Starting the dialogue with your principal
It’s often tough, that’s for sure, but keeping the lines of communication open with your principal is vital. It may mean the difference between the sudden imposition of prior review or having the chance to explain how your students weighed the pros and cons before deciding to run that controversial article.
There’s probably no better time to start the dialogue than the beginning of the school year. Everyone is optimistic about what’s to come, full of ideas and possibilities. Sometimes the principal is even new to the building and needs to know what you and your students are all about.
With that in mind, participants at each year’s ASNE High School Journalism Institute at Kent State have written letters to take back to their principals — or to have me, as Institute director, send along with one of my own. It offers them a chance to share what they have learned in their two-week workshop and to show their administrators the value of allowing students to make the content decisions.
This year’s group included a teacher who isn’t going back to a classroom this fall. Megan Fromm, a journalism teacher and media adviser in Maryland up until this fall, was moving and wouldn’t have a staff of her own or a principal to understand the process. But Megan understands it — an alum of an award-winning newspaper program in Colorado, a new addition to the JEA Scholastic Press Rights Commission and a top-notch teacher. So…her letter for this Institute assignment is for YOU. It’s designed to be something you can tweak and adapt, if need be, or simply fill in the blanks and use for your own principal.
Thanks for the useful letter, Megan, and good luck to all who use it.
cpb
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Dear [Mr./Mrs./Dr.__insert principal name here______],
With a fresh school year upon us, I wanted to take a few moments to share my vision for [INSERT PROPER NAME/DESCRIPTION] department this year. The start of each fall brings a rush of enthusiasm from students and faculty, and I’m excited to capitalize on that momentum and take our program to even greater heights.
I believe strongly that journalism, as a discipline, embodies so many of the skills we seek to impart to our students across the curriculum. Research, writing, editing, clarity, accuracy, and critical thinking are just a few of the skills journalism emphasizes. This year, I’d like to highlight an equally important aspect of journalism—and I think you could be a tremendous resource. As educators, we all seek to provide our students the awareness, understanding and healthy skepticism necessary to compete and succeed in a democratic society. What’s more, we all hope that our students will move beyond awareness and develop a desire for civic responsiveness. That’s where you come in.
This year, I’d like to push my journalism students to think beyond the walls of the classroom. I’d like for them not only to learn critical thinking skills but also to master ethical decision-making practices they can take with them into adulthood. To do this, they’ll need to stretch their comfort levels in many ways. They’ll need to rethink what topics they cover in the student newspaper, how they approach their sources, and how they present information to our student body. They’ll need to take off their student hats more often and pick up their reporter’s notebooks, looking for stories around every corner and stopping only when they have the best, most accurate information to share.
This won’t be easy, and it won’t happen without a few stumbles along the way. But if you think this sounds like a worthwhile pursuit, I’d love to talk more about my specific ideas and the support structures I’ll have in place to make it happen in a way that is best for the students. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to working with you for another great year.
Best,
Adviser/Journalism teacher
Note: Teachers, please feel free to modify this letter as you see fit. It should reflect a tone and intent you would feel comfortable using with your principal. Also, if your school mission reflects some of the ideas presented above, adding some phrases verbatim could also be helpful in beginning a thoughtful discussion with your administration.
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What student journalists learn is essential career training
By Fern Valentine, MJE
Working on a publications staff, led by trained student editors, clearly prepares students for future careers, not just a journalism career, but any career. Employers say over and over they want to employ people with the skills students clearly learn on publications staffs.
School districts across the country are cutting journalism programs from their curriculum. They don’t realize the enhanced learning opportunity they provide.
Other districts restrict those learning opportunities because they are afraid to let students practice some of the skills employers say they want like ethics, social responsibility, self direction and leadership. Ironically, that restriction not only inhibits learning, it opens the district to greater liability.
In some states, advisers fight to retain their programs when school districts seem to emphasize only classes that “teach to the test.” Advisers need to stress that along side the obvious writing skills, publications offer unique opportunities to learn lifelong skills to help their students succeed no matter what career path they follow.
A 2006 national study provides real evidence of this correlation.
In “Are They Really Ready to Work?” employers listed clearly on page nine the applied skills they want in new entrants to the 21st Century U.S. workforce, and 100 percent of them are integral parts of a student-run publications program.
They define “applied skills” as those skills that enable new entrants –recently hired graduates from high school, two-year colleges or technical schools and four-years colleges– to use the basic knowledge acquired in school to perform in the workplace.
See http://www.p21.org/documents/FINAL_REPORT_PDF09-29-06.pdf for the full 64 page report compiled by four organizations jointly surveying over 400 employers across the United States.
The study’s findings indicate applied skills on all educational levels trump basic knowledge and skills such as Reading Comprehension and Mathematics. They say that while basic skills are still fundamental to any worker’s ability to do the job, applied skills are “very important” to succeed in the workplace.
Among the most important skills cited by employers were Oral and Written Communications, Teamwork/Collaboration, Professional/Work Ethic, and Critical Thinking/Problem Solving.
Sounds like a great journalism curriculum to me.
Other necessary skills listed were: Information Technology Application, Diversity, Leadership, Lifelong Learning/ Self Direction, Creativity/Innovation, and Ethics/ Social Responsibility.
These skills are clearly developed and strengthened in the publications classroom where student editors lead the staff.
By working as a team producing school publications, students learn practical lessons in communication and in civic responsibility. They write for an audience of their peers instead of for their teachers. They research by interview rather than just by internet searches, developing people skills not taught in other classes. They develop critical thinking skills, learn to meet deadlines, and work within a budget as part of a team.
Presenting their work in a graphically attractive manner is another unique skill practicing the very technology employers want and need.
