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Engaging Students in Environmental Journalism with Emilia Askari
35 Plays2 years ago
On today’s episode: environmental journalist and lecturer Emilia Askari
Askari is a prize-winning environmental journalist, researcher, and lecturer at the University of Michigan, where she teaches science, health, and public policy reporting. She also teaches a bilingual, virtual exchange course with colleagues in Bogata, Colombia, where students collaborate on journalistic projects.
Topics:
- 02:00 The two golden ages of journalism
- 06:25 The challenges of covering climate change
- 11:10 The “fifth estate” and how students can make a difference
- 16:57 Middle schoolers and problem solving
18:56 Students collaborating across borders
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Transcript
Connecting through Social Media
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Some of the students were very surprised that they could find interesting people who they might never have met any other way on social media.
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They could strike up conversations with them.
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They could follow them and get to know what these other people were thinking.
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And that also some of those other people were very interested in what the students were saying.
Introduction of Host and Guests
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Welcome to How to Have Kids Love Learning, where we explore ideas and strategies for parents and educators that help students thrive.
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I'm your host, Ed Madison.
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I'm a professor and researcher at the University of Oregon and serve as executive director of the Journalistic Learning Initiative, a nonprofit organization that empowers middle and high school students to discover their voice, improve academic outcomes,
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and become self-directed learners through project-based storytelling.
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Teaching students to become effective communicators is at the heart of JLI's work.
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Well, today's guest is Amelia Escarri.
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She's a prize-winning environmental journalist, researcher, and lecturer at the University of Michigan, where she teaches science, health, and public policy reporting.
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She also teaches a bilingual virtual exchange course with colleagues in Bogota, Colombia, where students collaborate on journalistic projects.
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Previously, she was an environmental reporter at the Detroit Free Press, where assignments took her to places like a Bear's Den in northern Michigan,
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and as far south as the isolated cliffs in Patagonia.
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Really great to have you.
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We just met recently this past week, and I wanted to chat with you about all the things that you're doing.
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And I think it would be great to maybe just start to have you talk a little bit about your professional career as an environmental reporter and all the great things that you did and how that sort of informed your switch into education.
Escarri's Career Reflections
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Okay, well, Ed, it's a pleasure to be talking with you here today.
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I really admire the work that you're doing, bridging journalism and education.
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So you mentioned that I teach at the University of Michigan, and I like to tell my students that I have been so fortunate to experience two golden ages in my profession.
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I am a fan of Sid Meier's Civ game.
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And the first golden age really was the golden age of newspaper reporting.
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You know, I was an environment reporter and I also covered other topics for newspapers at a moment where they were probably at peak reporting.
00:03:11
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employment in the United States and globally and where I was the environment reporter for the Detroit Free Press.
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And I got to travel all over the hemisphere, you know, and report about environmental issues, which of course, know no borders, right?
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And
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I was fortunate to be based in Detroit, which is the home of the auto industry, which has global impact.
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And it was the kind of the hub of innovation in its day a
Information Technology and Climate Change
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century ago.
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It was the Silicon Valley of its day.
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So it has had enormous influence on the Industrial Revolution.
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and on the invention of the production line, right, on the invention of labor unions in the United States, the growth of those unions.
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So it's been a very interesting base to be a reporter, especially covering environment.
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And I tell my students that the second golden age in my career is what we're experiencing right now, an incredible moment of innovation related to information technology, where there, while there are not as many job opportunities in the traditional news outlets as there were at the peak of the employment when I was traveling,
00:04:42
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to Patagonia as in the Amazonian rainforest, as well as the bear dens in northern Michigan as the reporter covering environment for the Detroit Free Press.
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Yet there are so many opportunities now to help shape the future of how we as a society
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think about news and define news and gather and curate it and share it and understand it.
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And so I think it's an equally wonderful time to be working in this space.
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And I particularly feel fortunate that
00:05:25
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I continue to be really involved in working with environmental journalism because we are at a moment now where finally, after decades of being sort of marginalized in newsrooms, the people covering environment news, we are now getting...
00:05:49
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a lot more interest in climate change as an important story that many, many, if not most people recognize is going to be a framing reality for the rest of their lives, you know, that we're all going to be working on as a society at every level.
00:06:10
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So it's very important for every community to have a good grasp on that kind of news.
