Welcome to the teachers’ lounge, an occasional newsletter to keep you posted about happenings in the data journalism teachers’ club.
This issue: our first virtual event 📆, a mini NICAR reflection 🤔, and a summary of survey responses about what the club should do 🗳️.
TEACHER SCHOOL 101 | Instructional Standards
Date: Friday April 26, 2024
Time: 1:30 - 3:00 pm ET
Location: Zoom
Signup link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/teacher-school-101-instructional-standards-tickets-885745597927
If you, like us, teach data journalism, chances are you were plucked from a newsroom and dropped into a classroom. You’ve probably got lots of knowledge to impart on students but how do you know if you’re doing it effectively? As the semester winds down, let’s reflect together on how it went. Did you take a structured approach to measuring your students’ success? How do educators in other disciplines set standards for their classes and what can we learn from them?
Dr. Anita Sundrani, whose research focuses on curriculum and instruction, will lead us in a conversation around standards-based data journalism instruction. Attendees will learn what instructional standards are and how we can develop them for a journalism course to guide course planning and syllabi.
Bio
Dr. Anita Sundrani is a Research Associate at the Center for Education Efficacy, Excellence, and Equity situated within the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. She earned her doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction from University of Houston where her research explored mathematics educators’ noticing in online spaces when planning and enacting equity-focused mathematics lessons. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, Anita was a high school mathematics teacher and a project-based learning coach.
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We were excited to meet with many of you after our NICAR panel on what we’ve learned reading scholarly works on data journalism education (of which there aren’t too many!). If you missed it, check out our slides here. Among other key concepts, we talked about signature pedagogies, the ‘teaching hospital’ model of journalism education, formative and summative assessments, and how others have studied writing about data. Before we took on this panel, we didn’t know a lot of these terms, and we’re still deciphering them! Part of what we’re hoping to do -- and what we were able to do for a brief amount of time at NICAR -- is talk with all of you about how these concepts can apply to journalism education.
We also got students involved in the 2024 #nicarscavengerhunt! We’re hoping to continue this in future years and we’d love to involve your students, too. A big thanks to the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and OpenNews for sponsoring the students’ shirts.
The Data Journalism Teachers’ Club is at least 74 members strong! All of you lovely pedagogical people left some thoughtful answers in response to the question “What would you like this community to think about?”
Here are some themes that stood out to us: