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The Transformative Power of Journalistic Learning with Ellen Austin
43 Plays2 years ago
On today’s episode: journalism educator Ellen Austin
Austin is a nationally recognized and distinguished journalism educator. She was the director of the journalism program at the Harker School in San Jose, taught journalism and English at Palo Alto High School where she created The Viking – the first all-sports, regularly published high school publication – and she previously taught journalism and English in Minnesota.
Topics:
- 02:48 Austin’s journalism journey
- 07:14 Puting “English language arts” to work with journalism
- 13:00 The need to build agency and problem solving skills
- 17:28 Understanding students’ (and teachers’) free speech rights at school
- 22:56 The importance of creating representative newsrooms
- 30:21 Unpacking distrust around “the media” and the future of journalism
Recommended
Transcript
Proactivity in Journalism vs. Passivity in English
00:00:08
Speaker
In your English classroom, you can sit on your butt in a chair with your shoulders back and your feet pushed forward and you can wait for someone to pour stuff into your head and then give it back to one person, your teacher, on request.
00:00:24
Speaker
But if you're in the journalism classroom, you are going to be leaning forward.
00:00:28
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You're going to be on the balls of your feet.
00:00:31
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The initiative rests with you.
00:00:32
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The ball is in your hands to move it.
00:00:35
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and you're going to have to make that shift and it won't happen immediately.
Introduction to the Podcast and Host
00:00:42
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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.
00:00:50
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I'm your host, Ed Madison.
00:00:51
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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 non-profit organization that empowers middle and high school students to discover their voice, improve academic outcomes,
00:01:05
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and become self-directed learners through project-based storytelling.
00:01:09
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Teaching students to become effective communicators is at the heart of JLI's work.
Ellen Austin's Career and Impact
00:01:23
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Ellen Austin is a rock star in journalism education.
00:01:26
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She taught journalism and English for many years at the Harker School in San Jose and at Palo Alto High School, which is where we first met.
00:01:33
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She advised the Viking Sports Magazine and website, which earned a Columbia Scholastic Press gold crown several times, actually.
00:01:41
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And I think it's noted as being one of the first high school sports publications, which we'll talk about.
00:01:48
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Numerous other awards, National Scholastic Press Association, Journalism Education Association.
00:01:54
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She also co-advised In Focus, a daily broadcast news program at Palo Alto High.
00:01:59
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And then prior to California, she taught English and journalism in Minnesota.
00:02:03
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She received JEA's Rising Star Award in 2006, which was the inaugural year of that award, and was named the 2011 California Journalism Education Coalition Journalism Teacher of the Year.
00:02:16
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That's a mouthful.
00:02:17
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And was the Dow Jones News Fund.
00:02:20
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2012 National High School Journalism Teacher of the Year, which is a real significant accomplishment.
00:02:27
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She holds a gold key from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association and received the Pioneer Award.
00:02:34
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So that's a lot.
00:02:36
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It's a mouthful, but you're deserving of all those accolades, Ellen, and welcome.
00:02:42
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So glad to have you on our program.
00:02:45
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I thought we would start by just maybe hearing a little bit about how you were bitten by the journalism bug.
00:02:54
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Tell us kind of your journey into becoming a journalism educator.
Ellen's Journey to Teaching Journalism
00:02:59
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Well, it's the accidental path of a career teacher, right?
00:03:04
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This was not my life journey.
00:03:05
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This was not my plan.
00:03:08
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But going back to when I was a kid, I got into photography and
00:03:12
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when I was in middle school and high school, and that led me to pursue getting on the high school journalism publications.
00:03:20
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So I joined my high school paper and yearbook staff as a freshman and did that all through high school.
00:03:25
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I wouldn't say that we were, you know, thank you very much, by the way.
00:03:29
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It's great to be here.
00:03:30
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I'm loving this.
00:03:30
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And it's a little humbling to hear the list of awards read out loud.
00:03:35
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And I always want to say, those are great.
00:03:38
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I am glad that our publications did so well and that my kids were so passionate and so skilled and so committed to what they did in all of the Scholastic Journalism publications I've been fortunate enough to advise.
00:03:51
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I would also say this, though, as I'm talking about my journey, my high school paper and my high school yearbook
00:03:57
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were we I don't I don't think we ever got a regional award, not a state award and certainly not a national award.
00:04:03
Speaker
And I still was up all night long trying to get the picture done for the paper and I was at the basketball games and you know so the love of doing it is is I really think somewhat separate from any hardware you get and I did not come from legendary
00:04:18
Speaker
Sarah Silverman, Journalism legacy programs I came from what I had a great advisor but we just did it because we loved it, so I was on this in high school it's been interesting to me to
Influence of High School Journalism on Careers
00:04:27
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see the.
00:04:27
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Sarah Silverman, paths that so many kids in my high school journalism program have crafted many of them have gone on to either journalism or advocacy work or politics.
00:04:38
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And of course, quite a few into teaching as well.
00:04:40
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But I find that interesting that there seems to be such a push to find your voice and do some good work in the world with where we came from in high school.
00:04:51
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I came to teaching as a second career.
