Draft Four: Creating space for my students

Teaching journalism when that's not what's needed

I’m staring at the whiteboard on the wall in front of my desk at the office. There are some printouts stuck to it, along with a few words scribbled with a blue marker, in all caps. „Cristi”, it reads. „Because of you, I’ve decided to teach!” The exclamation mark has a heart instead of a dot at the bottom. Signed: „Maria”.

Maria is of 80+ students in my Narrative Journalism Fall semester class; we just wrapped up this week. We met once a week in a small and cozy auditorium at the University of Bucharest, and travelled along the steps of the writing process together: from idea, to gathering information, to writing and rewriting. They also met weekly with their seminary teachers, four amazing journalists, who advised and edited them as they crafted the class assignment: a narrative portrait.

With DoR closing, the past months were a disorienting season of grief and loss for me. My students though, provided the opposite: enthusiasm, joy, a reminder we’re always going to be looking for something, worried about something, dreaming of something we don’t yet have. Alongside them I remembered that „telling stories in order to live”, as Joan Didion put it, also means walking roads less travelled, especially darker ones, to uncover one’s new path.

In our last class, I shared all of this, and tears were shed, mine included. I also had them over in our now empty newsroom – one group each night – for an evening chat. What they told me in return echoes Maria’s comments. Every semester we latch onto someone who’s going to take us through to the other side, they said. Very few people treat us like they care about us. This was one of the few classes where a teacher was interested in what we had to say. It doesn’t feel like school, one wrote in a feedback note mid-semester.

This is all flattering and moving, but it also shouldn’t be that special.

This experience should be the norm for them.

*

I went to journalism school in Bucharest at the turn of the millennium. Twenty years on, their complaints still ring familiar: outdated equipment, profs that call them „stupid” (sometimes, supposedly, as a form of endearment), profs that don’t communicate, readings that have little to do with modern journalism, and the list goes on.

This kind of abandonment on the part of an educational institution isn’t surprising, as most of us feel this throughout our school years. Getting to college, and finding a similar lacks of care isn’t new; it’s just one more institution that wasn’t built to accommodate you, although you are the reason it exists.

How do we act in places like this? Certainly not like our best selves.

I made up stuff from whole cloth when I was in college. I once submitted an interview with my grandfather that never happened. My roommate worked on a seminar essay, and his footnotes quoted a book he had supposedly used as source material: Oral Intrusions, by Phil Mycock. It was a juvenile lets-put-porn-in-this move, but the teacher praised him, and graded him highly, saying they appreciated the use of modern scholarship. Those of us quoting books that were actually published fared worse. One terribly cold winter morning, hungover, three of us recorded a radio piece on pirated software at a bus stop: one was the reporter, the others played the customer, and the salesman. We passed.

We were terrible students in an environment that didn’t seem to care whether we were terrible or not.

The students’ instincts didn’t change much over these past decades. Every time I pass the attendance sheet around, they come back with a few names that are not in the room. They know I don’t care if they miss class, but they also know they have to meet 50% attendance or will have a point deducted. So many break the rules unaware they are betraying themselves, just as I did.

This is why, what I’ve done in the years since I began teaching seminars at the J-School (this Fall was my first large group course) is try to work within these existing narratives: many students already regret their choice of coming here, many just want to get college over with, many also push back when there is work to be turned in. Many were already broken by their first twelve years of schooling, and college isn’t helping either.

So I’ve tried to adapt my priorities as an instructor:

• I’m interested in who they are as individuals;

• I want them to have the rules upfront, in a course syllabus;

• I tell them I’ll treat them as adults, and adults make choices, sometimes good, sometimes detrimental, but we have to own them. (For example: You knew your deadline two months in advance. I trust you had good reasons for not meeting it, but you might also get less in-depth feedback, since I have less time to read your stuff);

• I won’t judge their character, I’ll judge their work. They are all great people, and, yes, their work is sometimes sloppy;

• I’m not their „teacher”. Since this is journalism, I’m their more experienced colleague. A coach, let’s say. (It helps that I’m a contractor, not employed by the University);

• I’m there to remind them they can do things they can’t even imagine yet;

• I’m there to create a space for them to talk about their anxieties of asking strangers questions, I’m there to create space for them to discover how their own interests can lead to stories, I’m there to cheer them on to risk doing the thing they want, even if it’s scary.