Communicating Climate Change Challenges
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And I just think there's lots of opportunity and really interesting work in this area.
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Why do you think it's been such a challenge for journalists to convey just the severity of what lies ahead as it relates to climate change?
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There still seems to be this disconnect, particularly in, I guess, more conservative communities about
00:06:46
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you know, just denying what every year, you know, we see the wildfires, we see the, you know, the hurricanes and the devastation, but still there seems to be this disconnect with a significantly large part of the population and also politicians.
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You know, that's a very interesting question, Ed.
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Throughout my career, I've been involved with the Society of Environmental Journalists,
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which is an organization that represents the public's, the mission is to promote public understanding of environment issues through journalism.
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So it's a professional organization for environmental journalists.
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And I can tell you that through the 30 plus year history of this organization,
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we've been struggling with that question that you just asked.
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How do we help people understand the impact of this very important trend of climate changing when it's really not a classic news story?
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You know,
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it's news organizations are much better at covering events that happen on a today basis, or even a this week basis, like classically,
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If you in the past looked at the front page of an American newspaper, there would be stories about things government did today.
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There'd be stories that came out of the courts or the police system.
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Way too many of those stories in my view.
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There would have been some feature stories about people, fun, interesting people doing interesting things around the community.
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But it was very hard to get attention for climate change as it's such a story that oozes.
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There's very few events that are happening today that can be definitively declared as related to climate change.
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Even
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You know, in aggregate, we can look at all the unusual weather events, but even any one particular fire or storm, you can mention climate change now and say that it's part of this, experts believe it's part of this trend, but it's not like a very hard situation.
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that you can declare with certainty in any one particular case.
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So it's always been a challenge.
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But I think now that many people are experiencing the change in the weather, they are just like, there's a difference, of course, between weather and climate.
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But even the weather is becoming that people experience it over seasons.
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People are seeing a change.
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And so...
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And so these changes are following the predictions to like the climate scientists more or less told us to expect.
00:10:09
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And so now it's easier to direct more attention to these stories, but they're still pretty challenging because they're technical, they involve...
00:10:25
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They don't involve usually a storyline where there's a clear one villain or somebody doing something wrong.
00:10:34
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So they're more complex to tell.
00:10:37
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And there is certainly a lot of money, public relations money being poured into this topic and trying to influence public understanding and public conversation about this topic.
00:10:53
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And there's perhaps an effort to get people to feel personal responsibility, which is, I believe, a good thing.
00:11:01
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But yet also, that shouldn't be at the expense of also looking at the bigger players and their responsibilities as well.
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Mm-hmm.
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I want to talk to you about the work that you're doing with students and particularly younger students.
00:11:14
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And, you know, this whole issue of climate science and weather and everything reminds me of the 60s and 70s, where it was really young people that opened the public's eyes, you know, just about concerns about nuclear war and
00:11:33
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the warden of Vietnam and civil rights.
00:11:35
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And it occurs to me that it may be student journalists who are going to certainly open the eyes of their generation, but maybe even their elders about these concerns.
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Absolutely.
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Yeah.
00:11:51
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Do you have a... Well, tell me about the work you've been doing in Flint, Michigan.
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Absolutely.
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So in Flint, I've done some work with a terrific language arts teacher at a public high school.
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And I won't identify her or the school right here because it's academic research and the custom and academic research is to protect
00:12:19
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the identities or anything that could publicly identify, especially the students who were the focus of our collaborative research project.
00:12:29
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But her students, I did some research with her and her students looking at understanding of this concept called the fifth estate.
00:12:42
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And
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Basically, this is a concept that social media companies like Facebook, like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have been mentioning in their testimony before Congress in the past.
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And it's an idea that basically that we have three branches of government, the executive branch with the people like the president, the judicial branch,
00:13:18
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and the legislative branch.
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On top of that, people have spoken of journalism institutions as the fourth estate, a group that holds the other parts of government, the parts of government accountable.
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And now the fifth estate is all of us, every person in the world, using their communication information technology devices like their phones,
00:13:44
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to communicate their version of reality to the rest of the world.
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So the Fifth Estate is a concept where promoted by a researcher at Oxford University in England, Bill Dunham.
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And he is encouraging people to use this power
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to communicate with anyone anywhere in a civic way, to try and raise voices that haven't been heard in traditional conversations about civic issues.