00:04:52
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I was doing other things.
00:04:54
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I didn't major in journalism.
00:04:56
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And I kind of, through a backdoor, got into English education.
00:05:01
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The school that I was in in Minnesota, which was in a farm town in southern Minnesota, a little tiny town of about 3,000 people.
00:05:08
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When I got there, we had a yearbook.
00:05:10
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I didn't have anything to do with that, but there was no school paper.
00:05:14
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And that reminded me of my growing up times and how important the paper was to me.
00:05:19
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We tried really hard.
00:05:19
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We weren't that great, but it really mattered.
00:05:22
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So I asked some kids if they would join in and we would just try to do a paper.
00:05:26
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This was in the moment, the transition out of film, the transition out of pen and paper graphic design,
00:05:36
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where we were beginning to move into that digital age right at the turn of the 2000s.
00:05:41
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So a lot of change management and becoming comfortable with what you know today is not the thing you're gonna need to know tomorrow.
Teaching at Pali and Sports Journalism
00:05:50
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That led to a path moving on in Minnesota.
00:05:54
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And then the big move gave up my Toro snowblower to move to California, go to Pali.
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The irony, of course, was that when I was in high school, there was no Title IX.
00:06:04
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I went to high school pre-Title IX.
00:06:06
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Girls sports was really not celebrated at nearly the level it always should have been.
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And watching the women's NCAA tournament, I'm reminded of how important women's sports are in every way.
00:06:19
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So when I got to Pali and they said, you're going to do a sports magazine, I was like, okay.
00:06:25
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I never played on a team.
00:06:27
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You know, I really didn't know anything about that.
00:06:29
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And you learn fast.
00:06:30
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So what I found was that I loved it.
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My staff was pretty much 100% athletes themselves in every sport.
00:06:42
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And they were there, there is no one who cares more about the story on the field than a fellow athlete.
00:06:49
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And we did some stats over half of the kids in any high school are playing a sport, at least one sport.
00:06:57
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And the other half know someone who played a sport.
00:07:00
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So there was an audience to hear the story.
00:07:03
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And our mantra there was, you can talk about any issue that's resonant to teens and in life through the lens of sports.
00:07:12
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And that's what we did.
00:07:14
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Let me ask you, because there's so much to talk about here with you, but we have many educators and parents who listen to this program, but may not necessarily...
Engagement and Agency in Journalism Education
00:07:31
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understand why we're so passionate about this journalistic approach to learning.
00:07:37
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And one of the quotes that I reminded you of from you when we talked many, many years ago, as you said, journalism is English language arts being put to work.
00:07:49
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And so if you could sort of describe the shift that you've seen in students when they are exposed to journalism,
00:07:59
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the journalistic lens compared to the other areas of academics in terms of them having choice and agency and all those things that we know can benefit kids.
00:08:10
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It's interesting, the first word that I was gonna focus on when you were framing the question was the word agency.
00:08:17
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I'm not gonna lie, I love, I am passionate about writing and words in every single way.
00:08:22
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I'm passionate about the visuals too, but I love reading and I love teaching about writing and I've taught every writing class there is.
00:08:28
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When I went to Harker, I was
Benefits of Journalism in Skill Development
00:08:30
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fortunate enough to have a principal who said, would you like to teach journalism full-time?
00:08:34
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And this was after almost a 20 year career at that point of having taught all English all the time.
00:08:40
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And I was like, yeah, let me in coach, let me do it.
00:08:43
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Because in the pursuit of journalism, you're right, it is English language arts being put to work.
00:08:52
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The whole reason that we train kids of how to analyze a text and how to be a clear writer and how to be an analytical thinker isn't so that everybody goes on to be a PhD English lit professor in their future career.
00:09:06
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We do it with the eye to that being a core skill that will serve a person no matter what they choose to do in their later life, that they will be a more seasoned effective communicator, that they will have the confidence to kind of share some cultural language together that comes through the study of literature.
00:09:25
Speaker
And somewhere along the way, I feel that we've gotten a disconnect that it's we're studying, we're studying this kind of in a in a not always linking it up to the other subject matter in a school and not always linking it up in the kids minds to you're not reading a book, you're reading a culture, you're reading, you're reading a way of you to meet words and to respond to them.
00:09:49
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You're meeting people.
00:09:50
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you're meeting skill sets to make you be able to get what you want in the world to happen with more facility.
00:09:59
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So that's how I feel when we walk into the journalism classroom.
00:10:04
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I can take a kid from anywhere in my journalism classroom.
00:10:07
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They can be that English kid.
00:10:09
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One of my Viking reporters was...
00:10:13
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she did some running and played a little sports, but her main thing was playing professional level Bach on the piano, clavichord, and now other things.
00:10:22
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And she's actually, she's lived a life in music, but she was on the Viking staff just crushing it.
00:10:28
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In fact, she got the first prize from the Giants baseball organization for best sports writing.
00:10:33
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Now,
00:10:35
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that should tell you that a polymath who cares so much about music and other things, who can also bring that mind to sports journalism, that's what we wanna see.
