Contact: Jennifer Greer, AEJMC President • 205-348-6304 or Sonya Forte Duhé, ASJMC President • 504-865-3633 | April 18, 2018

We, the Boards of Directors of AEJMC and ASJMC, stand in support of the letter sent earlier this month to Sinclair Broadcast Group about the danger of news organizations interfering with the journalistic process. By requiring news personnel to read prescribed corporate commentary without labeling it as such, Sinclair compromised the viewers’ trust. We condemn this behavior and encourage autonomy among journalists.

Please read the letter signed by deans, directors, and other leaders in our field below.

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April 6, 2018
David D. Smith
Executive Chairman
Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc.
10706 Beaver Dam Road
Hunt Valley, MD 21030

Mr. Smith:

We are writing to you as faculty and leadership of journalism schools that have produced many fine graduates who have gone on to work at Sinclair-owned stations across the United States. Our comments are informed by our awareness of these fine, responsible, ethical journalists at Sinclair stations who have spent years building reputations as professionals with high standards for accurate and ethical news reporting.

One of the tenets of American journalism and one of the foundations of American democracy is that news reporting serves as an independent voice free from government censorship and influence. Moreover, American news consumers have come to expect that news professionals cover news rather than advance the business or political interests of news organization owners.

While news organizations have historically had and used the prerogative to publish and broadcast editorials clearly identified as opinion, we believe that line was crossed at Sinclair stations when anchors were required to read scripts making claims about “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country.”

Certainly, no news organization is beyond critique. And, as the Sinclair stations noted, social media have been used all too often to spread “false news.” But these are two very different things – the work of professional journalists who produce real news and the false accounts on social media. In making the leap to disparage news media generally – without specifics – Sinclair has diminished trust in the news media overall. Ironically, Sinclair’s use of news personnel to deliver commentary – not identified as such – may further erode what has traditionally been one of the strongest allegiances in the news landscape, the trust that viewers put in their local television stations. Indeed, the fears articulated in the Sinclair script regarding an extreme danger posed to democracy by news media telling the public what to think describes our fears about the impact of the Sinclair must-carry script.

We have heard from students who now are apprehensive that what they have come to believe and appreciate about ethical and unbiased news reporting will come into conflict with demands placed on them by future employers. We would like to be able to continue to enjoy the relationship we have had with Sinclair, which provides our students with important opportunities to advance their careers while maintaining their journalistic integrity. We hope that your response to these concerns will make that continued and mutually beneficial relationship possible.

Click here to view the complete letter signed by deans, directors, and other leaders in our field.

<<PACS

Five Tips to Make the Second Half of Your Class Better than the First

By Jennifer Jacobs Henderson
AEJMC Standing Committee on Teaching
Professor and Chair
Department of Communication
Trinity University
jennifer.henderson@trinity.edu

 

 

(Article courtesy of AEJMC News, March 2018 issue)

The first days of the new term are like visiting Disney World for the first time. Everything is new and shiny. All wishes can be granted and all hopes fulfilled. The second half of the semester is more like holding on to the seat in front of you on a roller coaster. There doesn’t seem to be any good way to change course as everyone careens toward the end of the term, screaming in fear.

The second-half of the term doesn’t have to be all panic and final exams, though. With a few small changes, you and your students can leave the academic term feeling accomplishment rather than anxiety.

1. Ask students what is working (and what isn’t). Midterm is an excellent time to find out how things in your class are going. Not what the students have learned or not learned (what you grade) but how your teaching is going (what they grade). These formative class assessments are helpful for both professors and students. Not surprisingly, students often see class much differently than we do. Time and again, we think class is going poorly when students are enjoying it, or we think it is amazing and they are lost, bored or both. Midterm is a great time to figure out the reality (which is often somewhere in between these extremes).

An assessment like this can easily backfire if not carefully planned, though, turning into a gripe session rather than a productive exercise. To avoid the piling-on that can occur, ask things like: “what do you like most about class so far?” and “What one thing would you change if you could?” These questions allow students to give useful feedback that can actually be integrated into your future class sessions.

2. Implement the best suggestions. If you ask students for feedback and then do nothing with it, you are actually harming both you and them. It is better not to implement a formative assessment at all than pretend you are listening to students. Trust is an essential classroom element. Like molecular binding, it connects professors and students in a symbiotic, stable balance. I tell students before they complete a midterm evaluation of the class that there are things that I won’t change (assigning readings, giving exams), things that I can’t change (the date of the final, the number of credit hours of the class), and everything else, which can be altered.