Social Media and Civic Engagement
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So my work with those students and their teacher in Flint was about
00:14:28
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raising their voices on social media in a responsible way, looking for civic interactions and looking to develop their understanding of how to bring attention to civic issues that were important to them from their perspective as young people in Flint, which of course is famous for its drinking water problems.
00:14:56
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And what did you discover in this research in terms of the kids' sense of agency?
00:15:03
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And what did you discover?
00:15:07
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Well, some of the conclusions of our research project, this teacher created class accounts on several social media platforms and taught the students
00:15:24
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some principles around posting and finding information that was credible on social media and elsewhere and sharing that information on civic issues that was credible.
00:15:35
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And we learned that this exercise really opened the eyes of the students to possibilities
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about using social media in civic productive ways, you know, beyond, um, just, uh, communicating with their friends or looking for things that had to do with celebrities or fashion or other topics, music that they were already, um, spending a lot of time, um, you know, on social media discussing, it was, it was not like, um,
00:16:09
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leading them to something that was a complete unknown to them.
00:16:13
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It was already a large part of the lives of most of these students.
00:16:18
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And we encouraged them to use it in civic ways.
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And some of the students were very surprised that they could find interesting people who they might never have met any other way
00:16:36
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on social media, they could strike up conversations with them, they could follow them and get to know what these other people were thinking.
00:16:43
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And that also some of those other people were very interested in what the students were saying.
00:16:50
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So that was the research project and some of the conclusions there.
00:16:57
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You also did a news innovation project
00:17:02
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in Dearborn, I believe, with middle school students, right?
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Tell me about that.
00:17:07
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Yeah, you know, um, uh, I did, uh, an earlier project with a middle school, uh, journalism teacher in Dearborn, Michigan.
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It's, uh,
00:17:18
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a city that's known for having a very large Arab American population.
00:17:22
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So this school had, um, uh, a very high percentage of Arab American students.
00:17:29
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So they had a very, a different perspective than the Flint students did, um, uh, which, um, Flint is a city, uh, that is, um, a larger black population and, um,
00:17:45
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a pretty substantial Hispanic population as well, and some white residents as well, non-Hispanic white residents as well.
00:17:55
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So Dearborn, almost exclusively Arab Americans, especially at this school.
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So in Dearborn, we invited the students to explore problems related to information that was civic in nature.
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and try to imagine solutions to innovate, come up with some ideas that would help solve these problems.
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And that was a class assignment for middle schoolers there in that school.
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And it was a very empowering and interesting project, I think, for those students and also for the teacher and for me.
00:18:37
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Yeah, I can only imagine.
00:18:39
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I mean, our work started with sixth graders in rural Oregon, and I think people underestimate just the capabilities and level of engagement that middle school students can have to entertain some of these issues.
00:18:56
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I'm very curious about the work that you're doing in Bogota.
00:19:01
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Tell me about that.
00:19:03
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Okay.
00:19:03
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Well, to clarify, I have never been to Bogota.
00:19:07
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I'm doing the work in collaboration with colleagues, right, who are in Bogota.
00:19:16
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And so it's a virtual exchange course.
00:19:18
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And I'll tell you the story of how this course came
International Journalism Education
00:19:22
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to be.
00:19:22
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Yeah.
00:19:25
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Over the years, the university where I teach, the University of Michigan, has a
00:19:32
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terrific Center for Research on Teaching and Learning.
00:19:35
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And this center hosts every year a kind of a one-week conference on our campus right at the end of the winter term in May, where they just invite people to make presentations related to teaching and invite everybody to come and sort of polish up their teaching skills.
00:19:58
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So I'm a huge fan of this conference because I've always been interested in innovating myself in different ways, especially related to teaching.
00:20:07
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And so I attended numerous events that were hosted at this conference by a tiny part of our university called the Virtual Exchange Initiative.
00:20:19
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They were promoting people, professors connecting with colleagues in other countries in digital spaces.
00:20:27
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and doing some collaborative teaching.
00:20:30
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Now, most of their examples were language courses where language learning itself was part of a major focus of the coursework.
00:20:40
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But yet I went to these conferences, these sessions at the conference, because I was interested in it.
00:20:46
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Then the pandemic hit, all study abroad programs were canceled and the virtual exchange people
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got suddenly got the spotlight on them from the provost's office.
