Journalism 394C - S-Community Journalism
Fall
2018
01
3.00
Nicholas Mcbride
W 12:20PM 3:20PM
UMass Amherst
75922
Integ. Learning Center S414
mcbride@journ.umass.edu
The Community Journalism Project is an intermediate reporting class that sends students into ghettos, barrios, and poor white and working class communities of Western Massachusetts. Journalists have become increasingly out of touch with the majority of the population. The working class, the poor, minorities are often overlooked in the mainstream media. This course puts students into the homeless shelters, food pantries, health clinics, community centers, public schools, and low-wage job sites in hope of finding solutions and answers from the real experts. Intensive field work, substantial newswriting, and devotion to reading comprise the calculus of this course.
Open to Senior, Junior and Sophomore Journalism majors only. The Community Journalism Project is a reporting and writing collaboration with the journalism and English students at the High School of Commerce in Springfield. Each week we catch our UMass yellow school bus at noon, travel from the Haigis Mall to Springfield, returning to campus at five.
Since 2008 UMass undergrads have served as mentors and writing coaches at Commerce. This is a hybrid journalism as civics and literacy class that is a reciprocal intellectual exchange between undergrads rich in opportunity and black brown and poor white students rich in insight and intellectual capacity. The high school students share truths that most undergrads have only read about. The undergrads in turn share knowledge and resources only available to students in higher education. Many of these high school students have given up on school because they are bombarded by messages that tell them school has given up on them.
Over the years we have been able to get countless students reengaged with school simply by being available and validating their wisdom as valuable. Undergraduates have been reengaged as well, moving away from the idea of bachelors degree as workforce passport, to a deeper understanding of why journalism is the only profession enshrined in and protected by the US Constitution.
In the process of multimedia storytelling students do what the educational theorist Paulo Freire calls ?intervening in history.? Students realize that exposing facts from ignored sources reveals new truths and increased possibilities.
Dealing with the subject matters of poverty, racism, social inequality, food insecurity, misuse of police authority and institutional racism, while simultaneously telling the stories of hope, resilience and unrecognized intellectualism, our ambition is to move from holding up a mirror to social injustice to an understanding that journalism is a social action in itself, that has the power to make our work in progress democracy into a more perfect union.
Since 2008 UMass undergrads have served as mentors and writing coaches at Commerce. This is a hybrid journalism as civics and literacy class that is a reciprocal intellectual exchange between undergrads rich in opportunity and black brown and poor white students rich in insight and intellectual capacity. The high school students share truths that most undergrads have only read about. The undergrads in turn share knowledge and resources only available to students in higher education. Many of these high school students have given up on school because they are bombarded by messages that tell them school has given up on them.
Over the years we have been able to get countless students reengaged with school simply by being available and validating their wisdom as valuable. Undergraduates have been reengaged as well, moving away from the idea of bachelors degree as workforce passport, to a deeper understanding of why journalism is the only profession enshrined in and protected by the US Constitution.
In the process of multimedia storytelling students do what the educational theorist Paulo Freire calls ?intervening in history.? Students realize that exposing facts from ignored sources reveals new truths and increased possibilities.
Dealing with the subject matters of poverty, racism, social inequality, food insecurity, misuse of police authority and institutional racism, while simultaneously telling the stories of hope, resilience and unrecognized intellectualism, our ambition is to move from holding up a mirror to social injustice to an understanding that journalism is a social action in itself, that has the power to make our work in progress democracy into a more perfect union.