Tips from the AEJMC Teaching Committee
Teaching in the Eye of a Storm
By Earnest L. Perry Jr.
AEJMC Standing Committee on Teaching
Associate Professor
Coordinator, Doctoral Teaching Program
School of Journalism
University of Missouri
(Article courtesy of AEJMC News, March 2016 issue)
Last August, when I began planning for the upcoming fall semester I worked on how to use the growing social justice movement and the media coverage surrounding it in my undergraduate Cross Cultural Journalism class and my graduate Media and Civil Rights history course. The previous year, students here at Missouri organized in response to the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, a short, two-hour drive from Columbia. They met with administrators in a series of town hall events to voice their concerns about what they saw as a hostile campus climate for students of color. MU officials assured them that they would address their concerns. There were meetings over the summer, the Faculty Council formed a race relations task force, chaired by a fellow journalism faculty member, but as classes began tensions remained high.
My usual approach to teaching hot-button issues in my undergraduate class is to wait until heightened emotions have subsided so that the conversation can focus on facts not perceptions. I planned to walk my students through the media coverage of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, the Charleston church shootings and other racially-charged events of the past year. The goal was to teach students the importance providing context, voices, complexity, authenticity and proportionality to tell very difficult stories. At the time, I had no clue the next stop in the fight for social justice would be right outside my office window.
By now I’m sure that many of you reading this article have seen the events that took place on the Missouri campus in November. Those of us teaching at the world’s first journalism school helped guide our students through covering a national event while trying to deal with how it was affecting them personally. For many of us it was the teaching and mentoring challenge of a lifetime. For me personally, there were many sleepless nights and stressful days. However, many of the methods we have developed over the years in Cross Cultural Journalism helped us work through the challenges we faced. Here is an overview of the most effective methods:
It’s not about you! This is a statement we use from day one in the course and our students hear it until they walk across the stage at graduation. I found myself saying this over and over either in my large lecture class or in one-on-one sessions with students. Even when the story is not about something close to you, it’s hard to separate yourself. It becomes next to impossible when it is about you and yours. Many of our students felt they were under attack; some of them received actual threats. However, when they were assigned to cover the story or it came up in class discussions I advised them to remember that the story is about others living the experience and not us the journalists.
Concentrate on listening. This is a trait I wish many in the national media would follow. After getting students to realize that the story was not about them, I pressed them to listen to what they were hearing before making a determination. In other words, don’t listen for confirmation of what you already assume. Listen to gain understanding and knowledge. Don’t feel compelled to get every one of your predetermined questions answered. Listening leads to the authentic story, not the one you had in your head before you arrived. More on this later.
Know your history. Those in journalism education who question the importance of history in our curriculum should spend a week in the midst of a social justice struggle on campus. I spent a lot of time during the crisis educating students, staff, other faculty and national journalists about the long struggle for equality and citizenship. Many of the civil rights struggles in the 1950s and 60s began on college campuses. The current movement may have started on the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore, but it may be sustained within the halls of academia. What happened at Missouri is an evolution, not a singular event. Knowing the history of the struggle provides context and can help inform what could come next.
In the midst of the events I and other faculty and staff spent a lot of time listening to students talk about what they were experiencing and feeling. We heard how difficult it was for our students of color to report on the protest when they wanted to join their friends on the front line. We also heard the frustrations of our white students as they watched the negative images of the school being beamed from satellite trucks positioned in the stadium parking lot. Even though Cross Cultural Journalism has an enrollment of more than 200 students, we have created an open environment where students get to talk about difficult subjects in a way that educates. The goal is to talk to one another, not at one another. Allowing students to share their thoughts and experiences with one another helped prepare them to tell family and friends the authentic story of what took place on campus not only from their lived experience, but from that of their fellow students from all backgrounds.
There is more for us to learn. We are in the process of developing a case study based on the events of last semester that can be used throughout our curriculum. Last fall, I learned a lot about what I don’t know. However, I believe many of the grounding concepts taught in Cross Cultural Journalism helped our students navigate through the personal and professional challenges they faced and continue to face in this current phase in the struggle for citizenship.
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