Attracting Diverse Interests through Journalism
00:10:47
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So I can have in 15 kids in a room, three kids who are passionate about, so at Harker, I wasn't doing sports, I was doing the full spectrum advising of newspaper, online, yearbook, and then this huge kind of a humans of your school feature profile project.
00:11:03
Speaker
And in my classroom, I would have the kid who really wanted to just read about the NASA work and what's happening with the telescopes.
00:11:11
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I would have three kids who wanted to only talk about the NFL draft.
00:11:14
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I would have kids who were all about social justice.
00:11:17
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I'd have kids who were all about...
00:11:19
Speaker
you know general science and they were all in the same classroom doing the same work meeting their interest level and then writing and researching asking questions talking to professionals talking to teachers talking to peers about that so the lights were on and what I would say to my freshman when they entered my classroom for the first time is uh perhaps a metaphor it was a metaphor that I that I led with I said
00:11:44
Speaker
You are coming into a classroom that the closest analog is your English classroom.
00:11:50
Speaker
But in your English classroom, you can sit on your butt in a chair with your shoulders back and your feet pushed forward, and you can wait for someone to pour stuff into your head and then give it back to one person, your teacher, on request.
00:12:06
Speaker
But if you're in the journalism classroom, you are going to be leaning forward.
00:12:11
Speaker
You're going to be on the balls of your feet.
00:12:13
Speaker
The initiative rests with you.
00:12:14
Speaker
The ball is in your hands to move it.
00:12:18
Speaker
And you're going to have to make that shift and it won't happen immediately.
00:12:21
Speaker
And usually for the first two or three months, you know, be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.
00:12:27
Speaker
Kids always say they want agency and they want more power to choose.
00:12:31
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And when you hand that over back over, when you say you're right, here it is to a 14-year-old.
00:12:36
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Suddenly it becomes, oh my gosh, this is much more difficult than I thought it would be.
00:12:40
Speaker
This is scarier than I thought it would be.
00:12:43
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I'm the one framing the questions.
00:12:44
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I'm the one coming up with the ideas.
00:12:46
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I'm the one talking to the people.
00:12:48
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And just entering into those soft skills that come with talking, interviewing, asking questions, having a kind yet skeptical mindset.
00:12:58
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That's all new stuff.
Empowerment through Journalism Education
00:13:00
Speaker
You're reminding me of a memory.
00:13:02
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So I remember, and so the program at Palo Alto High School, which I want us to talk a little bit about, was basically the topic of my dissertation and then a later book that I did through Columbia University.
00:13:16
Speaker
called Newsworthy.
00:13:17
Speaker
And I can recall that you had a group of students there who had written an article questioning something about the Common App.
00:13:26
Speaker
So a Common App is something that students use to apply to college.
00:13:31
Speaker
And I think the issue was that
00:13:33
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let's say it said you can put in, you know, 500 words into this text box, but it only took 300 or something like that.
00:13:39
Speaker
And so they basically wrote this article.
00:13:41
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And I think it was maybe even the CEO, you know, fired back and said, take that down or whatever.
00:13:47
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And they said, please explain to us what piece of our article is inaccurate.
00:13:52
Speaker
And there was no response.
00:13:54
Speaker
And, you know, first of all, you know, this is potential consequences of
00:14:01
Speaker
of, you know, retribution, because this is the way in which you apply for college, right?
00:14:07
Speaker
But that level of agency and that level of, you know, just speaking truth to power, I just think was just fantastic to watch.
00:14:18
Speaker
Well, you know, I think that that was one of I believe Paul Kandel students.
00:14:22
Speaker
Yeah, I actually think that young man was in my AP lit class.
00:14:25
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And as I recall, he was much more passionate about journalism than AP lit as many of my own students were.
00:14:31
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And I, I can see their point.
Importance of Civil Discourse for Young Journalists
00:14:34
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And that is what he did.
00:14:35
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It was a challenge.
00:14:37
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It was a challenge to why is it this way?
00:14:38
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It was asking the question with a sense of good research, but also a sense of, I guess I would say, a little bit of audacity, one might say, but also a sense of fearlessness and also willingness to bring the questions forward that actually matter.
00:14:56
Speaker
I'm so concerned currently that...
00:14:59
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Gosh, you know, Ed, we could go on a soup to nuts trip right now.
00:15:03
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I know.
00:15:04
Speaker
About, you know, it's interesting to me that everybody's like, you know, these kids, they're going to have to solve the climate crisis.
00:15:11
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They're going to have to solve Ukraine.
00:15:13
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They're going to have to solve, you know, Social Security running out of money when they get there.
00:15:18
Speaker
And one would think that that statement of you're going to have to be the problem solvers and we haven't been able to solve it the way we've been doing it.
00:15:28
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you would think that everyone would want to liberate the minds of these kids and say, come at us out of the box.
00:15:34
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Give us any question you have because we want to see that trained limber mind coming alive at 14, 15, 16, 17, 18.
00:15:42
Speaker
We don't want passivity.
00:15:43
Speaker
We don't want
00:15:47
Speaker
the same old answer to the same old question.
