Tips from the AEJMC Teaching Committee
Transformation Involves Collaboration
By Charles Davis
Standing Committee on Teaching
Dean, Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Georgia
(Article courtesy of AEJMC News, September 2013 issue)
As a newly minted dean, I’ve been on a steep learning curve, one that has me energized and excited as never before. I’m spending a ton of time listening to faculty, students, staff and alums of the Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia – and the process serves to remind me anew of how critical the teaching mission of our program remains and of the challenges and opportunities of journalism education in the digital era.
The transformation of our disciplines, fueled by the difficult economic environment and the changes roiling the industries we partner with, offer tremendous opportunities for positive change, but only if we all remain open to experimentation, collaboration and yes, the occasional spectacular failure. It’s awfully hard to embrace risk-taking in today’s mass media environment, but that’s what we must do to remain relevant and take a more central role in the reshaping of our disciplines.
For the past three years, I worked half time for the Provost of the University of Missouri in a unique interdisciplinary program, Mizzou Advantage. My job title was simple yet evocative: Facilitator. My charge was to explore opportunities to cross disciplines and find external partners for the university to work with. The job was enormously rewarding, and served to provide me with an eye-opening realization. The way forward for journalism education, at least in part, must involve interdisciplinary and external collaboration like never before.
The steps we took towards building an interdisciplinary culture started simply enough. We convened forums for anyone interested in digital media, mass communication, from technologists to empiricists. The turnout was heartening, the conversations stimulating, and from those early efforts, a call for interdisciplinary research proposals generated a number of multidisciplinary teams working on all sorts of fascinating topics, from digital archives to opportunistic discovery of information and communicating science.
Meanwhile, I fanned out across the state, the region and the nation, touring corporate headquarters and labs, attending workshops and seminars and spreading the word that Mizzou sought partnerships and collaborative projects. Bring us your research questions, I said, asking corporate and government leaders to think of things that keep them up at night.
We began seeing new teams of researchers emerge from such disparate disciplines as engineering, law, art, English, Life Sciences and many, many more. Once the culture began to grow, it seemed like everyone had a research question to explore!
Interdisciplinary collaboration begins beyond the classroom, but quickly begins to influence pedagogy in new and exciting ways. At one of our social gatherings to encourage interdisciplinary networking, a young orthopedic surgeon approached me with an idea to head off ACL injuries in young girls. His grasp of the literature was encyclopedic, and he knew what he wanted to do, but he needed the help of an engineer and some digital journalists to explore it further. I pulled together a team, and now a class is working on designing an interactive video game platform to retrain female athletes in proper jumping kinesiology. This is interdisciplinary research and teaching at its best, presenting students with real-world problems in need of solutions.
It’s happening at Grady College as well. Just last week I sat at Turner Entertainment Networks, watching some amazing student presentations from our Advertising and Public Relations students who had been tasked with creating a promotional campaign for a new TBS show set to launch in the fall. I watched, delighted, as Turner execs took furious notes as the students outlined their innovative social media campaign ideas.
For the last two weeks, Grady health and medical journalism students have been featured in the Athens Banner-Herald. A team of journalists went to Reno, Nevada, to report on a unique health insurance cooperative being replicated in Athens. The coverage, nuanced and rich with personal detail, brought the subject to life.
Students presented with professional opportunities like these are changed forever. They excel, and by doing so, they work collaboratively with professionals. I’m confident that we’ll seek even deeper and more profound collaborations, inside and outside of our walls, because the energy of these projects is contagious.
Take the first steps towards becoming an interdisciplinary teacher. They can be small steps, but each is important and each leads to another. Perhaps you start by seeking a collaborative project with another department on campus. Or it could be something as small as lining up guest speakers from other parts of campus who can lend a fresh perspective. Warning: once you start, it will be hard to stop!
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