The following are ideas from our 2020 award-winning members to consider implementing in your own journalism history classes.
Connections Between Media, History and Memory
Breaking Immigrant Myths One Tweet at a Time
Historicizing the News Through SourceNotes
A New Method of Teaching Media History for the 21st Century
Veterans’ Voices
Connections Between Media, History and Memory
Lisa Burns, Quinnipiac University
Burns says the collective memory framework helps students understand why history matters by showing clear connections between the past and the present.
“It takes a more critical approach to history by viewing it as a form of storytelling that can be shaped (and reshaped) by those controlling the narrative, including journalists, filmmakers, politicians, historians, and even our own family members whose stories are passed down. We discuss how and why ‘who tells your story’ matters, examining the power dynamics at play when it comes to whose stories become part of the historical record – and whose stories are overlooked,” she said.
“We also look at how individuals and groups have been marginalized or silenced by history and the efforts to recover those lost voices and stories. For each topic, we analyze how historical events were covered by journalists as they happened (the “first draft of history”), how media coverage shapes people’s individual memories, and how media accounts become part of the historical record. And we consider how films, TV shows, books, and songs shape our memories of historical persons, events, and eras.”
The result is a dynamic and transformative course. The collective memory framework helps students appreciate history by making clear connections between the past and present, showing them just how much history impacts our everyday lives.
The collective memory framework helps students appreciate history by making clear connections between the past and present, showing them just how much history impacts our everyday lives. Thanks to the collective memory framework, we’ve been able to focus more on issues of diversity, community, and social justice than we did in our previous version of the U.S. Media History course, allowing us to connect historical events to important current events. Students routinely report on their course evaluations that they’ve learned more about history in this class than in all their years of taking history. While I take that as a great compliment, it also speaks to the failure of our education system to stress the importance of history. Students also say this class is more interesting than your average history course because we look at history through the lens of media and connect it to issues that are relevant today.
Most importantly, students report that the class made them more aware of the powerful role the media play in shaping history and our individual and collective memories. They come to appreciate that history is a living thing that they are part of and that their stories and those of their family and community are pieces of the mosaic that is collective memory. Students also become more critical consumers of media, noting things like who is telling the story and what voices may not be represented.
If you have any questions about the course, please contact me at Lisa.Burns@qu.edu.
Breaking Immigrant Myths One Tweet at a Time:
Analyzing Media Portrayals, Resilient History, and Political Voice in “A Village Called Versailles”
Elisabeth Fondren, St. John’s University
This teaching idea encourages students to publicize the story of an underreported New Orleans minority community by connecting their theoretical knowledge with their journalism skills. Through creating narratives of marginalized communities and issues that highlight the resilience and political voice of immigrant groups, students can deepen their understanding of what media diversity entails.
Specifically, I created a Twitter analysis project around the Emmy-nominated documentary “A Village Called Versailles” (2009, 67 min.). This film tells the story of a small insular community in eastern New Orleans, which is home to 6,000 Vietnamese American immigrants. Following Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in 2005, the city government chose this part of the city to build a toxic landfill in close proximity to these immigrants’ gardens and houses, in part because political leaders did not anticipate any backlash. They were wrong. The community mobilized in large protests and political advocacy efforts that eventually moved the city government to close the landfill.
Media portrayals of minorities and historical coverage of immigrants
Immigrants have routinely been framed as “outside” groups in media portrayals, often lacking both political voice and agency. Throughout the semester, students reflect on the historical and political contexts of media’s framing of “us” vs. “them.” Within this historical context, students explore the myth of the “model minority” and how Asian Americans have been associated with positive stereotypes (i.e. being docile, hard-working, self-sufficient). These stereotypes, however, can have real-world consequences in terms of government actions, especially when stakeholders make strategic calculations that there will not be sustained media coverage, advocacy efforts, or public resistance against unsafe policies.
How the assignment works
The assignment follows a three-step process. First, the students watch the documentary, they fill out individual workbooks and respond to longer form questions. Secondly, they discuss their answers in group settings, focusing on the lack of media coverage (esp. the absence of thematic frames) on minority perspectives and issues concerning public affairs. Thirdly, students think about ways to increase awareness for the history of this community via social media. They develop a small Twitter response campaign or a longer Twitter thread to highlight their discussions and make their observations and opinions available for a broader public community. A detailed grading rubric sets expectations for grades and communicates the teaching module’s learning objectives.
Putting theory into practice
In my experience, this project helps students to practice the skill of making informed arguments in an online public sphere, thinking about journalism and diversity topics, while also discussing their individual perspectives and reactions with their peers. Since 2018, I have taught this assignment three times in different classes. Each time, students used their theoretical and practical training to share creative ideas or suggestions for how media professionals could and should focus on the stories of marginalized community.
