Dan Gillmor poses the question, but having come from the land of departments with HEAVY "service" loads to institutions (English, Composition, Rhetoric), I'd sure add a MASSIVE caveat to this idea.
I mean, it is a great idea in principle. I support it fully, especially as Dan enunciates it below. However, in U.S. post-secondary institutions, what such an endeavor would probably bring with it (besides a TON of adjunct teaching jobs for newly-laid off veteran journalists, as keepers of the anachronistic journalistic tea service, as it were) is the purely EVIL specter of a TON of adjunct teaching positions, flooding the permanent academic ghetto underclass with even more second-class humanities teachers with no hope of ever entering the tenured ranks.
It would have to be done smartly and with foresight, with protections for faculty who could easily within a few budget years, morph into an army of opportunistic-administration classroom fodder, just as so many composition teachers are now. Something should be learned by the humanities evil experiments with its permanent adjunct underclass in the first-year composition general education requirements, requirements that at many institutions into first-year experience courses, beyond writing to learn, to embrace more critical thinking and reading goals.
What I'd want to know, Dan, is how these proposals are different from the existing programs, the existing service requirements, because these very ideas, including media literacy and cultural literacy readings, have long been part of first-year composition programs, and first-year experience programs, as well as honors seminars and the like.
And those programs are already being taught by faculty members in other disciplines, faculty enriched with a deeper disciplinary reading background in cultural studies and critical theory than most journalism faculty currently have. There is already a rich set of media criticism and popular culture course readers that attempt to do just what Dan proposes, and these courses are already being taught, albeit not by people with any background as working journalists.
How do we know this idea isn't the same thing in different clothes?
I'm guessing what Dan wants to see, in this particular moment for citizen and participatory social media, are better results from the critical media courses that are taught.
Here, let me lay out the gist of Dan's ideas. I'm putting BOLD on my favorite bits below.
Link: Journalism Education’s Future: Broader, Deeper in Community – Center for Citizen Media.
Journalism Education’s Future: Broader, Deeper in Community
Feb 7th, 2009
by Dan Gillmor.
Accepting an award from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School for Journalism & Mass Communication several months ago, former PBS NewsHour host Robert McNeil called journalism education probably “the best general education that an American citizen can get” today.
[...]
It’s open to question largely because the employment pipeline of the
past, a progression leading from school to jobs in media and related
industries, is (at best) in jeopardy. Yet journalism education could
and should have a long and even prosperous life ahead — if its
practitioners make some fundamental shifts.
Some of the shifts are already under way, especially in how
journalism educators do their jobs. The Cronkite School, where I’m
teaching, is one of many journalism programs aiming to be part of the
21st Century. The school understands at its core that digital
technology has transformed the practice, though we hope not the
principles, of the craft. This is welcome, if overdue; if newspapers
have adapted fitfully to the collision of technology and media,
journalism schools as a group may have been even slower.
But that recognition, while valuable, isn’t nearly enough.
Journalism educators should be in the vanguard of an absolutely
essential shift for society at large: helping our students, and people in our larger communities, to navigate and manage the myriad information streams of a media-saturated world.
We need to help them understand why they need to become activists as
consumers — by taking more responsibility for the quality of what they
consume, in large part by becoming more critical thinkers. And they
need to understand their emerging role as creators of media.
In both cases, as consumers and creators, we start with principles.
For media consumers:
• Be Skeptical
• Exercise Judgement
• Open Your Mind
• Keep Asking Questions
• Learn Media Techniques
For media creators (after incorporating the above):
• Be Thorough
• Get it Right
• Insist on Fairness
• Think Independently
• Be Transparent, Demand Transparency
(See this recent paper, part of the Media Re:public project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where I’m a Fellow, for a fairly lengthy description of the principles and an explanation of why I believe they’re important.)
[...]
This applies not just to students studying the practice of
journalism. The same issues are roiling public relations and
advertising, the teaching of which is often housed in schools of
journalism and communications. Not surprisingly, because modern
commerce has been so much about selling things, those industries have
been considerably more innovative, in the professional ranks, than
journalism in recent years. Key leaders in advertising and PR are
surely making their needs clear to educators, and one suspects getting
results.
As noted above, journalism schools are starting to embrace digital
technologies in their work with students who plan to enter traditional
media. Too few are helping students understand that they may well have
to invent their own jobs, however, much less helping them do so.
[...]
But I keep coming back to the issue(s) that should trouble anyone
who cares about the future of self-governed societies. We’re not
turning out the critical thinkers we need in a time when that skill has
never been so important, particularly when the avalanche of data — some
of it bogus and much of it irrelevant — has never been so difficult to
handle.
One experiment, at State University of New York’s Stony Book campus, is notable. Howard Schneider is leading another foundation-funded program (so many of these are, raising an interesting question that I won’t go into here) that aims to make better news consumers and critical thinkers of all students,
not just those enrolled in journalism courses. This goes only part of
the way to what I’d like to see in journalism education, but it’s a
very useful start.
Where would I take it, if I ran a journalism school? I’d start,
again, with the principles listed above, and rework the how-to part of
the curriculum to be more digital (that is, media-agnostic) and
entrepreneurially focused.
[...]
Then, tackling the media activism challenge, my colleagues and I would:
- • Persuade the president of the university that every student on the campus should learn them before graduating, preferably during freshman year.
- • Create a program for people in the broader community,
starting with teachers. We should be seeing every student take a basic
media activist course at every level of education — not just college,
but also grade, middle, and high school.
- • Offer that program to concerned parents who feel overwhelmed by the
media deluge themselves. Children especially need to learn to be
independent thinkers and not take for granted that what they see, hear,
or read is necessarily true or real.
- • Provide for-fee training to communicators who work in major local
institutions, such as PR and marketing folks from private companies,
governmental organizations and others. If they could be persuaded that
the principles matter, they might offer the public less BS and more
reality, and they’d be better off for the exercise.
- • Try to enlist another vital player in this effort: local media. The
traditional journalism organizations should be making this a core part
of their missions, but haven’t yet realized why, namely that their own
trust in the community would almost certainly rise if they helped
people understand these principles — not to mention the enormous value
of truly engaging the audience in the journalism itself. New media
entrants would benefit, too, if they embraced the principles of media
activism to produce higher quality work and deepen their own
conversations with their communities of geography and interest.
All this suggests a considerably broader mission for journalism
schools and programs than the one they’ve had in the past. We’re not
the only ones who can do this, but we may be among the best equipped.
If we don’t, someone else will.
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