Chapter 8 - What in the World: Teaching With Current Events

After watching the video Journalism Revived by Sarah Stuteville and reading chapter 8 in the text book:

What is newsworthy?

News has many purposes: to inform, to persuade, to entertain. News makes the unknown known, and unfortunately, bad news is good for business. To determine what is actually newsworthy, you must consider timeliness, proximity, relevance, conflict, and human interest all while aiming for fairness, accuracy, and balance. 

Student motivation:
The text describes a class that did projects on flash mobs. They were motivated because they were interested in the topic. They worked hard and were proud of their work.  After seeing how the news crew presented their story, flaws and all, they had a much better understanding of how news works and how news can give a specific idea about a certain topic, even if that isn't what really happened.

Sarah and her two friends were motivated to change their situations based on what was happening in the world. Their chosen majors were "dead", so they motivated themselves to do what they really wanted to do. They were quite successful and definitely have an inspiring story to tell!

Authentic learning:

"refers to a wide variety of educational and instructional techniques focused on connecting what students are taught in school to real-world issues, problems, and applications"

Back to the students who studied flash mobs... This topic was very relevant to these kids. They had some knowledge but maybe didn't know all there was to know. Buy incorporating this real word issue into school, Mr. Landis made an awesome lesson, including a lot of digital tools along the way. It helped the kids become more informed in fun, hands on way, not just a lecture.

Sarah and her group were literally dropped into different parts of the world and were learning first hand how other people in other parts of the world live and the issues they are faced with and how different they are from what we deal with. They were extremely unprepared and had to just learn about and deal with these problems on the fly.



Place-based education:

"seeks to help communities through employing students and school staff in solving community problems"

According to the text, " the internet and digital technologies can turn people from passive spectators to active citizens, where people generate ideas that are relevant to their own communities." (p 154) 

It also tells us that sometimes it can be risky to develop activities that allow students to take action, and even states that most classes don't even try to offer these activities. Based on this, it could seem as though not a lot of school's are calling their students to be involved in community problems. I'm not in the public schools, so I don't know what teachers around our area are doing.

In the video, Sarah mentions The Common Language Project that she was working with. This project had people involved who WANTED to help their community. They want to write for her project, and publish information in their newspapers, and put them on the radio, and also to help them have a fundraiser. This is real community involvement and helps to get people from different walks of life involved for a common cause. 

http://edglossary.org/authentic-learning/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place-based_education
Hobbs, R. (2011). Research as Authentic Inquiry. In Digital and media literacy: Connecting culture and classroom. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press.