Outlook and adaptation
This teaching idea can be easily adjusted for classes in media history, multiculturalism, and political or social justice reporting. The assignment allows students to watch an excellent documentary while also applying their theoretical knowledge to a real-world Twitter thread or argument. Other universities or schools could easily modify this assignment to tailor it to specific minority or immigrant community issues that they find go underreported or misrepresented in their local, regional, or national media outlets.
“Historizing the News through SourceNotes”
Andrew Offenburger, Miami University
In my class, “Historicizing the News,” I wanted to enable students to learn history by conducting research together. What if a class were to pick a single historic newspaper and dive deeply into its archived issues (courtesy of Chronicling America) to understand the minutia of a particular place and time? They would learn history in the way that comes easiest for me, by witnessing events as they occur, or are reported on, in the moment.
To facilitate this, I developed SourceNotes, an online platform that is now a collaborative endeavor with colleagues Raphael Folsom and John Stewart at the University of Oklahoma. “Historicizing the News” was therefore the platform’s testing grounds.
Early in the semester, students read scholarly works on the history of news, and we discussed how to interpret Gilded Age materials. We then had a conversation about how to best take consistent notes from sources. Students analyzed a certain number of issues from a periodical we chose (Goodwin’s Weekly from Utah), and each took hundreds of notes on all portions of the paper (news, social notes, advertisements, etc.).
In SourceNotes, each student tagged a record with metadata: keywords, people, and a date. This research continued through two-thirds of the semester and was evaluated on its own. That was one of the (unexpected) pedagogical innovations. I realized that we history professors don’t often give feedback on source interpretation until a student has written a paper, long after thoughts have been formed and analyses written.
In the final third of the semester, students used the cumulative 5,000 research notes to write their own individual research papers. They were able to see which keywords/people were trending, which they used to inform their topic selection. This helped less experienced researchers choose topics with plentiful sources, and to think about a paper through the sources themselves, writing from the ground-up. We then workshopped these papers in the last two weeks of class.
The end result was that students wrote better papers, with more grounded sources, while also benefitting from having their peers (and their professor) join them in the trenches of historical research.
This class was offered in 2017, described above, and again in 2019, when students researched the El Paso Herald from 1900-1920.
Because SourceNotes is freely available online, it can facilitate long-distance collaboration, as well. For instance, this fall, my Gilded Age America class will use it to conduct research with Dr. Allyson Brantley’s class at the University of La Verne, and Dr. Alice Baumgartner’s class at the University of Southern California. Students at our three universities will be investigating how the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was reported and received in U.S. media along the southern border.
For more information: https://sourcenotes.miamioh.edu/about.asp
A New Method of Teaching Media History for the 21st Century
The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture
A Video, Audio and Text History Course
Joe Saltzman, University of Southern California
What I hope to do today is to give you an abbreviated version of the introductory lecture of this new method of teaching media history as if I were presenting it to my first class of the semester. Since it introduces the students to the concept of the class, it will also serve to introduce you to how I teach history at USC. So from now on, I will be speaking to as if you were students in that class.
Here we go.
Welcome to the first class of “The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture,” a new method of teaching media history for the 21st century. I believe that this innovative way of teaching media history will show you what journalism past, present and future is all about, will give you a sense of the excitement of being a journalist, and will demonstrate how without journalism, any democracy is doomed.
Your textbook is Heroes and Scoundrels: The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (written by Matthew C. Ehrlich of the University of Illinois and myself) and besides the assigned reading from the textbook you will expected to view during the semester a 40-hour -plus documentary including hundreds of excerpts from films and TV programs that I produced for each chapter of the book.
Although the one-of-a-kind video resource is the heart of this class, I want you to know that the book, Heroes and Scoundrels, is a traditional look at journalism since it is structured on basic and time-honored principles of Journalism Studies – History, Professionalism, Difference, Power, Image, War and The Future (Conclusion). You can purchase the book on Amazon as a Kindle-book or as a paperback. All the video will be available to you on our server.
Besides the book and the videos, you will also be expected to become thoroughly familiar with the IJPC-DOT-ORG website where we have a special Heroes and Scoundrels section on up-to-date and new resources for each chapter of the book.
You and I both know that when you read a famous speech by a journalist or a transcript to an important trial on freedom of the press, it doesn’t affect you the same way as hearing and seeing great actors reading the same words. Those images, I believe, stay in your minds and hearts.