*

One reason I went to get a master’s in journalism in the US is because I met some American journalists teaching in Romania in my third year in Bucharest, and they did a version of all of the above, and more. It completely confused me: being treated as an adult, being heard, being accepted with all my flaws and exaggerations, being shown a standard and then encouraged to meet it. I desperately wanted more. (When I told my Bucharest dean in 2003 that I’m going to the Missouri School of Journalism, he was unimpressed. Not much to learn in the middle of nowhere, he said. He was wrong.)

A few years back a fellow prof at the J-School here told me she heard the students like my class, want more like it, but that she believes I should teach them more journalism, and talk less about their lives. That’s our job, she said: to teach journalism.

To a degree, she’s right. But the young adults that come into the classroom will pay attention to journalism theory, if you pay attention to them, and if you understand what they struggle with.

I can frighten them into being in class (ask for perfect attendance to pass, for example), I can fail them if the work sucks, but that misses some of the point: you’ll still have an adversarial relationship with your teacher, you’ll still look at projects as “homework” rather than opportunities to practice, improve, or comprehend your current skills.

J-School shouldn’t just be about meeting a list of criteria to get a passing grade. It should be a laboratory of self-discovery. It should be a place to discover you are a news junkie, and go into daily journalism, as well as a place to discover you like writing about restaurants or sports, or that your anxious temperament finds the rhythm of TV news unbearable.

It could be a place to discover what you enjoy, and a place where you can honestly share with others what scares the living shit out of you (reaching out to potential subjects was a big one this year), or what you still struggle with.

*

I was scared shitless in college. To take the oral exams I had to psyche myself up to leave the house by blasting Marylin Manson, and a song by The Bloodhound Gang called I Hope You Die. I was less afraid of the grade than I was of being considered unworthy. Sometimes that fear was so big, that I tried to find ways to bend the rules or make things easier for me.

I know some of our students are the same.

Part of the beauty of narrative journalism is that it shows us we are not alone. Stories give us space to work through our difficulties and losses. Part of the educational experience can serve a similar purpose: you can be anxious, AND have a future in this field. Let’s see how we can take some steps together.

This is why I believe our students’ experience this semester – of enjoying class, of feeling heard, of getting constructive feedback that makes them want to better themselves – shouldn’t be an outlier. It should be a standard. J-School can be a laboratory not just for a profession that should always look to a better future, but also for all kinds of people to discover if there is room for them under this umbrella. I believe there is, and I believe they’d do great under it.

*

Let me leave you with a list of promises my students made to themselves about how they will work in the future: I will make deadline, I’ll work without sacrificing my mental health, I’ll ask the questions I’m scared to ask, I promise I won’t stop here, I’ll stop procrastinating, I’ll go to work happy, I’ll be more patient, I won’t allow people to scream at me at work, I’ll enjoy this, I’ll start organizing, I’ll always go out to report, I won’t betray my principles.

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SIDE DISHES

1. It took me years to come to peace with what I can and can’t do in this field. It was during this period of wandering and wondering I read this beautiful response to a reader asking if anxious people can make good journalists. To save you a click: yes. (But it’s still worth a read all these years later.)

2. What worries educators? AI, especially ChatGPT, which can deliver pretty decent essays if asked the right questions. But there are teachers that don’t spend as much time worrying about combating theft; rather they find ways to use it to understand the work better. I had a lot of fun with the tool this week; I asked it to structure a narrative class for me (it did well) and to give me quotes on writing and pain. Here’s one: “In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.” (Don DeLillo)

3. Nick Cave really disliked some lyrics ChatGPT wrote. So he reminded us that AI doesn’t live through the experiences it conjures; a songwriter does.

4. One of the most interesting human-AI relationships I have come across in recent years was in Under the Blue, a book on… well, the end of the world. (Yes, there’s a pandemic involved).

5. I found my way into the journalism I most enjoy through a teacher, Liz Brixey, my first editor in Missouri, who told me to listen to this show called This American Life. I believe this is the first episode I came across. My life changed. It features a crazy story by Jonathan Goldstein, now the host of Heavyweight, a daring podcast about our need to make peace with the past. This week’s Longform podcast interview with Jonathan on his work is wonderful.

6. Ecstatic that The National are putting out a new album this year; Tropic Morning News is the first song they released from it.