00:15:50
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We have new big problems and we need new big solutions and mindsets.
00:15:55
Speaker
And what I'm seeing right now is, and maybe it's the reactivity of the people in our age group.
00:16:01
Speaker
What I'm seeing right now is instead of saying, give us your best and you're going to make us uncomfortable and we'll have to be, we'll have to sit with that discomfort.
00:16:11
Speaker
Instead, what I see is a nearly whole scale, uh,
00:16:18
Speaker
intention to squash dissent and to squash questions and to squash anything that might make discomfort in another.
00:16:28
Speaker
And my thing is, you know, I'm watching kids in well-trained journalism programs, whether it's Paul Kandals and the current colleagues at Palo Alto High School or my own program at Harker, where I have two really thriving new young colleagues who are energetic and passionate, neither of whom were in journalism.
00:16:45
Speaker
and who are both just both feet jumping right into it.
00:16:49
Speaker
What I, when in our best journalism programs, we're teaching civil discourse.
00:16:54
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We're teaching, we're teaching a way to ask questions that isn't a personal attack when it's being done correctly.
00:17:01
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We are teaching kids to not look at a person you don't like, but look at the system attached
00:17:07
Speaker
and see what questions you can ask and what solutions you can pitch.
00:17:10
Speaker
So to squash these young minds who have so much ahead of them and they know it, and that's why we have the wellness crisis happening right now with our youth, it seems to me to be going the wrong way for what we want the future to look like for these children globally and certainly in the United States.
00:17:29
Speaker
Well, this reminds me yet of another thing you said to me many years ago.
Supreme Court Decisions and Student Journalism
00:17:34
Speaker
people may or may not be aware of two Supreme Court decisions that have a lot to do with the First Amendment.
00:17:40
Speaker
The first was the Tinker case where a young woman in the 60s comes to school with wearing a black armband.
00:17:48
Speaker
Three of them, actually, yeah.
00:17:50
Speaker
Yeah, protesting the Vietnam War.
00:17:52
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And she's basically, I think, sent home or suspended.
00:17:56
Speaker
And that case went all the way to the Supreme Court and she prevailed.
00:18:00
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I think that there was a lot of fear and anxiety around that decision, which led to another one several years later called Hazelwood.
00:18:10
Speaker
which basically allows censorship in many states.
00:18:14
Speaker
And I think we now have about 17 states, West Virginia being the most recent, where there's anti-Hazelwood legislation that really protects student speech.
00:18:24
Speaker
But the thing you said to me many years ago is that a student can be in a civics class
00:18:30
Speaker
learning the basics of the First Amendment and then go down the hall to their journalism class and be told that they no longer have the right to free speech.
00:18:38
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And I'm not sure most people are aware of this, but it's the law of the land.
00:18:47
Speaker
Well, you know, it's funny that you say that.
00:18:48
Speaker
It's very true.
00:18:49
Speaker
And at the time I was talking to you, I was probably, I won't say which school it was at because I don't want to bring any colleague's name into this.
00:18:57
Speaker
But there was a social studies teacher who was unhappy about, very unhappy, the department was very unhappy about a piece that one of my very best students had written.
00:19:10
Speaker
And in fact, when the student had this opinion piece, which had to do with, you
00:19:17
Speaker
which had to do with the diversity or lack of diversity in certain social studies texts.
00:19:22
Speaker
When that student came in and said, I really want to do an opinion piece on this, and a very high profile student at our school as well, I said, I'm really terrified that you could get some blowback to this and...
00:19:37
Speaker
And I know that you're out there in advocacy and I'm not disagreeing with your point.
00:19:42
Speaker
I think you've got a very good point, but I need to make sure that you're not exaggerating.
00:19:46
Speaker
Someone else needs to be checking your research, if you will.
00:19:51
Speaker
And I said, I want you to bring the textbook in question to school.
00:19:56
Speaker
You're gonna give it to your fellow editor who was a math and science guy all the way down.
00:20:01
Speaker
And the guy who was not, he was not trying to upend the social narratives.
00:20:06
Speaker
And I said, he's going to take that home and he's going to check every fact in your story.
00:20:10
Speaker
If you say there's eight pages that refer to what you're talking about, he needs to tag those.
00:20:17
Speaker
And until we check that, you're not going to publish it.
00:20:20
Speaker
And he checked and he came back, he said to her, her facts are solid.
00:20:23
Speaker
And I checked all the pages.
00:20:25
Speaker
I checked everything she referred to.
00:20:26
Speaker
I'm like, okay, then you have my green light as your advisor.
00:20:32
Speaker
You are now protected by the facts to run this, but that doesn't mean that there won't be a reaction.
00:20:39
Speaker
And the reaction was swift and it was highly energized.
Challenges of Free Speech in Education
00:20:43
Speaker
And Akali, who I hold in high regard,
00:20:47
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caught me after meeting him was very, very angry and said the department was angry and that they were looking at retributive actions against the student in their department because they were so offended.
00:21:00
Speaker
And I literally said, you're going to meet me in a different way if you do that.
