Jinx C. Broussard Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Media History

This award is presented to the winners of the division’s teaching competition. Members may submit an innovative teaching strategy to the contest, which is judged by a committee each spring. 

Teaching ideas should be original, tested, and transformative pedagogies that have been used by the author in teaching media and journalism history and could be used by other instructors or institutions. Teaching ideas should help professors address one or more of these pedagogies: diversity, collaboration, community, or justice. The competition welcomes a variety of teaching ideas, including those taught across a quarter/semester or taught as a module within an individual course. The 2022 deadline for submissions is February 15.

The applications should be submitted as one document saved in a PDF format to aejmchistory@gmail.com using the subject line “Transformative Teaching of Media and Journalism History” and should include:

• Required: a three-page CV
  
• Required: a single-spaced, two-page discussion of the teaching idea that includes a 250-word overview followed by discussions of these seven criteria used for judging:
  • Originality (makes clear how the work has not been published or presented at a conference or an online forum previously; is not in any other 2022 AEJMC competition; and does not represent another person’s teaching without acknowledgement of that work and discussion of significant modification by the author),
  • tested (describes how employed previously in the author’s classroom),
  • transferability (makes a case for how other schools/classes/programs could use),
  • degree of transformative nature (speaks to evidence of how the teaching leads to a marked change on the part of students, such as via assessment or student feedback),
  • degree of focus on diversity, collaboration, community, and/or justice (addresses one or more of these pedagogies, as defined by the author),
  • degree of clarity (presented clearly, completely, and concisely).
  • willingness to present (expresses willingness to present at the 2022 AEJMC conference)

• Optional: a set of supplementary teaching materials relevant to the teaching idea, such as syllabus, assignment, handouts, links, or slide, saved as PDF and no more than five pages

2022 Winners

• Melita M. Garza, University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana
• Kathy Roberts Forde, University of Massachusetts Amherst
• Katie Foss, Middle Tennessee State University
• Will Mari, Louisiana State University

View full teaching ideas.

Garza created a course called Journalism and Moral Courage, a combination conceptual, current events, and media history course that requires students to deeply explore what is meant by truth, moral courage, and journalism. Student-led discussions underpin the coursework in the classroom, where historical research methods are also taught to help students develop their final paper. The course offers a perspective on the price that journalists play to bring the world truth, and with domestic and transnational examples, students come to understand the worldwide phenomenon that is accountability journalism.

Forde created an assignment to address three goals: first, to help students learn how to think and write historically using primary and secondary sources; second, to write about media history for a popular audience, combining the highest professional standards of both journalistic and historical writing; and third, to learn how powerful white newspaper editors and publishers collaborated with violent, authoritarian political movements after Reconstruction to build white supremacy in the South—and how Black news leaders resisted. In this original “news essay” assignment, students learn how to write a news article about journalism history—in other words, they undertake a public history project. Their subject: the role of the press, both Black and white, in the North Carolina election of 1898 and the related Wilmington Massacre and coup d’état.

Foss developed a mock trial activity, based on Mary Mallon’s actual appeal for her freedom to the New York Supreme Court, to help students better understand the context, media framing and Mallon’s overall case. In health communication history, the case of “Typhoid” Mary Mallon is key to understanding shifts in medicine and journalism in the early 1900s, demonstrating how media of the moment fueled a critical public health transformation – at Mallon’s expense.

Mari has students contribute to volunteer transcription efforts at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and other institutions. These are defined as projects that take previously non-digitized material and translate them into text for use by scholars and the public. They are crowd-sourced, large-scale efforts that have relatively easy-to-follow instructions and that students often find enjoyable—and they certainly mix things up a bit (he substitutes this activity for a traditional primary-source response). 

2021 Winners

• Ira Chinoy, University of Maryland  
• Teri Finneman, University of Kansas 
• Kristin Gustafson, University of Washington-Bothell  
• Donna L. Halper, Lesley University  
• Robert Kerr, University of Oklahoma 

Chinoy redesigned a course on journalism history for freshmen who would be starting college and their major online during the pandemic. He did away with standard sit-down exams.  Instead, each student kept a “personal learning journal.” In place of the cramming that goes with standard exams, journal entries were made each week based on prompts which enabled students to capture what was salient from the material they explored and to make connections with current-day issues.  They used Adobe Spark to create these journals and shared a link with him so he could review the posts every three weeks and provide feedback.  Students got class participation credit for the journals, and they could use their journal entries to complete midterm and final essays on their own time.  The journals also allowed him to see in real time what was resonating with students.  In their final entries, students provided feedback on keeping the journals. One wrote: “Looking back at the last fifteen personal learning journal posts, I am shocked at just how much I learned and synthesized…”  Another wrote: “I have never been so emotionally attached to a school assignment in my life… It’s low stakes, no pressure, but achieves remarkable effects.” Read more about the project

Finneman developed a pandemic oral history project to teach students that journalism history is not just passive material from the past in a book but an ongoing, active practice that involves preserving history in the present day. Students conducted oral histories with 28 faculty members, students and staff to capture the impact of the pandemic on the William Allen White School of Journalism in Kansas. The oral histories focus on how the subjects came to terms with the pandemic in March 2020 and how they were coping with the new normal of pandemic life in the months since. Overall, it is an examination of how journalism education and college life changed as a result of the pandemic. Students submitted full audio, transcripts, overviews and photos, which were then assembled into a website. Read more about the project.

