I love this story about Amy Gahran (whose Furl feed is worth following, btw) putting together a group of citizen journalists to cover a controversial housing development in her town. And immediately it makes me ask why we shouldn’t be putting together groups of our students to do the same type of real life work.
Although I love my current job, the changes we’ve seen over the past four years makes me yearn for my old journalism classes simply because of the real life stuff they could be doing. Fifteen years ago, I had them do “real” stories, but so few of them ended up being read by any “real” audience that they were pretty much meaningless (aside, of course, for the grade.) Now, as the article indicates, newspaper editors around the country are embracing the idea that citizen (including student) journalists have an important role to play in the collection and contribution of stories that might otherwise not be covered as well or at all. Real work. Real audiences. And even if local papers aren’t interested, our students can still publish and invite comment on their own sites.
And it’s not just our student journalists doing journalism. It’s oral histories about the community in Social Studies and experiments on local environments in science and literary interpretations in English and area museum tours in art all done by students and published in meaningful ways to audiences outside of the classroom. Why shouldn’t every school Website be a portfolio of student work for that community? A place where people can come to find out about not only their schools but about their own spaces. Why shouldn’t we be teaching students that the work they create in our classrooms no longer has to end up in the dumpster at the end of the school year? Or that what’s more important than the grade is the standard of publishing excellence that we set? Or that contributing their work for others to build upon is the new way of the world?
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