Learning to Think Like A Journalist: Examining the Pedagogy of Journalists as Teachers of their Profession

Spikes, Michael Antonio

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-q1wr-7y87

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Learning to Think Like A Journalist: Examining the Pedagogy of Journalists as Teachers of their Profession

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A proliferation of new media platforms have upended the traditional roles that journalists have played in society, placing their work into content streams that are populated by creators who mimic the surface features of their work but not their methods. As a result, journalists’ practices and news media that they produce have been called into question, and the public’s trust in their work has degraded. In response, journalists have taken on the role of teaching others about their practices in order to regain that trust (Ashley, 2019b; Fleming, 2012). These journalists do so through interventions such as training young journalism enthusiasts. For broader audiences who may not have aspirations of becoming journalists, these journalists also teach aspects of news media literacy (NML). While these programs have become more prominent in recent years, literature on the pedagogy undertaken by journalist instructors is nascent. This dissertation seeks to address this gap in literature through descriptive case study of the pedagogy of journalists. The purpose of the studies is to catalog the pedagogies that they draw on and probe the content of that pedagogy. The data used to inform this study consists of observations of and interviews with journalist teachers. I engage a methodology that probes the participant structures, or the pattern of speaking rights and obligations used in learning environments (Watson-Gegeo, 1997) to identify discrete instances of journalist’s pedagogy and the techniques that constitute that pedagogy. Findings illustrate a preponderance of instructionist styled pedagogies, characterized by personal narratives and explicit definitions of journalism terms and jargon. Results also provide examples of journalists’ use of boundary setting discourses and idealized norms of journalism as primary themes within their pedagogy as primary tools for teaching. Implications of this work are discussed for both journalism education and NML approaches.

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