Can student journalism build news literacy skills? Why or why not?

Participants: Paul Mihailidis, Mike Robb Grieco, Donald Taylor Patterson, Erik Duarte, Renee Hobbs

We talked about the high burnout rate of teacher advisors for student newspapers in general and the factors relevant to the lack of a student newspaper at Science Leadership Academy. It’s best when the teacher/advisor is knowledgeable about journalism. It’s important to have a critical mass of students participating for it to work.

We wondered: If you teacher journalism production skills, will students become critical news readers? One participant explained that journalists themselves may not analyze their work — the focus is on production, not analysis. We wondered how university tensions between production and theory might contribute to this.

We wondered: is teaching journalism production primarily a matter of teaching the values and the formula? Students shared their disengageement with both debate and journalism when they discovered that the activity was not primarily about the ideas, but about mastery of the format, structure and conventions for presenting ideas. We discussed the pros and cons to the structure and conventions of journalism.

We wondered: does a production oriented program give students time to reflect on the impact of journalism in society? On the changing definition of news?

We wondered: do students learn the right lessons when journalism education is strangled as a result of Hazelwood and its legacy, rulings that enable educational leaders to censor, shape, limit and control student expression both in and out of the classroom?

Renee shared a story about her experience as an advisor to a college newspaper when students uncovered a powerful visual example of fraternity hazing — as the story reveals, students don’t always make good journalistic decisions. Advisors have to respect student decision-making for students to experience the real power and responsibility of public communication. But adults find it challenging to give up control for this kind of learning to occur.