It is one thing to read, for example, the famous Edward R. Murrow speech on “wires in a box,” and quite another to hear those same words coming from the screen. In this class, you do not just read the words of such seasoned journalists as Ben Bradlee, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Jules Reuter, H.L. Mencken, Joseph Pulitzer, Sydney Schanberg, Charles Lane and Marty Baron. You also “hear” them as read by some of the most accomplished actors in the history of movies and television.
And I’m not just talking about real-life examples. You will also have the chance to hear fictional journalists giving incredibly uplifting speeches about journalism. If you’re like other students who have taken this class, you know that you tend to remember a scene from a movie far better than words written on a page.
If you’re like my grandchildren who are students at Tufts and Yale, you live on the computer, absorbed by the images, sounds and text integrated into every electronic “page.” That is why I love this class because it will teach you the history of journalism through video, audio and text, and it will do it in a way that makes history alive and real to you. At least that’s what students before you have told me.
As we go through the semester, you will notice that most of the journalists depicted in film and television in the 20th century were white, usually males. Women, while as strong as male journalists throughout the film, usually end up marginalized by the end of the film. People of color simply did not exist in films until the late 20th century and even then in very few roles, especially major roles. Because diversity is so important a subject, we will spend three weeks on the chapter on gender, race and LGBTQ. We will explore through film and television how female journalists, people of color or gay-transgender journalists are treated by the news media; how females are portrayed using sex to get information (and the ethical ramifications of this), how gay journalists were treated and ignored. The focus on diversity can be found in every chapter, in every class, especially when it comes to gender. The focus on justice – what is right, what is wrong, the effect of hypocrisy and lying – is also inherent in everything we will do in class. It is particularly valid in the age of Donald Trump when if you are like me, you are trying to figure out what is “fake news” and what does that phrase mean.
Starting this week, you will be assigned each chapter to read with anywhere from four to seven hours of accompanying videos. The video matches exactly what you are reading so there is no confusion or contradiction between what is assigned and what is expected of you. In addition, you can get extra credit and do better on the examination-papers if you also check out the additional resources on the web site and integrate any film you have seen with journalists in other classes or on your own into the class discussion.
To give you an idea of the kind of experience you will have in the weeks ahead, I have put together a five-minute video summary of what is to come. It’s a very small sampling, but it will give you a good idea of what’s ahead:
VIDEO
I’m delighted you are taking this course and if you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them.
Veterans’ Voices
Pamela Walck, Duquesne University
In Fall 2019, nine years after I left the newsroom, I had the chance to merge my former life as a military reporter with my academic life as a journalism professor.
During my time as a reporter, I interviewed countless soldiers and told their stories—topics that covered every aspect of modern military life. Enlistment, training, deployment. Injury, recovery, discharge. Return to civilian life. But among the most memorable stories I ever reported was on April 27, 2009, when eighty-six World War II veterans and their family members returned to Fort Stewart, an Army post about an hour south of Savannah, Georgia. These veterans were there to mark the sixty-fifth anniversary of a major battle in the history of the Marne Division.
The aged men, survivors of a bloody effort to hold Italy’s Anzio beachhead for the Allies, were praised for their heroic efforts during a special ceremony on post. Among the veterans was Wilbur Dickens, a ninety-two-year-old man from Tifton, Georgia. Wheelchair-bound, he was escorted around the post by a young enlisted man. I remember watching the two warriors interact, sharing stories and commonalities that ran deeper than conflict, age or ethnicity.
And so, I told my students about Wilbur Dickens. (I would note: Wilbur died a year and two months after he made that visit to Fort Stewart.)
Ultimately, this experience inspired me as an instructor to consider ways I might incorporate a similar opportunity with my undergraduate students at Duquesne University. So, when I had the opportunity to teach a special topics journalism class on military and veterans’ issues in Fall 2019, I knew I wanted to implement a similar assignment.
My goal was to provide students the opportunity to collect oral histories; understand the difference between oral histories and journalistic interviews; and provide an avenue to share those stories with larger audiences.
By partnering with the Heinz History Center, a major museum and archive in town, I was able to create an assignment where journalism students collected oral histories from local Vietnam veterans and used the recordings to create journalistic podcasts. Materials generated for the class are in the process of being submitted to the History Center for consideration in their larger regional archival collection of oral histories from area men and women who served in Vietnam.
I remembered the process of talking to the two men, asking question, hearing them tell their stories – and then returning to the newsroom and fretting that my words were NOT capturing this moment adequately enough. (The eternal struggle of writers everywhere.)And in Fall 2019, I knew that I wanted to give my students a similar experience – talking to combat veterans and learning how to listen. Especially to another generation. Especially to individuals whose life experiences were far different than their own.