00:21:07
Speaker
Because the last time I checked your curriculum, you were talking about the First Amendment.
00:21:12
Speaker
You are in California.
00:21:13
Speaker
Oops, sorry.
00:21:18
Speaker
And this is to put the power of teachers on a student because they pointed out a structural concern.
00:21:30
Speaker
And they've done it civilly and in writing doesn't doesn't feel like it's fighting fair or in the way that we in social studies would want to teach them about how to do this.
00:21:39
Speaker
If you want to write a letter to the editor, I will probably I will tell the kids to publish that tomorrow.
00:21:46
Speaker
Because this student published it openly and publicly, she didn't go on to Twitter or some, you know, Finster account.
00:21:56
Speaker
Right.
00:21:57
Speaker
And.
00:21:59
Speaker
you know, let's show how we do this.
00:22:01
Speaker
And I was pleased to see that, that,
00:22:09
Speaker
you know, teachers are human too.
00:22:11
Speaker
I was glad to see that when people took a breath and talked about it, they did write a letter to the editor, which was published immediately.
00:22:18
Speaker
And, you know, to be fair, my students were like, they wrote this letter.
00:22:23
Speaker
I'm like, yes, because they have free speech as well.
00:22:27
Speaker
The Tinker decision says neither teachers nor students give up their rights at the schoolhouse gate.
00:22:34
Speaker
So, you know, I would also point that, you know, I think there's an equally concerning trend right now
00:22:39
Speaker
that if you say something and I don't like it, I'm going to come at you as the teacher.
00:22:44
Speaker
I'm going to come at the teacher and shut down the teacher.
00:22:47
Speaker
I think we've got discourse problems with kids, but I also think that it's important to remember that intellectual liberty lives all the way through and we often want to agree with what someone else says.
00:22:56
Speaker
Yeah, I want to speak a little bit more about Palo Alto and Palo Alto High.
Diversity Efforts in Journalism at Palo Alto High
00:23:02
Speaker
So, you know, I think my first presumption, and I think the presumption many people would have because they know it's one of the most affluent zip codes in America.
00:23:10
Speaker
It's across the street from Stanford.
00:23:12
Speaker
The high school is Facebook's around one corner and Google's down the street.
00:23:17
Speaker
they might consider that the results that are evident there in terms of just the students is about affluence.
00:23:26
Speaker
And what I found that was really, certainly that's a factor, but there's something else going on there.
00:23:32
Speaker
And I also want to just acknowledge the fact that
00:23:38
Speaker
you and Esther and Paul made a concerted effort to also really bring diversity to the program.
00:23:48
Speaker
You would take your summers.
00:23:50
Speaker
So for people who aren't aware, across the freeway is East Palo Alto, where the demographics in terms of people of color is very different than it is on one side of the freeway.
00:24:00
Speaker
And
00:24:00
Speaker
Those students over there had a high school called Ravenswood that was closed, I think, maybe even back in the late 70s because it was, quote unquote, underperforming.
00:24:08
Speaker
And so those kids get bused to Palo Alto High School and some of the other high schools around.
00:24:13
Speaker
And you all would take your summers.
00:24:17
Speaker
And this is a whole other piece of this, because I think that it speaks to the fact that when people don't see themselves represented in media, they start to think maybe it's not for them.
00:24:29
Speaker
So your efforts to recruit into the program at Palo Alto High School were challenging.
00:24:35
Speaker
And so you set up the summer program in East Palo Alto where the kids were actually, parts of it, sometimes they were going into a little, you know,
00:24:45
Speaker
unbeknownst to many, a publication called East Palo Alto today, run by this woman.
00:24:50
Speaker
I can't remember her name at the moment, but they're, you know, just these computers that were, you know, 20 years old.
00:24:57
Speaker
And, but there was this sense of pride about news in our community that is not all about gun violence and everything else.
00:25:05
Speaker
And,
00:25:06
Speaker
There's a question in here somewhere, but I just really want to paint a picture for the real powerful work that you and Esther and Paul were doing there and that continues to go on in terms of being really earnestly committed to diversity in media.
00:25:25
Speaker
Well, I'm not sure I have an answer to the I'm not sure what the question was part, but let me if I can.
00:25:33
Speaker
I do that sometimes.
00:25:36
Speaker
Well, you know, to your earlier question, there's a, you put it right, it doesn't matter what the lenses that we're looking through.
00:25:47
Speaker
I think the Oscars are the proving case in this.
00:25:50
Speaker
Michelle Yeoh, it was so important that she got that Oscar after the career that she's had, and she wasn't the only Oscar, but I'm going to speak about her.
00:26:01
Speaker
Because if you don't see yourself on film, how can you see how... I think of American TV in the 70s and the 60s, and I wonder how anybody except white suburban America saw themselves in it, except for maybe the Bunker family and all of that kind of broad stroke stereotyping.
00:26:26
Speaker
But, you know, it's really important if you want to have journalism that's representative, you need to have people coming from all over.
00:26:36
Speaker
But then it's also important to say, and I'm going to come back to the East Palo Alto story in just a second because there's a couple of things I want to add and it's going to be out of order.
