by Doug Cumming, Washington & Lee University
GIFT is a fitting acronym. It stands for “Great Ideas for Teaching,” and it really does give them away for free, 25 gift-wrapped ideas for your classroom displayed in a poster session at every AEJMC convention since 2000.
I felt a little like a pickpocket the first time I snatched a couple of these great ideas in 2002 at the convention in Miami Beach.
One idea that caught my attention was called “Enliven History and Public Record Research—in the Cemetery.” The professor had her students select an interesting gravestone in a cemetery in the university’s city, Kearney, Neb., and then begin digging into local archival records about that person. One lesson was the value of primary documents that could not be found on the Internet: old newspaper obits, cemetery records, city directories, the U.S. Census (of course this is online now through 1940), school census records, court records. By the fourth week, students present the story of their dead guy, mostly pretty sad stories of suicide, consumption or time in the mental asylum, as it turned out for that frontier town in earlier days.
The process taught the journalistic skills of accurate note-taking, using documents and storytelling, but it also opened up history as something lying in thick strata right underfoot. The professor, Carol S. Lomicky, won the GIFT Grand Prize for that year.
These ideas are not only great and free, but also flexible. I’ve adapted Lomicky’s cemetery exercise for my own purposes, in a media-history class as an exercise in using primary sources, and in a magazine feature writing class as an exercise in storytelling. My town of Lexington, Va., happens to have a cemetery full of history-book history – Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery.
GIFT ideas have the advantage being laboratory tested in somebody else’s classroom, then selected by peer-review. This year in Washington D.C., the 25 winners were picked by a nine-member panel out of 54 entries.
The contest is co-sponsored by the Small Programs Interest Group (SPIG) and the Community College Journalism Association. GIFT coordinator John Kerezy, at Cuyahoga Community College in Parma, Ohio, said the response has been phenomenal. “AEJMC’s core mission is teaching and this is one of the few activities that is dedicated to that topic,” he says.
All 350-plus teaching ideas are still available for plundering. Through 2009, the winning lessons were put into booklets that sold at convention for $5. You can find these online as PDFs for free at http://www.aejmc. org/home/2010/11/giftbooklets/. Since then, each year’s 25 winners were put on a CD you can order for $5 – or get as your reward for being one of the 25.
I once submitted an idea that was rejected. This year, older and wiser, I got my idea picked as one of the 25.
I’ll share my secrets of heady success. First, look at the good tips that the GIFT program provides in the 10-year anniversary special booklet for 2009. Starting on page 62, there’s a study of all the winners since 2000 by two serial-GIFT winners, David Cuillier and Carol B. Schwalbe. Their analysis included useful hints from a handful of repeat winners and judges. “Keep it simple. You want students to remember your teaching point.” “Assess course weaknesses and solicit feedback.” “When submitting your great idea. . .write clearly and come up with a clever title.”
My other suggestion is to draw on ideas from other, wiser teachers. For instance, I adapted an item from one of Melvin Mencher’s irascible “Update” emails – those fun follow-ups to his classic New Reporting and Writing textbook. This item repeated something from Poynter Institute senior scholar Roy Peter Clark, 16 historic documents that Clark considered essential to understanding the craft of writing (and Mencher called must-reads for J-Students). It’s a quirky list, from the Magna Carta of 1215 A.D. to Tom Wolfe’s “manifesto” published in the 1973 anthology The New Journalism.
I stretched this out into a two-part assignment in my J101 mass media survey course. The first part was to find each document online, a natural reflex for most students when asked to look up something. Happily, about half these documents are online now, even the entire Elements of Style of Strunk and White and Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” A bit harder to Google as original texts are documents such as the Hutchins Commission report and CBS News manual of standards and practices under Richard Salant.
The next step nudged students into intellectual history. In teams of two, they had to present two of the documents to the class – my random pairing of any two – and extract whatever underlying principles connected the two documents (or made them clash). Does the First Amendment imply the open government advanced in the Freedom of Information Act? Can they hear the John Peter Zenger defense of 1735 echoed in Justice Brennan’s 1964 ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan?
I called this exercise “What’s the Big Idea?”
The Grand Prize winner this year was from a couple of journalism professors at Massey University in New Zealand. One of them, Catherine Strong, traveled all the way from New Zealand to Washington – a long way for a $100 prize, which she didn’t know she’d won until the end of the poster session. Their winning idea was a four-week course, very intense sounding. Students learn-by-doing all the newest digital media – audio reporting, interviewing and editing, video scripting and editing, online writing and photography. Then, in the final week, each student finds a local real-world news story and reports it using the entire multimedia palette – all within a day.
A similar contest with the National Communication Association has a similar name – Great Ideas for Teaching Students – GIFTS. http://www.natcom. org/gifts/ (The NCA convention is in Washington DC Nov. 21-23).
And you can check out other great teaching-idea resources from AEJMC: http://www.aejmc.org/home/resources/ teaching-resources/