In an effort to raise awareness about the depth of the Journalism History archives, Pam Parry and Teri Finneman have organized 600 Journalism History articles by topic. The hope is that this document will aid in the compilation of readings lists, literature reviews and syllabus development. The list includes more than 30 topics.
The list was distributed to History Division members in January. If you would like to receive a copy, please reach out to Teri Finneman (finnemte@gmail.com) or Pam Parry (pparry@semo.edu).
The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) has selected Kathy Roberts Forde, Katherine A. Foss, Melita M. Garza, and Will Mari as winners of the 2022 Jinx C. Broussard Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Media History.
Kathy Roberts FordeKatherine A. FossMelita M. GarzaWill Mari
The award acknowledges original, creative practices that journalism educators and media historians use in their classrooms to teach media history and seeks to share those techniques with other instructors. Ideas and practices focused on diversity, collaboration, community, and justice receive special attention in the selection process. The award is in its fourth year.
This is the first in a series of teaching columns by 2021–2022 History Division teaching committee chair Ken Ward.
The pandemic has taught us that much of what we thought was sacrosanct in the classroom is actually far more flexible than imagined. A risk is that as we (eventually) move beyond the pandemic, we also leave behind this important lesson.
Instead, let’s press forward with it in mind. Today’s student, who has grown up in a world very differently mediated than when we were younger, interacts with media differently than we do. As a result, we may need to rethink how we’re doing things, not just online but also in the face-to-face classroom.
For my part, I’m rethinking textbooks, at least as the primary out-of-class resource assigned to students.
I know from conversations with many of you who are watching students struggle to connect with readings, particularly textbooks, in a way they didn’t in years past. This has been true in my media history course. My students are reading, but they hate it, and they struggle to sort the trivial from the critical.
Some of this definitely falls on me as an educator—teaching that kind of critical thinking is a big part of my job as an educator. But I’ve talked to enough colleagues who I know are excellent educators who say students are struggling with textbooks in a new way.
I don’t think we should be surprised. The decline of dead-tree media and ubiquity of digital tech drives today’s students to interact with material differently—not better or worse, mind you. Differently.
My classroom in this very rural corner of Kansas is likely very different from yours. But in many ways, our classrooms are the same, filled with digital natives who consume nearly all content through phones and laptops and who do not like textbooks. They read it, but they cannot connect with it in the way they can other media.
In that vein, this semester I’ve joined those educators who are deemphasizing traditional textbooks in favor of other means of information delivery. By far the alternative I utilize the most is the History Division’s own podcast (although I try to avoid assigning the episodes I host—those poor students have to listen to me enough). Every textbook reading comes with an accompanying podcast episode to contextualize what they’ve read.
In a history course, this can be further supplemented by videos on YouTube posted by folks like the Sacramento History Museum, videos demonstrating past media technologies which simply must be seen to be appreciated as revolutionary, such as the Linotype. On the page, even with illustrations, these technological leaps too easily seem quaint. Video can bring them to life.
Is all of this working? Who can tell for sure, but test scores are encouraging, and classroom discussions clearly show podcast episodes improve retention and deepen understanding. And the big themes of the course are clearly sticking in the minds of students.
As a result, the textbook is moving into the back seat for me. It’s not going away, as I think the formal structure of a book helps students sort and make connections among concepts. But if students are connecting better with other forms of media like podcasts, it doesn’t make sense for textbooks to be the course’s keystone.
All this is just one guy’s experience, though. During my brief tenure as teaching committee chair, I’ll use this column to explore how other History Division members are connecting with today’s students in their own media history courses. Our goal won’t be to find flashy, throw-out-the-textbook tactics for the classroom—this isn’t an “innovation” column. Instead, we’ll just see what people are doing differently to connect with today’s students. In the next column, Elisabeth Fondren shares what she’s doing differently with regard to assessment, with long, written assignments now taking a backseat in her classroom.
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication History Division awarded five winners for the third annual Transformative Teaching of Media and Journalism History teaching-idea competition, renamed the Jinx Coleman Broussard Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Media History in late 2019. The recipients were:
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
The competition featured original and tested transformative teaching ideas and practices that address pedagogies of diversity, collaboration, community, and/or justice.
I don’t know about you, but so far, a month into this semester, it feels like it’s been three (or four) months. And so knowing that things are hard out there for a lot of us, I wanted to offer some practical, “off-the-shelf” teaching ideas that you can use in your media-history classes.