00:26:44
Speaker
You know, I also think that there's a real pigeon hauling effect.
00:26:50
Speaker
And I think there's a word for this.
00:26:51
Speaker
I can't think of it right now.
00:26:53
Speaker
You know, if you have a Muslim reporter on staff, they don't get to do the religion beat or all the Muslim stories, right?
00:27:01
Speaker
That's ridiculous.
00:27:03
Speaker
You have a voice on your staff who can cover anything, right?
00:27:07
Speaker
But in your newsroom, you're going to have an awareness that wasn't there before.
00:27:13
Speaker
If everybody in your newsroom, and this is an equally big problem for me, if everybody in your newsroom went to the same slate of 15 universities in America, and your hiring staff, your hiring decision makers, privilege that only and won't look at a regional institution or a state school of journalism because that's just not good enough for our newsroom, then you are already pre-selecting the mindset that will be around the tables in your newsroom.
00:27:41
Speaker
And again, we're at that place where you've got to have voices that can speak to experiences.
00:27:49
Speaker
We can go, the easiest way to go is I'm gonna speak from my experience as a woman.
00:27:52
Speaker
If you don't have women in your newsroom, how the heck are you gonna know, how are you gonna be attuned in conversations in your newsroom to what it's like to be a woman as a reporter if you don't have someone talking to you about it?
00:28:05
Speaker
We can talk about people of color, the LGBTQ plus community,
00:28:10
Speaker
We go on and on and on, but the newsroom needs to be representative and then everybody needs to write all the stories.
00:28:17
Speaker
And I stand on that.
00:28:20
Speaker
At Pali, one of the biggest problems was that the kids that, there was a diverse population at Pali.
00:28:29
Speaker
We weren't, we were still, we were,
00:28:33
Speaker
We were still majority, majority in students, but the brown and black kids stayed away from journalism.
00:28:38
Speaker
And one of my colleagues, the thing that kind of led Paul Kandel, and I really want to give props to Paul.
00:28:42
Speaker
He really put this into motion and really, and really was the Energizer bunny behind it.
00:28:48
Speaker
And I also want to give props to Christie Blackburn, who's at Gunn High School and Michelle Balmeo, who landed at Monta Vista and now is in Oregon.
00:28:56
Speaker
Um,
00:28:58
Speaker
We had a colleague who we were trying to get kids to be sort of shunted over to journalism, kind of spotted when they were ninth and 10th graders to get into our programs.
00:29:09
Speaker
And the kids on campus said to the colleague, when they kind of were walked over to the journalism, they said, I'm not going in there.
00:29:16
Speaker
It's snowing in there.
00:29:17
Speaker
It's so white.
00:29:20
Speaker
And, you know, when there's no group you can be in, schools or social places, if you can't be with your friends or there's nobody that seems like you in a classroom, why would you do it?
00:29:31
Speaker
So we decided to come at it a different way.
00:29:32
Speaker
It also was a credit problem.
00:29:34
Speaker
Journalism is always an elective ad.
00:29:35
Speaker
You know, it's always fighting with something else.
00:29:38
Speaker
So kids have to make really hard choices.
00:29:42
Speaker
They might love journalism, but they may also love French horn.
00:29:45
Speaker
And at some point they're forced to choose one over the other in our current school systems.
00:29:50
Speaker
So over the summer, that's what we did is we created a standalone journalism program and tried to give the kids a hands-on experience and then got them in the newsrooms.
00:30:00
Speaker
And then with the idea, at least at Pali, if you would take our summer program, you could step onto any of our staffs.
00:30:08
Speaker
And that had some blowback within our own newsroom.
00:30:11
Speaker
You know, kids are like, if they didn't have to take our class, how can they come in?
00:30:15
Speaker
So we were like, we'll take it.
00:30:16
Speaker
We'll take the hits.
00:30:17
Speaker
But this is what we're going to do.
00:30:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:21
Speaker
I want to ask you, but this is kind of
Addressing Fake News and Teaching Critical Thinking
00:30:27
Speaker
a big question.
00:30:27
Speaker
We'll see where this goes.
00:30:29
Speaker
And it has to do with where we are in terms of journalism.
00:30:35
Speaker
in our society right now in terms of the distrust.
00:30:40
Speaker
And when I ever mention to people that I'm a journalism professor and I also run an educational nonprofit that focuses on journalism, I immediately, well, for many years, it was always the fake news question and all of that.
00:30:56
Speaker
But I'm curious, you know, I mean, we, this whole era of alternative facts and some of the, you know, the issues that we find ourselves in, in terms of just a breakdown of trusted institutions, you know, somebody who's committed your life to journalism, education, and the First Amendment, and all these things, where do you think we go from here with all of this?
00:31:28
Speaker
a big question.
00:31:30
Speaker
I'll take a cup of coffee and drink a cup of coffee and I'll talk to you in a month or so.
00:31:35
Speaker
So, well, you know, I am going to say this.
00:31:40
Speaker
I'm committed to journalism, but not, you know, you heard my, a little bit about my life, my life track here.
