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Journalism and Education with Eder Campuzano
75 Plays3 years ago
On today’s podcast: journalist Eder Campuzano
Campuzano is K-12 reporter for the Star Tribune, the largest daily newspaper in Minnesota. Before that, he was the education reporter for the Oregonian, focusing his coverage on marginalized students. He’s an alum of the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, where he worked at the Daily Emerald, the college’s award-winning student publication.
In this episode, we discuss his journalism career and the ways journalism can help students unpack complex issues in the classroom.
Topics
- 02:07 Covering education news in two different cities
- 04:37 Learning loss, both academic and socio-emotional
- 07:13 The pandemic’s toll on teachers
- 09:20 How parents feel race and history are unpacked in the classroom, in Oregon and Minnesota
- 12:22 Eder’s early school experience and how its informed his reporting
- 15:05 Feeding students’ “metiche” with journalistic learning
- 17:41 The importance of local knowledge and community reporting
Recommended
Transcript
How Journalism Feeds Curiosity
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me to really indulge in that sort of gossipy side of myself, which, you know, academically speaking is more of a curiosity, right?
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You're just like so incredibly curious about everything.
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You just want to know, you just want to get in there.
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You want to be a little bit what we call in Spanish, metiche, kind of like meddlesome, right?
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And so what journalism has done for me and what it did for me kind of having that mindset when I was in middle school, when I was in high school,
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Is it fed that like natural curiosity that I feel like we all have, where if you find something that is kind of obscure and you get really interested in it, you can just kind of grab on until you know everything to kind of tell the world about it.
Introduction to the Education Podcast
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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.
Meet Eddard Campanzano
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Eddard Campanzano covers education for the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper.
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He was in the same role at the Oregonian, which was based in Portland, Oregon, and he's an alum of the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, where we first met in the early stages of our launching a digital magazine many, many years ago.
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Many years ago.
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How are you, Eddard?
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Thanks for joining.
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I'm doing fantastic.
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First snow of the season's just hitting and, you know, it's getting fun finally.
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All right.
Education Coverage in Oregon vs. Minneapolis
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Well, you know, we like to have journalists on this podcast when we can because, you know, given the work that we do with the Journalistic Learning Initiative, which you're familiar with, we use a journalistic lens to help young people just really –
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approach the way they do English language arts and helping teachers with that as well.
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And I'm just curious, as someone who's now covered the education beat for two publications, what are you discerning?
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I mean, are there any similarities in covering Oregon education to Minneapolis and what's different?
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Yeah, so I think that is that's sort of the tough thing about moving from one region of the country to another, but staying in the same beat, in that there are a lot of things that do remain the same, but a lot of things that are wildly, wildly different.
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So I get kind of tripped up.
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And
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I guess to start, the things that are really different is that when I was at the Oregonian, I didn't really think much about the fact that practically everybody in the newsroom sent their child to public schools.
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And out here, there's an array of options.
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I mean, this is sort of the epicenter of the charter school movement out
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And so you have a lot of different folks who send their kids, not just to public schools, but to charter schools, privates.
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Homeschooling has gotten really, really big in the last couple of years.
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And so I guess that's one of the really big things that kind of threw me for a loop moving from Portland, where, again, the majority of my colleagues sent their children to the local public school and out here where everybody has a different story based on
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where their kid goes to school, what helps their kid exceed, and kind of what really shapes their experience with education.
What is Good Quality Education?
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In terms of the things that are the same, I mean, I think that you'll see the thorough line everywhere being that everybody just wants their kid to have like a good quality education.
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And everyone just kind of disagrees on what that means, you know, what aspects of school are supposed to meet which needs.
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And kind of that entire debate that had kind of really started, I feel, really came up during the pandemic, especially like, you know, like so many other things, the pandemic exacerbated just the way that we look at different aspects of life, but kind of carrying on into the present as well.