If you don’t teach media history right now, these could work in other journalism or mass-comm courses that either feature a history component or even just a section on the use of the college/university library or digital archives. They can be part of a lecture day, an activity-oriented day, either synchronous, asynchronous, or as a standalone out-of-class activity.
I’ll focus on a short list of volunteer public-history projects that are interactive, engaging and rewarding for undergraduate and graduate students alike and that use transcription as their main vehicle. I’ve used these to invite conversation about the role of media history in the ongoing, complex, American story. You might find them helpful, too.
A project led by Cornell, it guides volunteers through scanned but-as-yet transcribed ads for enslaved people from before the Civil War, and has them either do the actual transcription or check the work of others. I was a bit hesitant to ask students to do this, but many felt that it was a way to give back and give voice to previously unheard people. I’ll talk a bit more about how I structured this assignment below.
The Smithsonian, National Archives and Library of Congress’ projects tend to be trickier in that they sometimes require the ability to read cursive, which might be challenging for some students. That same challenge is present with the War Department and Digital Newberry projects, but some later-in-the-20th-century efforts are more straightforward, and just involve tagging images versus transcribing writing. One immensely popular project with the New York Public Library transcribes menus (“What’s on the Menu?”), but it often has more volunteers than it has un-transcribed material!
One alternative is to have students look at finished projects and their curated artifacts, online, and talk about the long journeys these physical things have taken to survive to the present, or what they meant, perhaps, for the people who once used them.
But the initiative I’ve had the most success with this semester is Freedom on the Move, which offers helpful tutorials, videos and other “explainer” material, and is perhaps the most user friendly. I had students take a screenshot of a finished contribution and respond to just two prompts: first, why did they pick their project, and second, what did they learn while working on it? Most of my students choose Freedom on the Move and reported feeling convicted and surprised. They hadn’t realized that slavery was such an embedded part of American society—“even” in the northern part of the country—for so long. At least a few said that doing the transcription drove home that lesson more than reading our textbook.
I would add that it’s good to let students pick, to a certain degree, what project they want to help out on, and to make sure that they have enough time to complete them (I gave my students an extra day). But I highly recommend this as a way to enhance an existing class, and to give yourself some mental space, if you need the support.
A final idea: some university and public libraries are documenting the pandemic and are encouraging students to contribute (this is happening at Louisiana State, where I work). But that might require another conversation to unpack more fully.
If you do have your students use an interactive, volunteer project for an activity, I would invite you to have them tweet about it to our fall media-history awareness campaign, #mediahistorymatters.
Please reach out to me with suggestions or ideas, to wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, on Twitter. We’ll have more updates later in the fall on our panel line-up for next year’s conference, as well as other initiatives and efforts.
Students should create a podcast of 10 to 20 minutes that either (1) explores the history of journalism through discussion of a particular topic, such as the life of a prominent journalist or a major event covered by the press years ago, or (2) integrates historical context into your reporting on a newsworthy event on your campus or in your community (e.g., you may review your university’s old yearbooks and back issues of your campus newspaper in order to add context to reporting on the cancellation of the university basketball season).
By Will Mari, vice chair and incoming chair, and Teri Finneman, chair, AEJMC History Division
Throughout the fall, we’re inviting you to involve your students in #MediaHistoryMatters, a Twitter campaign to get students talking about journalism history together.
Echoing past efforts with Media History Engagement Week and National News Engagement Day, the idea is to get our students engaged in a larger national conversation about the importance of perspective and context when it comes to media systems.
The
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication History Division
awarded five winners for the second annual Transformative Teaching of Media and
Journalism History teaching-idea competition, renamed the Jinx Coleman
Broussard Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Media History in late 2019.
The recipients were:
Lisa M. Burns, Quinnipiac University
Elisabeth Fondren, St. John’s University
Andrew Offenburger, Miami University
Joe Saltzman, USC Annenberg
Pamela E. Walck, Duquesne University
The competition featured original and tested transformative teaching ideas and practices that address pedagogies of diversity, collaboration, community, and/or justice.
A new teaching resource has been added to the History Division website.
History Division members have contributed items to create a collection of syllabi and sample assignments for courses related to journalism history. The collection includes syllabi for courses focusing broadly on journalism history as well as courses on specific areas like electronic media or legal history. There are syllabi for both undergraduate and graduate classes, and some members have contributed sample assignments as well.
