Tuesday, May 30, 2006
First day of class!
This is the third year that the Alamo Community College District has sponsored a Service-Learning program to Oaxaca, Mexico, for students from Palo Alto College, San Antonio College, St. Philip's College and Northwest Vista College. Ten students are enrolled in the summer session, and they are Jewelette, Alex, Giselle, Mary, Brendan, Melissa, Mila, Liz, Mel and Gail. You'll get to know each of them through their blogs.
I am teaching COMM 2311: News Reporting and Writing I and COMM 2315: News Reporting and Writing II and my colleague, Karen Marcotte, is teaching HUMA 1302: World Cultures and Global Issues during this five-week summer session. We're spending the first two weeks in San Antonio, followed by two weeks in Oaxaca, and the final week back in San Antonio. During the session, we are going to take a look at poverty--here in San Antonio and down in Mexico--and its effects. What are its causes? Who is affected? What programs (governmental and charitable) are in place to deal with poverty? The courses, structured as a single learning community, have a service-learning emphasis. According to the National Service-Learning Clearninghouse website, "Service-learning is a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility and strengthen communities." While we're in San Antonio, we'll visit and work at the San Antonio Food Bank, the SAMM Shelter and Avance, and we'll have similar experiences while we are in Mexico.
Today was our first day of class, and I'm afraid I overwhelmed the students with a truckload of information and handouts! (In summer school, you're cramming 15 weeks of learning into five.) I can tell this is a great group, though, and they're going to do just fine. We read "A Rat in My Soup" by Peter Hessler (The New Yorker, July 24, 2000) about a reporter in China who visits two restaurants whose house specialty is rats, and we talked about what makes a story great.
The list the students came up with includes thorough reporting, great description, dialogue (not just a pulled-out quote or two), scenes that make the reader feel like s/he is there, a catchy title/headline, interesting facts/information, use of the active voice, an engaging lead, and humor. I talked about the two non-negotiables of journalism: fairness and accuracy. Reporters must be fair, and reporters must be accurate. We talked about how journalism's/journalists' credibility is destroyed when these non-negotiables aren't followed. (Jayson Blair, the New York Times' reporter who plagiarized the San Antonio Express-News' reporter, Macarena Hernandez, came up.) We also talked about what makes a story newsworthy: impact, proximity, timeliness, prominence, novelty, conflict, information, cooperation/consensus, and common experience.
The students are to read "Don't Tell, but Show" and "Be Specific" from Natalie Goldberg's "Writing Down the Bones" (1986) book, and "Chapter 10: The Craft of Writing Great Stories" by Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute by tomorrow and post their first blog entry. We're off and running!