Even more importantly, students learn first hand the civic lessons our forefathers intended when they built a free press into our democracy.
Project-based learning provided by working on a publications staff clearly prepares students for the working world. These skills are enhanced when the students themselves solve the problems and take responsibility for what they publish. The more involved they are, the more they learn.
Advisers need to stress that students learn by doing and may need to call on former students, now successful in their chosen careers, to write administrators and school board members about the importance of the unique skills they learned by working on a student-run publications staff.
Only a few members of publications staffs will seek journalistic careers, but they will all be more informed consumers of the media and understand its essential role in a democracy.
When students are allowed to work responsibly as a team with the freedom to make creative and innovative choices, they learn and practice all the applied skills employers in all fields seek in their work force.
Districts need to recognize and encourage open forum publication programs not restrict or eliminate them. Advisers need to continue to make administrators and school boards aware of the unique learning opportunities a student-run publication can provide.
Read MoreRe-establishing our belief in the right forum
Just because the 2nd Circuit Federal Appeals Court recently handed down a decision in R.O. v. Ithaca City School District laden with shaky interpretations and references, it is not time to surrender or alter our beliefs.
“Drawings of stick figures in sexual positions clearly qualify as ‘lewd,’ that is, ‘inciting to sensual desire or imagination,'” Second Circuit Judge Jose A. Cabranes wrote in the decision about why the school could censor an independent student publication and the school’s student paper, which had attempted unsuccessfully to run the drawing in the first place.
The decision also said even though school’s paper, the Tattler, was a “limited public forum,” the cartoon could still be censored.
The Student Press Law Center reported in a May 18 article, “The Second Circuit, however, distinguished between a ‘limited’ public forum and a ‘designated’ public forum, holding that a ‘limited’ forum newspaper remains subject to Hazelwood.”
If not reversed, that decision could damage student media forum status, but other courts could also ignore it as an aberration.
The First Amendment Center’s President, Ken Paulson, said May 20 in a commentary (which also provides access to the student artwork), “the cartoon was censored because the school found it embarrassing, not because it would unleash the sexual imaginations of ninth graders. They can pretty much do that on their own.”
Paulson said images on the Internet and sexting expose students to far worse.
“In this environment,”Paulson wrote, “it seems a stretch to call anatomically vague stick figures ‘sexually explicit.'”
SPLC executive director Frank LoMonte said the decision was a misapplication of the law. “The court just fundamentally misunderstood what it means to be a limited public forum,” LoMonte said. “A forum where the government gets to pick and choose which cartoons it likes is meaningless.”
“All that this ruling really changes,” LoMonte said, “is that the term ‘limited public forum’ by itself apparently is going to be meaningless. And, as in Hazelwood itself, the court looked to the actual practice as well as what was on paper.”
If the adviser starts acting like the assignment editor, he said, it’s going to be held against the students, and a court is not going to recognize the paper as a true forum paper.
“You, the adviser, are ‘the state,'” LoMonte said, “and the more actively the state is involved in editorial decisions, the less likely the paper will be a forum regardless of what appears in the masthead and even in the policy manual.”
Simply calling student media “limited public forums” may no longer be enough, LoMonte said. In an email to the JEA listserv, LoMonte said any decent publications policy will have to go further than the “forum” buzzword and will have to enumerate with precision the exclusive grounds on which censorship is permissible. LoMonte has added additional information in a new post May 22.
For those who have “limited public forums” policies, or others concerned about maintaining their forum status, here are a couple suggestions:
• Look at your policy. If it just states you are a limited public forum, add or clarify language that explains what that means and how students make that the framework of professional standards. Look at model and state law language.
• Add or clarify language that shows how students will avoid unprotected speech and report accurately, thoroughly and in context.
• Add or clarify language that students make all final decisions of content and why that is important.
Although he warned JEA members the Ithaca decision could be the “worst legal setback” since Hazelwood, LoMonte also said it is such an outlandish overreach “it may become in New York, Vermont and Connecticut what Hosty v. Carter became for the college media in Illinois — the impetus for legislators to fix the law.”
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#WPFD
While you are re-posting “Free the press — all of it. http://bit.ly/f3wE2Y, be sure to go to #wpfd on Twitter, to add your comments that a strong segment of media in the United States is also not free: that of the scholastic media.
Read MoreStand up, shout out for student journalism
With the 2nd U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in the Doninger case, one thing is certainly clear: If we want to protect student expression rights and responsibilities, we are going to have to be the ones who stand up to do so.
SPLC executive director Frank LoMonte said the courts abdicated their responsibility to protect the basic human rights of vulnerable young people.
“Young people are going to have to organize and mobilize like never before to petition their legislators and members of Congress for better statutory protection,” LoMonte said. “This ruling is a wake-up call to every student in America that their rights are in peril and that they cannot depend on the federal courts to police even the clearest disciplinary overreactions.”
Adam Goldstein, SPLC attorney advocate, said the decision was flawed.
“It opines that students don’t have rights unless those rights are clearly established in light of the school environment,” Goldstein said, “as if students at home didn’t possess citizenship.”
It’s time for students and teachers to clearly highlight those rights.
May 3 is World Press Freedom Day. Embrace its principles to endorse student expression as a key constitutionally protected right of citizenship. Create forums to talk about how and why journalism is at the core of democracy and the building of citizenship. Demonstrate the viability of student decision making, critical thinking and responsible expression through student media that make a difference.
In short, stand up for the importance and legitimacy of First Amendment rights for these American journalists, whether they criticize or commend or simply report issues, placid or emotional.
We’ve said it here before, and now again: We must oppose policies and practices that limit student expression. We must stand up and shout out for student journalism.
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