Jump down to read my teaching philosophy.
What I teach
I've been an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism since 2003. I spent my first five years on the faculty teaching a class in news design, in which the students make up the design staff for the Columbia Missourian. With my designers, I frame everything in terms of contributing to the storytelling. My students tire of my asking "where's the journalism?" when we critique our work. As part of my design work, I served for five years as the adviser of Mizzou's chapter of the Society for News Design and coordinator of the College News Design Contest.
In my sixth year on the faculty, I took on two new challenges. One was taking over the teaching of a class I renamed Participatory Journalism, which focuses on all the ways professional journalists interact with the people formerly known as their audiences, as Dan Gillmor would say. As part of that class, students worked on MyMissourian, a user-content arm of the Missourian. The other new challenge was creating from scratch a class called Multimedia Planning and Design. I taught its inaugural semester in Spring 2010. We covered things like storyboarding, usability studies, information architecture and interface design.
As a faculty member, I'm wildly proud of my push for undergraduate curriculum reform. I was a vocal advocate for the need to move away from medium-centered sequences (magazine, print, broadcast) and toward skills-based paths of study. I began by urging my own faculty group (print and digital news) to think broadly and ended up as vice-chair of the faculty curriculum committee. In 2009-'10, we succeeded in passing what can only be described as an overhaul of the entire curriculum.
As a teacher, I've supervised more than 50 independent study projects, lead a two-week study tour of four European cities, served on 13 masters committees and taught seminars for a week for the Hangzhou Daily Press Group in China.
I've also taught on design, storytelling, interactivity and audience engagement for organizations like The Poynter Institute, the Wyoming Press Association and College Media Advisers. Let me know if you're interested in having me hang out with your smart folks, too.
My teaching philosophy
The best part of teaching at the Missouri School of Journalism, and at the Columbia Missourian, is learning. In no other job have I had the opportunity to continually step outside my comfort zone, to get smarter about something every single day. And given that I work in a field that is changing so drastically as to be hardly recognizable on the surface, I’m grateful to be able to grow and evolve at such a rapid pace.
These days, I’m teaching more subjects and more specialties than I could have imagined just a few years ago — or even, frankly, one year ago. I supervise designers and editors, writers and multimedia producers. I’m teaching blogging, social media and audience interaction in one class and web usability and interface design in another. My long-standing specialty of print news design plays a smaller and smaller role in what I’m teaching and the journalism I’m practicing. I find myself instead getting up to speed in a hurry about what our students most need to know to stay relevant. The design of print newspapers hardly falls into that category, so I’ve diversified.
There’s a big old “however” coming: The more different topics I teach, the more I find myself teaching the same things. The specifics might change, but the foundation is the same. Take responsibility for your work. Tell stories well and responsibly. Rise to the occasion. Be bold. Embrace failure. Own it. These are the things I challenge my students to do — regardless of the format or situation — and their grade depends on how well they do it.
Through examples I show, sketches I make and stories I tell, I expand students’ toolbox of ideas. And I assess them more on their ideas than on their execution. I challenge them to be bolder. Go farther. Stand for something. The expectations are clear, and the successes are celebrated. So is the learning. I talk to my students about my own evolution as a journalist. They hear me talk about what I don’t know along with what I know. They see me fumble curiously through things I don’t have answers for. They witness my relationship with changing technology: one of excitement and wariness, fearlessness and sometimes irritation. They see me experiment with things I’ve never tried before.
The process is my favorite part. A fantastic final product is nice, but it doesn’t give me as much pleasure as the evolution — watching ideas form, brains expand and thought processes grow more sophisticated. I don’t solve problems for the students. I point them in a problem-solving direction and put them in a problem-solving mood, then coach from the sidelines. I also model a spirit of collaboration and a respect for other departments in the newsroom. Students need to learn what their colleagues value, what they struggle with and what they have to offer. The best journalism is rarely produced in isolation.
Students see my enthusiasm. Showing my passion for what I do is a conscious choice, and I thank my college botany professor for showing me the value of it. He made me love botany. I worked for hours memorizing plant names and processes. And I just don’t get into science. But he inspired me to be part of his world. When a student finds a kind of journalism — my kind of journalism — that captivates her, I feel like what I’m doing matters. I enjoy making a mediocre student good more than I do taking a rock-star student from gold to platinum. I take more pride in helping a student find his way than I do from guiding one who already has her life figured out.
I don’t do any of this, however, by preaching the rules of journalism. In my world, there are very few rules. There are standards. There are ideas about what usually works. But when a student asks my permission about something, my answer is usually, “Try it, and let’s see.” The language is purposely collaborative — we’ll find out together whether this works.
I find that my teaching style and learning style are so intertwined that it’s hard to talk about one without the other. I learn because I teach, and I teach because I learn.
Certainly, I’m becoming a better journalist. I’ve worked in newsrooms where sophisticated journalism is expected and practiced, but I’ve never worked anywhere that had as part of its core mission to explain what sophisticated journalism is, and to analyze whether it has been practiced today. I explain most of my decisions out loud so students understand why I’m making them. Missourian editors naval-gaze out of necessity. And as I coach students, I often explain myself a few different ways, hoping one resonates with that particular pupil’s learning style.
As the industry goes through such sweeping changes, I’m in a newsroom of editors who are trying daily to figure out what success looks like in the new world. Instead of being immersed in a culture of fear, a culture of foot-dragging, a culture of strict job descriptions and slow innovation, I’m blessed to be in a go-for-it culture. A heck-let’s-try-it culture. Sound utopian? It isn’t. We struggle. We complain. We don’t always reach our goals. But we’re striving for them, and I’m a part of that effort. I’m learning software and skills that I hadn’t even considered a few years ago, and I know them well enough to teach them to my students. I’m great at making things up as I go along, and that enables me to jump into new situations without knowing what I’m getting myself into.
I’m also learning in the most traditional way: by taking classes. I’m nearing the end of my masters degree. The flexibility of our program has allowed me to mix classes in technology with project- and research-based classes, alongside graduate seminar classes.
My focus, though, is always on my students. I learn in order to stay relevant for them. I take more pride in what my students design than I ever have in my own journalism. I learn from them even more than I teach myself. They surprise me more than I surprise myself. They think of things I never would have, and they push me to be at my best.
I would be remiss if I did not mention something else I teach my students. They learn from me that it is possible to be a journalist and have a life. I have two young children, and my students see them in the newsroom. They hear me say I’m leaving for a couple of hours to go to a parent-teacher conference, or I’m taking the morning off to go to preschool. They know I want to be home for bedtime. Each semester, I have students — some mine, some unfamiliar to me — who approach me to share their concerns about work/life balance. They see how hard we all work, and they wonder if they’ve made a career choice that will stand in the way of their non-work life goals.
I tell them about the flexibility of the profession. About all the different schedules I’ve worked in newsrooms. About staying in control of your own career. About learning to say no. About keeping your focus on what is most important. And I tell them that if you really love what you do, and believe in its importance, you find a way to make it work.