In past semesters, I’ve changed the amount of material we cover each session, the options for writing projects and the make-up of student teams, all because students said the change would make the class better. They were right. It did. Every time.

3. Remind students you listened. If you ask students for their input, and you’ve made changes based on that input, don’t forget to tell them so. Try to include as many students as possible in the praise, such as “Many of you suggested moving reading quizzes to Mondays when there is more time for reading. That’s really paid off in raising quiz scores. Great idea.”

When students feel their ideas are taken seriously, they move from recipients of information to participants in education.

4. Change it up. By the time you get to the second half of the term, everyone in the classroom has figured out the routine and the expectations. Of course, this is what we want. To an extent. There is a fine line between routine and boredom. So, change things up. Go outside. Do a team exercise. Let them use their phones. Add a guest speaker.

Students never complain that they didn’t do exactly what was on the syllabus for one day, but they always seem to remember the mock trial or ethics debate or television history timeline you added to liven things up after the thrill of Spring Break has faded. Low-stress surprises are a great way to improve productivity in the last weeks or months of the term. Like the groundhog, we all need to get out of the winter rut.

5. Plan an end-of-term celebration. I am a strong believer in marking occasions with celebrations. Birthdays. The Super Bowl. Ice Cream Day. My family makes fun of the fact that I have 17 door mats, one for each calendar holiday (and some for holidays I’ve invented). This philosophy has carried over to the classroom as well. While I have many colleagues who think my celebrations are beneath the dignity of the academy, I am a full professor, and I’m pretty sure that it’s okay to have fun while you learn.

Examples of celebrations? Breakfast tacos during final presentations (I live in Texas). An exam review game with media fandom prizes (who doesn’t like a Wonder Woman pencil?). A snack free-for-all where students bring their favorite childhood treats (Gushers, anyone?). The end-of-term celebration is not a reward for surviving your course; it is an acknowledgement that they have reached another milestone. Something to celebrate for sure.

 

Teaching Corner

Some Thoughts on Advising

By Natalie Tindall
AEJMC Standing Committee on Teaching
Chair
Department of Communication
Lamar University
drnatalietjtindall@gmail.com

 

(Article courtesy of AEJMC News, January 2018 issue)

Academics have an opinion on everything, including the issue of faculty advising. Some of us would prefer to advise the students in their departments from the moment they step on campus until the moment they walk across the stage. Some of us would rather chew glass than add another layer of work and work-related stress on top of the triad of teaching, research, and service. Some people don’t know what advising is or looks like, but they are terrified of it in any form.

Now here is what the president of a national advising association said about faculty advising: “When it comes to helping students be engaged, to give them advice about what they need to do outside the classroom, faculty are not always the best,” said Charlie L. Nutt, executive director of the National Academic Advising Association, which represents professional advisers. “It’s not because they don’t care, but because they are hired to teach a specific set of courses. So they end up advising like they were advised in college: They give students a schedule and send them on their way.”

Ouch. That hurts. We can do better than that.

Many of us are required to do formal advising – the make-an-appointment-and-let’s-look-at-classes advising. Research on the topic of advising finds that these interstitial, informal advising moments as well as the more formal appointments play a role in promoting student success (Light, 2001), retaining college students (Feghali, Zbib, & Hallal, 2011) and bonding students to the university (Heisserer, 2002).

Whatever your opinion is and whatever your title and role is on campus, faculty can do more with advising. Here are some tips and ideas.  I hope this advice helps makes your spring 2018 advising a bit smoother and less hectic.

Understand the value and weight of advising. Kennemer and Hurt (2013) recognized that faculty priorities may not be solely focused on advising: “the quality of faculty advising can be impacted by the lack of reward for advising…Tenure track faculty are typically consumed with other responsibilities including teaching, scholarship, and service. In many cases, exceptional advising and out of classroom access to students is expected but has no real impact towards the tenure or promotion process.” Delve into your the promotion and tenure guidelines for your unit and the faculty handbook and note how advising is counted. If there are no specific, clear expectations for advising, the authors advocate for faculty to “[w]ork with appropriate colleagues and campus administrators to make advising part of reappointment / promotion / tenure criteria.”