Impact of the Pandemic on Education
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There's still a conversation going on about learning loss during the pandemic.
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And there are some that suggest that that's not necessarily the best way to frame it.
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But from your reporting, you know, is the narrative accurate?
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I mean, that, you know, we've got a generation of kids who really may continue to be impaired by that sort of, you know, period of time when they weren't experiencing face-to-face trauma.
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Oh, absolutely.
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Oh, absolutely.
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And it's not just academic, as I'm sure you know, you know, it's also social and emotional.
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It's, you know, psychological.
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Because one of the common things that you hear specifically from middle school teachers, especially eighth grade teachers right now, is that so many of the students that they see didn't have that same experience of being educated.
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physically in a new space with a bunch of new kids when they hit sixth grade, right?
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To kind of get that, well, this is how people from a completely different school than the one that I came up through kind of get along and their particular cultural values and needs.
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And so that sort of melting pot aspect, right, of the lower grades in middle school and in high school didn't quite get the acclimation to education.
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people in their peer age group, but who weren't, who didn't grow up with them, if that makes sense, right?
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And so a lot of the.
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Yeah, there's a difference of having an elementary school, the same teacher all day and then going to, you know, a middle school situation where you may have six teachers and and have to manage your time from one class to the other.
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And if you did, if you miss that, you know, if you missed like sixth and seventh grade and all of a sudden now you're in eighth grade, I can see how that would be a dramatic change.
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for kids.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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That, and then, you know, academically, I don't think anybody is, I don't think anybody in any district in the country is going to tell you that remote learning was a good substitute for that in-person instruction.
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And what I heard a lot of in Oregon at the beginning of the pandemic was educators telling me that,
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You know, there are so many variables that you can just like shut off when you are in control of the classroom that just you can't control when kids are at home, right?
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Like siblings kind of making racket in the background or a slow internet connection, right?
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Or you can't, if somebody has their screen off, you can't read their facial and kind of like body language to see if they're getting it or not.
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And so educators didn't have the tools that they needed to make sure that kids were on track.
Teacher Responsibilities and Burnout
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And so there's a lot of catch up happening right now in Oregon and in Minnesota.
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What about the toll on the profession itself?
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I mean, you know, from what I read there, we've, you know, we've lost a lot of teachers who just, you know, it was as hard on them as if not more so than it was for their for their students.
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And they've just sort of said, you know what, I can't, I can't take this anymore.
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Is that what you're finding?
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Oh, yeah, absolutely.
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And I mean, even before the pandemic, a lot of what you heard from educators was that they kind of felt like they had to be way more than one thing, right?
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Like they had to play several roles in a lot of ways.
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They became kind of social workers, right?
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It wasn't uncommon to hear stories about teachers who had snacks for students who didn't have enough to eat at home.
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And so a lot of those issues were compounded and, again, exacerbated by the pandemic where people
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Maybe if you heard educators saying that the needs were like 11 out of 10 before they're like 15 out of 10, right?
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Needs that we need to address.
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And, you know, in Oregon, right before coronavirus hit, the state legislature did pass a $1 billion per year education, you know, bill to tax corporations to give $500 million to schools annually to really help the most struggling learners.
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And out here in Minnesota, uh,
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Right before the pandemic, there was this huge survey that came out that showed that students' mental health was on the decline.
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And so that's only been made worse by the pandemic.
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So it's just all of the pre-existing needs have just been whoosh, kind of like...
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washed, you know, in a huge wave, even more so than they were before.
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And so to your point, yeah, you've got a lot of educators who are experiencing intense burnout, I think, three of the four or no two of the three most recent Minnesota teachers of the year,
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left the profession because it was too much to take.
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So that's telling you a little bit about how even the high achievers and the people who have the most to give and who are like the paragons for what the profession can be are just, it's just too much for them right now.
Debate on Educational Content Policies
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I would imagine another deterrent is the debate that's going on between progressives and conservatives about what actually is considered appropriate content in the classroom.
