Teaching Journalism

In this Chicago Magazine article, the Dean of the Medill School of Journalism, responds to critics who say his new curriculum sacrifices the principles of journalism for the principles of marketing. John Lavine has kept his promise to "blow up" the old curriculum and replace it, this fall,  with one that emphasizes new media and "an understanding of audience" because, he said, there was little point in training students for disappearing jobs in print journalism. He drew much criticism from students, faculty and journalists who feared the new curriculum would blur the lines between journalism and public relations.  But he responds that many working journalists and some students are simply too resistant to change.

Many award-winning journalists never studied journalism in university, raising the question whether people who don't study journalism make better journalists. In an attempt to explore that idea, Betty Medsger, a leading U.S. journalism educator and former Washington Post reporter, argues that journalism educators would be more effective in improving journalism and journalism education if they became gate openers to all that universities offer rather than guardians of journalism as a separate discipline.

The World Journalism Education Conference in Singapore adopted this set of principles in June, 2007.

If you want feedback from students about your teaching or find out whether they understood aspects of a lesson or lessons and you don't want to wait for the formal course evaluations at the end of the term, you might want to consider using The Free Assessment Summary Tool or FAST. FAST is an anonymous online survey tool that automatically summarizes students' impressions of a course and/or teacher and supplies the data directly to the teacher. It allows a teacher to develop an online survey that students can complete 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The software automatically summarizes and consolidates the students' comments, in real-time, on the web or into a downloadable customized Excel spreadsheet. The software was developed at Mount Royal College in Calgary.