Title: Professor, Program Director
Department: School of Communication & Information / Journalism
College/School: College of Social Sciences
Showcase Course: Jour 481 – Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Email: brett.oppegaard@hawaii.edu, bretto@hawaii.edu
“Rather than cloister learning in our ivory towers, I want to expand the university’s footprint throughout the community, bringing my students into public spaces, and involving members of the general public in high-level learning activities.“
Table of Contents
Showcase Video
Teaching Philosophy
Students learn the most about professional Journalism practices by doing them in real-world contexts with real audiences. That philosophy and approach is purposely aligned with the fundamental aim of the second UH Mānoa Institutional Learning Objective for Undergraduate Students, labeled “Do,” which emphasizes critical and creative thinking, research, and communication. Rather than cloister learning in our ivory towers, I want to expand the university’s footprint throughout the community, bringing my students into public spaces, and involving members of the general public in high-level learning activities. This approach not only helps to demystify the university, and to make it more open and transparent for its public stakeholders, it also can help to strengthen support for higher education in general by modeling some of the concrete impacts of an academic program on the ways in which people circulate information in a democracy.
Teaching Practice
On the first day of class, I start to build the framework to support my students by extensively getting to know who they are, where they’ve been, and where they want to go in their Journalism careers. This class is the capstone course in the Journalism major.
They all have taken several Journalism classes before, and they have developed specific interests and skills leading them toward various entry points in the professional workplace. Some want to do tough investigative reporting. Some want to be foreign correspondents. Some want to be cultural storytellers. Some want to be videographers. Some want to be photographers. There are many different possibilities for a Journalism student, so the first step for me in this class is to fully understand these particular students, as individuals, and then to co-create a plan with them for how to reach toward their educational and career goals in the 16 weeks we have together.
From there, I build a real newsroom experience with them, and with my collaborators at Civil Beat, by setting up a beat-coverage structure for the students (i.e., students interested in environmental news are clustered together on the environmental beat). We also develop and establish a professional workflow, teaching students exactly how the professionals do it, from story-idea generation to media production to the editing process to publishing to social-media promotion and even discussing the best ways to handle real audience feedback, which they get, in large amounts. In that respect, the innovative practice I will focus upon here for your consideration is the ways in which I am teaching a story-production process as a real-life exercise in journalistic practice. In this process, which stresses the use of professional best practices, I initially spend a lot of time, energy, and thought with my students on the creation of the idea for a piece of Journalism, including establishing a specific news angle that separates it from other types of non-journalistic discourses.
My attached Story Pitch Guide provides the details of the approach, but in short, I want to make sure students are thoroughly thinking about all relevant aspects of this story idea, including projecting how it will play out in the real world, before making any calls or setting up any interviews. Another innovative part of my process is to provide an early and significant quality check on the idea, in the form of a public pitch, where the student must do some groundwork on the idea and then articulate and share the idea with the group, including a panel of faculty and professional journalists, and gather feedback about it, before we decide as a class to invest in it fully. That means other students in the class get a chance to assess and critique the idea as well, with the greater philosophy being that we are all in this effort together, and all of the stories we do reflect upon our class and program, so we want only the best ideas to survive and to make it into the production phase of the process. That type of multilayered and communal critique is unusual — except in newsrooms — where editors typically sit around a big table every day and bat around the ideas they have for consideration, as a way to see which ones deserve more resources, attention, and, ultimately, to be published.
Once a story idea gets the green light from the group, the provided Story Builder guide outlines the extensive process each student undertakes to realize the potential of the idea and to develop it into a publishable form. That production process includes sharpening the story angle, learning from authoritative sources, sharpening the angle more, determining the best ways to express the story, in texts and in multimedia forms, and creating multiple drafts. That iterative process, with multiple check-in points, allows teacher and student but also our professional partners at Civil Beat to help to shape the piece and to get it into a position that eventually has to gain clearance from the pros, who show their confidence in the work by publishing it on the top journalistic web site in the state.
Then, we do it again, and again, as many times as we can, with as many students as we can, until the semester ends. Not only is this great professional practice for the students, it also contributes original public discourse to the community, about the community. These are stories that need to be told in Hawaii and only exist because of the hard work of these students, as a part of this innovative classroom experience, and because of the community partnership developed with it.
Impact
By the end of the semester, every student in this class was able to publish at least one story with Civil Beat, which is a significant professional accomplishment for anyone, at any career stage. Civil Beat is the only news outlet in Hawaii dedicated to public-affairs reporting, and it has been named the best overall news site in Hawaii for 13 years in a row by the Society of Professional Journalists’ Hawaii Chapter.
A year earlier, the first edition of this Jour 481 class and its collaboration with Civil Beat led to the production of five Hawaii Society of Professional Journalists’ awards for these students, including the first-place award in the top overall category (Student News Reporting in Any Media) and a sweep of the awards for arguably the most-difficult type of stories to produce, the investigative ones.
I expect similar accolades to be generated by this collection of stories as well. That means, in this case, and through this innovative community-engagement approach, I was able to support and guide all of my students to reach this high level of publishing accomplishment, as concrete evidence that they can do this type of work, in a professional setting in the most-competitive environment in Hawaii. And for the top performers, they also learned that they can do this work with such skill that professional journalists outside of this community recognize their achievements with writing awards and other types of national recognition.
Supplemental Material
- Syllabus
- Assignment Instructions