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So we know about the anti-CRT and don't say gay and all kinds of other legislation that's happening in Florida and Texas and other states.
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You know, I don't know what the climate is in Minnesota, but what's your sense, you know, just looking at education writ large, about the conversation we're having about race and ethnicity and history in the classroom?
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Yeah, no.
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So that one of the things that the pandemic did when there was a lot of remote learning happening is that you did hear a lot of parents, a lot of them conservative, but definitely some who fall on the more left-leaning side of things, who said that they didn't appreciate what they saw their kids sort of being exposed to in the classroom.
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And so whether that's conversations about gender, right, or conversations about historical events that they don't quite agree with, I mean,
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Back in Oregon in 2021, I covered two different superintendents who were fired by newly installed school boards who didn't like the equity initiatives that they were trying to implement.
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One of them in Newburgh that was really focused on making sure that LGBTQ plus students felt at home in the classroom.
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Another one in Albany where they wanted to, the superintendent there wanted to
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Make sure that the high school schedules on either side of town were in line with each other so that students from the, you know, kind of more...
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So that students from the less affluent, right, more Latino high school could take classes and electives at the other one because they simply didn't have the facilities and infrastructure at their high school to do it.
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And parents raised a stink about it thinking that their white kind of wealthier students would lose something because all of a sudden these other kids had access to it, right?
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And so you're seeing a lot of that also sort of play out.
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in Minnesota, which is a little bit different because in Minnesota, every 10 years, the state government, or every 10 years, the state department of education requires basically not a rewrite, but a revision of the current standards in a given topic, social studies, English, math, you name it.
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And right now we're in the middle of the review process for social study standards and what a lot of progressive standards
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educators and a lot of historians want to add to the standards here is a component of, you know, native history in Minnesota.
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And there's a bit of a pushback to that, as well as, you know, lessons on the contributions of like black Minnesotans to the state's history and other immigrant groups to the state's history.
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That's getting a lot of pushback from parents who just kind of want what they had when they were in school to be taught to their children.
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I got to imagine this is a
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reflects on your own personal
Eddard's Immigration and Education Journey
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history.
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I mean, you know, you've shared in other discussions that we've had before about your immigration journey and how it was really a teacher that you had who said, you know, hey, you can write, you know, and affirmed a talent that, you know, you may not have recognized yet.
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And I'm just curious, you know, what it's like to, you
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to cover education and have it be informed by your own personal experience, particularly because of your immigration story, which you might want to share a little bit about.
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Oh, for sure.
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So one of the sort of common threads during my early education, and frankly, a lot of my cousins, because a lot of my uncles, right, and aunts also immigrated to the sort of same area that my parents did around the same time.
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I have a pretty substantial family.
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I think at one point, there were something like eight kids with the surname Campusano in the McMindle school system where there hadn't been any before, right?
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And
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So, you know, one of the one of the things about being an immigrant in a school system is that, you know, in Spanish teacher is maestro or maestra.
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And you sort of had a singular like la maestra, who was your key person.
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person, like your point person at the school for anything from the free and reduced lunch form to figuring out what the schedule was going to look like to, you know, if there was going to be a boundary discussion, right?
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If your school was going to shift its boundaries, what that looked like.
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And knowing that, like coming up through that and covering school systems where there were and are substantive immigrant communities,
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Sourcing with those point people has been essential to getting at, you know, when there's a broader conversation, again, about maybe curriculum, about making sure that people get those free and reduced lunch applications in to make sure that their school gets funding for the next year.
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finding those people as sort of touch points to get deeper into a story where it's not just, oh, this big expansive change is coming to the school system, but to be able to say, here's how it affects this very narrow slice of the population or this marginalized group.
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That experience has really informed the way that I go about my job because I know where the cracks are, right?
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A little bit better than some other people might.
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And I know who's kind of working to find kids who might be able...