Know your role. Faculty and graduate students are not professional advisors, and that is important to note. We should know what perspectives exist on advising as well as best practices for working with undergraduate students. Montag et al. (2012) outlined the three orientations toward advising: prescriptive, developmental, and praxis. Crockett (1987) believed that the best role for faculty to assume is the developmental role where the faculty is a guide/mentor. That role may not work for all faculty. Some faculty might only be information centers, and “Disseminating accurate information such as degree plans and institutional deadlines is important, especially early in the advising relationship” (Kennemer & Hurt, 2013). This is known as prescriptive advising. Finally, other faculty members may choose a hybrid method known as praxis advising, where “advisors give students expert advice on course selection, but also engage them in discussions about their declared major” (Montag et al., 2012, p. 27). Whatever your preferred role is, it may shift dependent on the context and the student (Smith, 2002).

Be prepared. Brush up on your institution’s requirements and your department’s requirements. Know who you are meeting with and review their status, current classes and degree plan. Also, be aware of additional resources on campus that may be helpful and necessary for students (e.g., the Student Health Center, Counseling Center, Office of Disability Support Services, Tutoring Center).

Document the appointment. Take thorough notes on what happened in the meeting. Place in the student’s paper file or electronic file so other faculty members or advisors have a record of what was shared. You may want to email or copy the notes for the student as well, so they can keep a personal archive of their progress toward graduation. As a department chair who has to validate students for graduation, I appreciate a complete set of advising notes in a student file.

Ask that your students be an active participant in the advising process. Crockett (1987) considered an effective advising situation to be one where all of those involved assume certain responsibilities and complete those responsibilities. For your students, their responsibilities should include thinking about the purpose of the advising appointment, having a list of questions or concerns, reviewing their transcript/degree audit for missing classes, and knowing which classes they would like to take during the next semester. The student handbook my department is developing gives students a checklist of things to do to prepare for an advising session.

Advising is not a one-time event. Developing a relationship, especially a student-faculty advisor relationship, requires commitment, trust, and satisfaction. For a student to develop a trusting connection, he/she will need to have frequent interactions with the advisor. Faculty can encourage this by contacting the students via email, opening up office hours for drop-in advising appointments.

Consider your professional liabilities. Many universities are moving to having all or part of advising done by people with the time and expertise to advise on pathways and document these interactions with students. Juggling multiple student appointments between teaching, research and service responsibilities can set up a faculty member for exhaustion as well as making mistakes. No one wants to make an error that would prevent a student from progressing in a degree plan or graduating, but mistakes can and do happen. Just in case, I would recommend that you consider professional liability insurance.

Look for discipline-specific advising assistance. Although we are not trained to do advising in most graduate programs, all of us – graduate students, instructors, tenured and tenure-track faculty – will advise students informally. We will receive questions about which classes to take, which professors (in other departments, of course) to avoid, and what I should do with my life, and we will try our best to answer those questions. If you cannot find any, ask your organization or divisions to provide relevant, specific help via the annual conference, webinars and task forces/committees.

References
Crockett, D. S. (1987). Advising skills, techniques and resources: A compilation of materials related to the organization and delivery of advising services. Iowa City: ACT Corporation.
Feghali, T., Zbib, I., & Hallal, S. (2011). A web-based decision support tool for academic advising. Educational Technology & Society, 14(1), 82.94.
Heisserer, D. L., & Parette, P. (2002). Advising at-risk students in college and university settings. College Student Journal, 36(1), 69-84.
Kennemer, C., & Hurt, B. (2013). Faculty advising. Retrieved from http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/Resources/Clearinghouse/View-Articles/Facultyadvising.aspx
Light, R.J. (2001). Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds. Boston: Harvard University Press.
Montag, T., Campo, J., Weissman, J., Walmsley, A., & Snell, A. (2012). In their own words: Best practices for advising millennial students about majors. NACADA Journal, 32(2), 26-35.
Selingo, J. (2014, April 13). Who advises best, pros or profs? Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/education/edlife/who-advises-best-pros-orprofs.html?_r=0
Smith, J. S. (2002). First-year student perceptions of academic advisement: A qualitative study and reality check. NACADA Journal, 22(2), 39-49

 

Teaching Corner

Strategies for Leading Discussions of Race and Diversity in the Classroom

By Karen M. Turner
AEJMC Standing Committee on Teaching
Associate Professor
Department of Journalism
Temple University
kturner@temple.edu

 

(Article courtesy of AEJMC News, November 2017 issue)

My original idea for this month’s column was to focus on recapping and providing advice from a robust teaching panel discussion I participated in at the 2017 Chicago AEJMC Conference entitled, “Your Candidate Is a Loser – Strategies for Leading Discussions of Race and Diversity in the Classroom.” And then Hurricane Maria slammed into the Caribbean and I got another idea.