Gustafson shares two examples from her series of on-ground, synchronous and online, asynchronous workshops designed to help University of Washington Bothell students break down learning into incremental steps. The complementary learning modalities helps students develop skills needed for their original research on Asian American media in the Pacific Northwest, as well as transferrable skills for student ventures beyond the class and college. Read more about the project.

Donna Halper is a media historian whose focus is on media representations of “the other.” Noticing that past reporting in the mainstream press about many historical events (both locally and nationally) often omitted the perspectives of women and minorities– even when they were central to understanding what occurred– she began utilizing “Restorative Narratives,” a framework for researching marginalized groups and then writing them back into history.  She began asking her journalism students to analyze local and national media coverage to see who was excluded, and to find the people whose stories needed to be told. In addition to engaging her students in the search for people whose accomplishments were marginalized in their time, Dr. Halper has written numerous articles about women and people of color whose work has been forgotten; the goal is to reintroduce them and promote further study of their perspectives.  Among her most recent published profiles is the story of Frank “Fay” Young, the dean of Black sportswriters, as well as a social commentator, who wrote for the Negro Press. Read more about the project.

Kerr developed a unit in response to growing activism and public expression related to social injustice in 2020 for the Media History class he teaches at the University of Oklahoma. For this history class, the unit was designed to place that movement into broader historical context of how the problems being spoken out against are part of much bigger problems that have manifest themselves down through history in countless forms, and with unimaginably tragic consequences.  The new unit proposes that one of the most critical elements in addressing social injustice is developing greater awareness and deeper understanding of the phenomenon referred to as “the other.” And how historically, media have often played roles in its perpetuation. Read more about the project.

2020 Winners

• Lisa Burns, Quinnipiac University
• Elisabeth Fondren, St. John’s University
• Andrew Offenburger, Miami University
• Joe Saltzman, USC Annenberg      
• Pamela Walck, Duquesne University

Burns helped to redesign Quinnipiac’s U.S. Media History course in 2017, shifting from the typical chronological format to using collective memory as the framework for the class. The newly titled “Media, History, and Memory” course examines the relationship between media, history, and memory, focusing on the role various media play in shaping both individual and collective memories of historical figures, events, and eras. Read more about the project. 

Fondren 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,” she said. “They were wrong. The community mobilized in large protests and political advocacy efforts that eventually moved the city government to close the landfill.” Read more about the project. 

Offenburger 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?” Offenburger contemplated. “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.” Read more about the project. 

Saltzman suggested that the 21^st century way of teaching journalism and media history is through the image of the journalist in popular culture video, audio and text.  Students get more involved in history if they can experience it through the media they use every day: video and audio and text on the screen. He incorporated a 40-hour documentary he produced to mirror the textbook he uses based on solid principles of Journalism Studies and students respond by getting involved in the essence of journalism, past, present and future and the excitement and importance of being a journalist. Read more about the project.

Walck said her collaboration with the Heinz History Center was only part of a class project that helped transform the undergraduate students in the Duquesne University Media Department, by prompting them to get out into the community, interacting with an older generation, and encouraging them to consider how journalists talk about and report on veterans’ issues. The undergraduates in my classroom have only known wars during their lifetimes. They have never known the United States in peacetime. And yet, they also don’t interact with people who have served in the military. This project not only helped them better understand an older generation—by focusing on Vietnam War veterans—but it also helped them make connections to today’s veterans. Read more about the project.

2019 Winners

• Nick Hirshon, William Paterson University
• Gerry Lanosga, Indiana University
• Kimberley Mangun, University of Utah
• Shearon Roberts, Xavier University of Louisiana      
• Amber Roessner, University of Tennessee

Hirshon says his collaboration with the Queens Memory Program “represents the pedagogy of community,” as his graduate students interviewed residents in a neighboring community and captured their geographic and artistic histories. This program, an initiative by the Queens Borough Public Library and the City University of New York at Queens College, transformed the culture of the graduate program and increased the visibility of media history. Read more about the project.

Lanosga redesigned an elective journalism history course to foreground archives and primary source collections to complete a research paper written individually or a multi-media presentation created in groups. He says the changes challenged students to resist “dipping superficially into online archives,” energized his own teaching, and engaged students directly with an extensive list of collections at his university’s repositories. Read more about the project.

Mangun describes how her students used primary and secondary sources for a “publication-quality, hands-on research project” instead of the standard end-of-semester (or end-of–quarter) paper. The students published Mass Communication History content on the Utah Communication History Encyclopedia, a site that Mangun created and maintains and which provides external visibility for student academic work. Read more about the project.

Roberts says over the past five years, she transformed a traditional converged media writing sequence through a community partnership with the three African American newspapers in New Orleans “to connect with 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.” The project exposed these students and other students of color to the history, need, and achievements of the Black Press. Read more about the project.

Roessner incorporated her collaborative, community-building experiential learning project into mass communications history around a diverse journalist committed to social justice. Through the Id(e)a Initiative, her students sharpened their media history and multi-platform journalism skills by creating biographical entries, written analyses, and audio or video packages related to Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Read more about the project.