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who might be falling through.
Journalism in Education Settings
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You've seen the work that we're doing in schools in terms of introducing a journalistic lens in a more project-based way of approaching English language arts.
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I'm just curious, given that you're a practicing journalist, what you think, and you also have mentored students through various summer programs and things like that, what you think the benefits of this sort of journalistic approach are?
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to having kids grow and excel?
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Right.
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So, you know, to kind of relate it back to my experience and the experiences that I have, or not even the experience that I have, but to relate my journalistic experience and the way that it
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benefited me when I was in K-12 and the way that I feel a lot of my reporting peers kind of consider it is there's this great Latino USA podcast episode.
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I think it was late last year where I
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the student interns did an episode on the concept of chisme.
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And chisme is literally just translated to English.
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It's gossip, right?
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But in Mexican culture, like the chisme among the family is, oh, hey, who's going out with who, right?
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Or, oh, hey, you know, who's starting up a business over here?
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And should we go to that one when we already have an allegiance to this zapateria or this panaderia over here?
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And what journalism has really done for me is it's allowed me to really indulge in that sort of gossipy side of myself, which, you know, academically speaking is more of a curiosity, right?
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You're just like so incredibly curious about everything.
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You just want to know, you just want to get in there.
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You want to be a little bit
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what we call in Spanish, medica, kind of like meddlesome, right?
00:17:02
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And so what journalism has done for me, and what it did for me kind of having that mindset, when I was in middle school, when I was in high school, is it fed that like natural curiosity that I feel like we all have, where if you find something that it's kind of obscure, and you get really interested in it, you can just kind of grab on until you know everything to kind of tell the world about it.
00:17:24
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So in terms of, you know, journalistic learning, I feel like that that's really what's been key is sort of like this profession allows you to really engage with that curious part of you that just wants to know things.
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And in a lot of cases, kind of broadcast it out to the world, too.
Fragmentation of Media and Hyper-local Journalism
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At the same time, there's still a significant level of distrust, particularly in certain states around journalism.
00:17:51
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And I wonder, just by the time that we broadcast this or circulate this, the midterms will have passed.
00:18:01
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But there was so much anxiety around the midterm elections, I think,
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the sense that it could even turn to violence and everything else.
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And we saw none of that.
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And also some of the predictions about certain waves didn't happen.
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And I wonder if the situation we're in now where media has become more fragmented,
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And there is more slices of the pie and more need to get clicks and all that stuff.
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If media and particularly
00:18:41
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mainstream media has started to amplify extremes in the same way that storms and hurricanes are covered and are often given a, you know, some Godzilla name or something like that.
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You know, in other words, I'm just curious, looking at not what you're doing at your job, but just the journalism writ large, you know, is, is, is that part of the problem?
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You know, that the, the pollsters and the, and the horse race and all the different coverage that's so amplified seems to amplify extremes now.
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doesn't give the public credit for really having a better sense of what's really going on.
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I mean, I don't know.
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Am I off base with that or what do you think?
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You are.
00:19:25
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No, I think you're right.
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And I think this most recent election cycle, I think what it's really proved to us is the...
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how essential it is to have really hyper-local knowledge.
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Because if you look at, you know, who was predicting what was going to happen with the red wave or who was going to win where, for the most part, like the pollsters were wrong, right?
00:19:48
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But if you look at folks like the, a columnist who works at the Nevada Independent who called that, you know, that Senate race perfectly because he's in the community, he knows.
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That's kind of what we're missing right now as we're losing local, you know,
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outlets, and there's a consolidation nationally, the big flashy things are going to get headlines, and they're going to go everywhere.
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But the things that aren't going to travel far and wide, that really, really help you understand a certain location, or, you know, the way that voters or students, educators in a particular district think, or feel, is having someone who
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is on their level, right?
00:20:29
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Who is talking to them every single day to get a sense of what they believe, right?
