journalism of Ida B. Wells.” A revised version of R.J. Vogt’s work appeared in Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice (New York: Lexington Books, 2018), an edited volume of scholarship inspired by the Ida Initiative and a one-day Ida B. & Beyond conference. Moreover, his experience with the project inspired Vogt, upon graduation, to write exclusively about access to justice issues (i.e. bail reform, court backlogs, representation of undocumented migrants, etc.) for Law360.
As an online pedagogical space, the Ida Initiative, alongside other sites such as Edward Ayers’s New American Historyand Janice Hume’s Civil Rights and the Pulitzer Prize, has the potential to make a profound impact as a public history initiative designed to share accessible narratives about our past with the widest possible audiences.