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SYMPOSIUM INTRO: A Is for Assessment

June 13, 2012 in Spring/Summer 2012, Symposium

Vivian B. Martin

As educators, we’re always in evaluation mode, whether we’re preparing that first syllabus for the new academic term, grading papers, or gently steering a classroom discussion that has gone off track due to students’ inattention or limited comprehension. Assessment guru Barbara Walvoord calls assessment a “natural, inescapable, human, and scholarly act” in which all good teachers can’t help but engage (2010, p.2). We’re always asking whether students are learning what we’re trying to teach. Increasingly, though, faculty across all disciplines are learning that their natural remedies must be turned into official measurements and documents to satisfy accreditors, administrators, and others. The additional work on top of teaching and other demands has made assessment the dreaded A-word many faculty resist. As a respondent to a TJMC survey put it, “I’m all for taking a look at your program and deciding what you’d like to do and how’d you like to get there. But the way assessment works, you are really just jumping hoops and not truly assessing.”

Please see these related supporting essays:
A is for Assessment: The Assessment Plan: A Work Constantly in Progress
by Lola Burnham
A is for Assessment: Teaching to the Test? Administration of a Senior Comprehensive Exam
by Tracy Lauder

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A is for Assessment: Teaching to the Test? Administration of a Senior Comprehensive Exam

June 13, 2012 in Spring/Summer 2012, Symposium—Supporting Essays

Tracy Lauder

Can you assess the accumulated knowledge of a broad-based mass communications curriculum in the senior year? We have been implementing, with varied success, a senior comprehensive exam as part of our annual institutional assessment report. Going into our fourth year, we are still fine-tuning the process and sometimes question our results. Using such a tool has brought up a range of departmental issues and questions.

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A is for Assessment: The Assessment Plan: A Work Constantly in Progress

June 13, 2012 in Spring/Summer 2012, Symposium—Supporting Essays

Lola Burnham

An assessment plan should be a living document, subject to pruning and open to growth. The journalism faculty at Eastern Illinois University adopted a plan in April 2004 but then revised it in August 2004. It has since been revised three more times, including the latest version, which was approved at a February faculty meeting. On paper, that may seem like an excessive number of changes, but in practice, it is not. The assessment plan, after all, is about change. The whole point of assessment is to offer a process to critically evaluate the curriculum and then revise it as needed. For an assessment plan to succeed, faculty must be open to change, not only in the curriculum, but also in the plan itself and in the measures adopted to implement the plan.

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Grounding Research, Theory, and Practice

June 13, 2012 in Editor's Note, Spring/Summer 2012

Vivian B. Martin

Teaching Journalism and Mass Communication (TJMC) was started as a venue for writing and research about teaching journalism and mass communication in traditional and nontraditional ways. With this, our second issue, the journal is moving closer to what we had envisioned, one with essays integrating video and other multimedia to help demonstrate teaching and pedagogical ideas, as well as peer-reviewed research on topics related to the classroom, such as research on motivating students to read long-form works, twitter pedagogy, and an applied theoretical discussion on dialogic in public relations. The mix of offerings, though an exciting realization of some vague ideas we editors had more than a year ago, only inspires us to push forward with more possibilities for thinking about, and writing and researching scholarship on teaching and learning.

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Book Review: Watergate’s Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse

June 13, 2012 in Reviews, Spring/Summer 2012

Watergate’s Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse
By Jon Marshall
Medill School of Journalism/Northwestern University Press
Evanston, Illinois, 2011
313 Pages

The word, “Watergate,” suggests a high point in American investigative journalism. Although investigative journalism may not seem as influential today as during the Watergate era, the craft will continue to have an impact on American democracy, according to Jon Marshall, who traces the past and future of investigative reporting in Watergate’s Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse.

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Plagiarism: Not So Simple . . .

June 13, 2012 in Spring/Summer 2012, Teaching+

Jim Sernoe

“There’s no way he wrote this assignment.”

That thought began yet another adventure in academic dishonesty, and although the end product was the same as usual, the process of getting there held a few surprises and forced me to think through several dilemmas I hadn’t expected.

This case went from a fairly typical plagiarism incident to a series of deeper questions about athletes, who should be in college, what the academy owes students, and what our role as faculty ought to be.

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Whom Kneads Kopy Ediotrs?

June 13, 2012 in Industry, Spring/Summer 2012

Margo Wilson

If a reporter accused military personnel at the decommissioned El Toro Marine Corps Air Station near Irvine, CA, of recklessly (or was it wrecklessly?) contaminating the soil, Mark Ludwig, my copy editing colleague at the Los Angeles Times, knew how to handle the situation. If a photographer spelled a local spelling bee champ’s last name “Abecedarian,” although the reporter spelled it “Abcedarian,” Mark made calls, sent e-mails, and checked the phone book. He would excise the offending opinion word or correct the aberrant spelling. And those were some of the least significant things he did before shepherding the story from the rim to the slot. Then, he would grin at the rest of us rim rats and nod.

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Deborah Gump

On Editing and Editing Education

June 13, 2012 in Industry—Supporting Essays, Spring/Summer 2012

Editing is everything. At least, that’s what I tell my students because it’s the truth. Don’t we all tell our students the truth, at least the truth of the elephant part that we are touching? I tell my students that there is joy, power, and totally awesome responsibility in editing, in the fact that there [...]

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Center in the Park sign

Team-Teaching Online Journalism by Focusing on the Great Migration

June 13, 2012 in Scholarship of Application, Spring/Summer 2012

John Beatty and Huntly Collins

In the Spring of 2011, we teamed up to teach an Online Journalism course that engaged 19 students in conducting in-depth interviews with six African American residents of Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood. The residents were among the six million African Americans who had migrated from the South to the North as part of the Great Migration in the first half of the 20th century. The 19 students in the class were divided into six teams and each team spent approximately 10 hours interviewing one of the six Germantown residents. The interviews, which required students to cross race, class, and age boundaries, were recorded on video and audio. Each student in the class then produced his or her own blog about Germantown and the Great Migration based on the story of the person with whom the student’s team had been matched. In the fall of 2011, one student in the class worked in an independent study under us and pulled together the video from each of the six teams into a 30-minute documentary called Journeys of Promise: Germantown and the Great Migration. Here, we present the result of our students’ work and discuss the lessons learned.

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What’s a Phone Book? Teaching Information Literacy Skills to Digital Native Journalism Students

June 13, 2012 in Scholarship of Application, Spring/Summer 2012

Maureen E. Boyle and Patricia O. McPherson

An innovative program developed by Stonehill College’s MacPháidín Library and its Center for Teaching and Learning led to the creation of a semester-long partnership between a communication professor and a reference and instruction librarian. The goal of that partnership was to provide information literacy instruction to narrative writing students to help them meet the Association of College and Research Libraries Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, hone their online research and evaluation skills, and craft richer narrative pieces. Anecdotal evidence and student responses indicate the information literacy instruction delivered and the library aids created for this class not only helped students track primary resources and historical material for their assignments but also introduced them to search strategies and online resources with which they weren’t previously familiar.

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