00:20:35
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What they're looking for out of maybe education reforms or what they're looking for out of the educational experience.
00:20:42
Speaker
You know, again, I think to your point, that sort of mass consolidation of larger media organizations is really depriving us of that hyper-localized knowledge that, you know,
00:20:57
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let's just get to the heart of like what a community actually stands for.
00:21:01
Speaker
The newest host of It's Been a Minute, right?
00:21:04
Speaker
That podcast that Sam Sanders hosted for the longest time had this really great insight about, you know, black comedy in Chicago where she said, you know,
00:21:13
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You can't have specificity without study.
00:21:16
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And that's what we're really missing in a lot of places is you can't get to the specifics of what a place like Oregon or Minnesota is all about, unless you have somebody who's really well studied in those regions.
Promising Education Reforms
00:21:29
Speaker
I'm curious, are you seeing whether in Oregon or in Minnesota types of reforms in K-12 education that, you know, seem to have promise in terms of
00:21:40
Speaker
You know, we talk about education reform and it always seems to get reduced to policies that don't necessarily bear fruit.
00:21:52
Speaker
So I'm just curious if you've seen anything.
00:21:56
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Right.
00:21:56
Speaker
Well, in terms of statewide reforms, I think if there's one thing that I have...
00:22:03
Speaker
If there's one conversation that I've been privy to that I feel like has gained some legs, it's in the way that particularly elementary instructors, but even teachers up and down the scale from kindergarten to high school seniors are thinking about reading and implementing the science of reading in their classrooms, right?
00:22:25
Speaker
So for the longest time,
00:22:28
Speaker
Educators, literacy instructors have sort of been using outdated modes and practices and are really hewing toward there's a program that I'm spacing on what the acronym stands for, but the letters program has got huge bipartisan support out here.
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There's a handful of districts in Oregon that are implementing it.
00:22:50
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And what it does is really tunes an educator into the ways that different students take in reading instruction.
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Speaker
And so in the earlier grades, there's a greater emphasis on phonics and phonemic awareness that just wasn't there before.
00:23:07
Speaker
And what they're finding is also that some students need kind of like sight or like touch cues to kind of sound out words and just give them very different entry points into figuring out what a letter represents when it's placed next to a different letter, right?
00:23:23
Speaker
And to sound things out.
00:23:25
Speaker
And that's probably the most expansive sort of reform that I've seen that's really been sort of a grassroots approach.
00:23:30
Speaker
campaign among parents who have kids with dyslexia, right, who wanted better supports for their kids.
00:23:37
Speaker
And especially as they hear podcasts, right, from APM reports, for example, that examines how the program has really helped students in Mississippi and Alabama make enormous gains in their literacy skills.
00:23:48
Speaker
So that's probably the single biggest reform that I've seen that's kind of...
00:23:54
Speaker
gained ground, but Minnesota, like Oregon, is also really, really big on local control for its school districts.
00:24:00
Speaker
And so even if you have like a big top-down sort of push from the Department of Education that says, hey, we feel like there's something here, here's a best practice, let's all go in on this together, you know, you'll have the district or two that's like, okay, cool, but we like what we have, right?
00:24:15
Speaker
And so there's always that sort of tension in states like this where, you
00:24:19
Speaker
You know, local control is best.
00:24:21
Speaker
And so it's really tough to get statewide or national programs to really penetrate that particular shell.
Closing Remarks and Credits
00:24:28
Speaker
Edder, thank you.
00:24:29
Speaker
You're always generous with your time.
00:24:30
Speaker
Really appreciate it.
00:24:31
Speaker
And we'll talk to you again at some point in the future.
00:24:33
Speaker
Thank you.
00:24:34
Speaker
Always happy to help.
00:24:43
Speaker
How to Have Kids Love Learning is produced by the Journalistic Learning Initiative.
00:24:47
Speaker
For more information about our work, please visit journalisticlearning.com.