00:31:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:46
Speaker
I am a journalism teacher because I was a teacher.
00:31:51
Speaker
And one of the things that became clear to me is I see where these the children of the 2000s, the 2010s, the 2020s, I see what's ahead for them and I see what they what they're going to need in terms of the internal power, the internal thoughtfulness, the internal compassion.
00:32:14
Speaker
that they're going to require in order to move through these years ahead of them.
00:32:19
Speaker
And obviously at the schools I was at, a lot of those kids will be leaders, not all.
00:32:23
Speaker
But I moved to journalism because I'm a teacher.
00:32:30
Speaker
And I was like, I don't care what it is.
00:32:32
Speaker
I don't care if it's underwater basket weaving.
00:32:35
Speaker
If it's underwater basket weaving and it can provide a crucible for kids to go through these kinds of questions and to be in these safe spaces to ask them to find things that they care about or want to lift up or questions that they feel are necessary to be asked and there's too much fear around it.
00:32:56
Speaker
And they're like, I will lift up this question for others.
00:33:00
Speaker
I don't care where that is in the school.
00:33:03
Speaker
I want to be there.
00:33:05
Speaker
And to me, journalism ticked every single box.
00:33:09
Speaker
We worked a lot to make Whitney Huang, who's my successor at Harker.
00:33:16
Speaker
We've talked about this a lot.
00:33:18
Speaker
It's very important that outside the journalism newsroom, you're doing your work well and you're writing carefully and you're researching carefully.
00:33:27
Speaker
and you're trying to come up with content that meets your community's needs, inside the newsroom, you have the opportunity to craft culture and a different kind of culture than you would find in a traditional classroom usually, simply because of the way the work has to happen.
00:33:43
Speaker
So a lot of my time in my journalism classroom was spent in, especially in these last 10 years, was spent in trying to
00:33:55
Speaker
Acknowledge where kids are with the screaming the high anxiety levels that are that are present because of first climate change and social social upheaval and then oh that's right the pandemic locked me in my room for three years.
00:34:10
Speaker
And to try and create a place where kids feel like they have a home where they have they can ask questions and not be shut down, but to create a culture so.
00:34:18
Speaker
For me, the.
00:34:24
Speaker
I think I moved away from your question, but for me, journalism answered my internal why.
00:34:30
Speaker
Why do you teach?
00:34:32
Speaker
And it answered my question of why do you want these kids to have this kind of thinking?
00:34:40
Speaker
So I just kept moving in that direction.
00:34:44
Speaker
For the people who mock journalism now or who nay say it,
00:34:48
Speaker
Oh my gosh, you've heard me say this so many times.
00:34:51
Speaker
The power of no is so powerful.
00:34:54
Speaker
Silicon Valley was built on the power of yes.
00:34:57
Speaker
And much of America's history has been built on the power of yes.
00:35:01
Speaker
I don't know why we have the Gulliver's Travels thing.
00:35:03
Speaker
Do you remember that cartoon as a kid?
00:35:06
Speaker
Gulliver's Travels, you'll never make it Gulliver, right?
00:35:09
Speaker
Do you remember that?
00:35:12
Speaker
And so often right now- I remember Rocky and Bo Winkle more.
00:35:15
Speaker
So-
00:35:18
Speaker
Natasha, Natasha.
Innovation and Adaptation in Journalism
00:35:22
Speaker
But you know, I really think that it's so easy because we're in a period of great uncertainty and change.
00:35:30
Speaker
And in a country that has kind of prided itself on being the country of momentum and power and
00:35:38
Speaker
hey, we're at the top of the sand, we're at the top of the mountain now.
00:35:42
Speaker
And we like other empires before us are seeing our position shift and we're seeing the nature of work shift.
00:35:50
Speaker
We're seeing a lot of things shift and they're shifting quickly.
00:35:53
Speaker
I mean, most recently now we're looking at what does AI mean?
00:35:56
Speaker
What is it going to be?
00:35:58
Speaker
What will it do?
00:35:59
Speaker
And I think it's very hard to just kind of flex with everything.
00:36:02
Speaker
It's a lot easier to say, I liked it better the way it used to be.
00:36:06
Speaker
And when it comes to journalism, you had a lot of, I find it interesting.
00:36:15
Speaker
How do I wanna say this?
00:36:17
Speaker
When I was teaching kids in journalism in the early 2000s and I had some very promising students who became journalism people, they quickly found that their best access to continue having a voice was not to follow a traditional newsroom.
00:36:36
Speaker
And just speaking from gender, if you look at the high school journalism newsroom today, it is overwhelmingly female.
00:36:43
Speaker
It's a female majority classroom in every school I've seen.
Gender Dynamics and Community Journalism
00:36:46
Speaker
more girls than boys.
00:36:47
Speaker
Even Viking by the third year was at a gender parity, more than it was 50-50 or better male to female ratios.
00:36:56
Speaker
And that was a sports publication.
00:36:59
Speaker
So we see that in high school and then we see in college.
00:37:02
Speaker
I don't know what your demographics are in your classes.
00:37:05
Speaker
Same thing, mostly women.