00:21:00
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And then they turned around and said like, who has shown interest?
00:21:04
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How can we beef this up during the pandemic?
00:21:06
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And they reached out to me and said, hey, you've kind of been a fangirl of our presentations.
00:21:14
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Are you interested in actually doing a virtual exchange course?
00:21:17
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And I said, yes, count me in, fascinating.
00:21:19
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And so they have a network of people who manage virtual exchanges at other universities.
00:21:27
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And they sort of sent up a flare saying, hey, environmental journalist over here wants to do a virtual exchange course.
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Who is interested?
00:21:38
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And the people in Bogota responded, not the people I actually wound up working with, but their administrators said, we teach journalism.
00:21:45
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We've got people interested in environment.
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Colombia is a fascinating country, one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, a place with...
00:22:00
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tremendous importance in terms of, um, um, its environment, tremendous contributor to, uh, the, the world's coal supply as well.
00:22:11
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Um, so, so, uh,
00:22:15
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Through these connections, I met these people who teach journalism and they were interested in teaching potentially around environment.
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They wound up visiting my course that I had been teaching for many years for one term.
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And then after we got to know each other, we said, OK, let's propose a joint course.
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And so we've taught that joint course for two years.
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It's taught entirely in digital spaces.
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We use Google Meet because it seems to be a more neutral platform than some of the other video conferencing platforms.
Bilingual Podcasting Course
00:22:51
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Also, Google offers a translation feature that's pretty magical, though not perfect.
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It will translate comments.
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It will translate the transcript of the meeting as you're going along.
00:23:04
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Again, very rough, but still helpful.
00:23:07
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Exciting.
00:23:07
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What are you learning from this work, this particular work?
00:23:12
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Oh, I'm learning so much.
00:23:14
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First, we are teaching in a mixture of Spanish and English.
00:23:20
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So I'm improving my Spanish a lot.
00:23:23
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I'm also like, I went and found a Spanish tutor from Columbia online through one of these many services that you can just go Google.
00:23:34
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The service I'm using is called Preply.
00:23:38
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So I'm literally studying Spanish on the side and learning a lot.
00:23:43
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And it's terrific that I found somebody from Colombia because I'm also learning a lot about Colombian culture, Colombian environment, Colombian media systems, government systems, both through the tutor and of course, through the work with the students and the professors in Colombia.
00:23:59
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And then of course, we decided that our course should lean on the spoken word because we are going to be working in a mixture of Spanish and English.
00:24:09
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And we don't want to, we don't want to forefront things like spelling and, and, um,
00:24:19
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you know, verb conjugation and all of that.
00:24:22
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So we decided to focus on podcasting and spoken interviews and weaving them together.
00:24:29
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So I'm learning about podcasting and about the difficulty of lining up people to interview across international borders and all of that kind of thing.
00:24:45
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Yeah.
00:24:47
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You know, it's funny, Columbia is one of the places I'm contemplating taking students in the next year.
00:24:53
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Several colleagues and I over the years, every other year, we pick a place and, you know, taking students to Vietnam, Sri Lanka,
00:25:03
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let's see, New Zealand.
00:25:06
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And we also have a study abroad program in Ghana, West Africa, that's been going for almost 15 years.
00:25:14
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But Columbia is so fascinating.
00:25:16
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And maybe, you know, maybe you will go.
00:25:20
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Maybe we can take students there together.
00:25:22
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Right.
00:25:22
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That would be fascinating.
00:25:25
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The idea of taking students there absolutely has crossed my mind, but it's a little bit of an expensive prospect.
00:25:32
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But the students, like one of the appeals of these virtual programs is that the cost is very low.
00:25:39
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So it's a little more egalitarian, you know.
00:25:46
Speaker
Well, I just, it's been a delight to talk with you.
00:25:49
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Thank you so much for spending time with us today.
00:25:52
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And I do want to offline chat about some potential opportunities to collaborate and the work that you're doing.
00:26:01
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And thank you so much.
00:26:03
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It's been a pleasure.
00:26:03
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Thank you.
00:26:04
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Thank you, Ed.
00:26:06
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I look forward to further conversation.
00:26:16
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How to Have Kids Love Learning is produced by the Journalistic Learning Initiative.
00:26:19
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For more information about our work, please visit journalisticlearning.com.