Since both are important, this column will address two issues.

Strategies for Leading Discussions of Race and Diversity in the Classroom

The idea for the AEJMC panel came from Iona’s Mitchell Bard. He said the spark was watching the now president make racist comments during the presidential campaign and emboldening people with similar views to speak so openly.  He questioned what he would do if a student said something offensive or insensitive in his class.  As teaching chair of the Political Communication Interest Group, Bard said he approached the Minorities and Communication Division’s Melody Fischer about co-sponsoring and the panel collaboration was born.

All four panelists provided tips from their well-worn teaching toolboxes and strategized with audience participants about specific classroom challenges.  I shared many of the teaching strategies I wrote about in my March 2017 column:

http://www.aejmc.org/home/2017/02/conversation-about-race/

What made the panel so valuable was the diversity of the panelists and their institutional environments.

Here are some words of wisdom from panelist Katy Culver, Wisconsin-Madison (kbculver@wisc.edu):

• Pay attention to your course materials. I realized my readings in a technology class tilted almost entirely male. One of my lectures on visual communication included only one example featuring a person of color and that was in a negative context. Things like the names you include in assignments or quizzes matter. Diversify across the board.

• Recognize that group projects can be a problem. Students’ implicit — or explicit — biases can make these projects thorny, yet problems are often invisible to you. I set up surveys at different mile markers in a project and ask students about the dynamics in the group. I don’t make it explicitly about race, gender, class or other variables that can raise bias concerns. Instead, I ask things like, “Is there anything I can do to help you be successful within your group?”

One time, an adult returning student used this opportunity to tell me she felt shunned by her group members because she worked two jobs to put herself through school, which made meeting times tough to coordinate. I was able to both advise her on how to respond directly and alter my schedule, so class time could be used for meeting.

• Talk about bias early and openly. I have students take a survey at the start of the semester about the kinds of qualities they think they have and the kinds they value in other people. I talk about how we may think we value others regardless of our differences, but what we think and how we act can be at odds.

I have them do a reading on unconscious bias, and we talk about it in class. I haven’t had much luck with readings that are academic in nature. Instead, I use more popular ones, like this Fast Company article: https://www.fastcompany.com/3044738/7-simple-methods-to-fight-against-your-unconscious-biases.

I also use current examples, saying things like, “I watched CBS News this morning and got ticked off because they went 21 minutes before I saw a female source used in a story. Do you guys ever notice that? Why do you think that happens?”

The Importance of Leading Discussions about News Coverage

I always teach a media literacy module focusing on what stories are missing from the news; or perhaps were covered in depth just weeks ago and have disappeared from the headlines; or those stories covered but perhaps not completely.

A day or so following Hurricane Maria’s destruction in the Caribbean, I was scheduled to begin this literacy module.  We talked about the top stories in the news including the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and the devastating conditions reported on the ground in Puerto Rico.

I pressed them to tell me about the condition of the other islands that were in Maria’s path.  Then I asked them to check their various mainstream media sources for hurricane reports.  What we found were numerous stories about the worsening situation in Puerto Rico.  At this point I shared with my class a friend’s personal story to illustrate the reality of stories not covered.

The weekend following the storm, a colleague was desperately trying to get her daughter and fiancé off the island of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. That group of islands had suffered devastating damage, too, resulting in no electricity, lack of water and limited access to medical care – just to name a few of their challenges. However, the story of the U.S. Virgin Islands was missing from U.S. mainstream media reports.

When I personalized a situation where reporting was lacking, the students seemed to grasp how the gatekeeping function of journalism can fall short.  I admitted that my personal connection to the Virgin Islands made me more aware of the reportorial shortcomings. We then identified other stories that had disappeared from the headlines such as the latest about ISIS, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

What’s encouraging is we then looked at several reputable social media sources where we found stories that were outside the reporting of mainstream outlets.  With so much media attention to low-hanging fruit and shiny objects, it’s always good to remind ourselves and this generation of news consumers to be aware of those important issues that are under-covered or not covered at all.

Teaching Corner