00:37:07
Speaker
mostly women, but it starts to diminish.
00:37:09
Speaker
And then when we start going into the traditional newsroom, women start moving out.
00:37:14
Speaker
And I have asked my female students why they moved out and they're like, are you kidding me?
00:37:19
Speaker
I'm out of there.
00:37:20
Speaker
They have found success in going with the startup
00:37:24
Speaker
Journalistic endeavors, they found success in going to the two pieces of social media and going there, they were able to flourish and succeed at a very high rate.
00:37:34
Speaker
So I'm going to also say that, you know, traditional journalism has has not been benign, you know.
00:37:44
Speaker
I have a relative who was in journalism for a long time.
00:37:47
Speaker
And when I was in my 20s, I remember, and she loved journalism.
00:37:54
Speaker
I couldn't believe it when she told me that she was asked to change a story so as not to offend an advertiser.
00:37:59
Speaker
Right.
00:38:01
Speaker
And so, I mean, what I think is we've got to have journalism, but we've also got to have civil discourse.
00:38:08
Speaker
I think the nature of journalism will change.
00:38:11
Speaker
I think that my belief is that we're going to see a really interesting thing occur.
00:38:17
Speaker
I watched it with my students.
00:38:19
Speaker
None of my students at my last two schools are probably going to be journalism people.
00:38:24
Speaker
They're going to major in computer science.
00:38:26
Speaker
They're going to major in medicine.
00:38:27
Speaker
They're going to major in whatever.
00:38:27
Speaker
But they were crackerjack journalists in high school.
00:38:30
Speaker
I would challenge any journalist up against my kids who were not going to go into journalism.
00:38:35
Speaker
They were just doing the great work.
00:38:38
Speaker
So the kids who are going to go into journalism, I think we'll see a couple of things change.
00:38:44
Speaker
I've said to my students, we have forgotten to invite you.
00:38:49
Speaker
I would like to invite you.
00:38:51
Speaker
Please consider for a few years of your life, I would invite you to consider giving back through teaching in some way.
00:38:58
Speaker
not for your whole career, but a few years, I would invite you to consider in some way being a voice in your community.
00:39:05
Speaker
You're trained, you know how to do it.
00:39:06
Speaker
I know that you're gonna be wise in the way you handle your democratic duties as a citizen, but consider it.
00:39:13
Speaker
You know, one of my favorite students is now an executive at a major news organization and lives in New York.
00:39:20
Speaker
When she was finishing college and looking for jobs,
00:39:24
Speaker
head, her own professors and people in the business were like, why are you going into journalism?
00:39:30
Speaker
Don't you know it's dying?
00:39:31
Speaker
And this was in like 2007.
00:39:32
Speaker
And what she said to me, and I'm paraphrasing, I'm sure she ever hears it.
00:39:38
Speaker
She'll be like, it's not quite what I said, because she's a fact checker.
00:39:42
Speaker
She said something along the lines of,
00:39:45
Speaker
Why are people saying this to me?
00:39:47
Speaker
When you run into the burning barn, you know the barn's on fire.
00:39:51
Speaker
If you're running into the barn, you have a reason to do it.
00:39:57
Speaker
And I don't think it's doing any service when we dismiss people who go into education.
00:40:01
Speaker
We're not doing any service when we dismiss people who are saying, I'd like to be a journalist or I'd like to be a storyteller.
00:40:06
Speaker
But I think the Renaissance will be community journalism is going to come back.
00:40:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:11
Speaker
Well, Ann Curry says that journalism is a calling because they're passionate.
Conclusion and Appreciation
00:40:16
Speaker
I want to thank you, Ellen Austin.
00:40:18
Speaker
This has been such a delight.
00:40:20
Speaker
And for those who are looking to maybe reach out to you or some of the consulting work and things that you're doing, we'll put your contact information in the show notes, if you so desire.
00:40:33
Speaker
I just want to thank you and you're collaborating with us at JLI on doing some things.
00:40:37
Speaker
So we're pretty excited to be working with you.
00:40:40
Speaker
And thank you for your service and your commitment to students and to
00:40:46
Speaker
the First Amendment and free speech and just all of that.
00:40:51
Speaker
So thank you.
00:40:52
Speaker
Well, thank you, Ed, and I just want to take a second because I think you're the guy who hides behind the humble hat too often.
00:40:59
Speaker
I think that you have done such incredible work to keep the lights on in journalism at the collegiate level and at the high school level, and I think that you do so much to lift up those who are trying to do the work of the creator of the students and those who are the teachers who are trying to be there in the room with those students doing that great work.
00:41:20
Speaker
I think...
00:41:21
Speaker
I think we owe you a great debt and a great thank you.
00:41:25
Speaker
Thank you.
00:41:25
Speaker
I'm humbled.
00:41:27
Speaker
Thank you.
00:41:27
Speaker
All right, Ellen, take care.
00:41:29
Speaker
Thanks a lot.
00:41:39
Speaker
How to Have Kids Love Learning is produced by the Journalistic Learning Initiative.
00:41:42
Speaker
For more information about our work, please visit journalisticlearning.com.