Welcome to the teachers’ lounge, an occasional newsletter to keep you posted about happenings in the data journalism teachers’ club.
This issue: Our next event 📆, course design workshops ✏️, reflecting on instructional standards 🤔, and a summer book club 📚!
The Masterfile with Eva Constantaras: Teaching students to write ‘data-driven investigations' instead of 'data-decorated stories'
June 21, 2024 | 10:00 AM Eastern Time
Sign up on EventBrite at the link below:
The Masterfile with Eva Constantaras
Finding a teaching method that consistently results in real and impactful investigative stories by the end of a data journalism course or training can be challenging. In this session, journalist and trainer Eva Constantaras will lead us through her decade-long journey to develop a formula for identifying groups of passionate journalists all over the world, training them on data journalism skills and mentoring their first investigations over 9 to 12 months. Eva has taught journalists in some of the most dangerous, censored and financially precarious places to be a journalist in the world. She has trained journalists at The Nation Newsplex, one of the first data desks in Sub-Saharan Africa; Pajhwok Afghan News, which maintains a casualty database and produces weekly conflict bulletins; and in the Philippines, where journalists have developed beats around data-driven environmental beat reporting.
Eva’s process is built around a central investigation that journalists put together piece by piece through guided lessons on completing a collaborative Masterfile (which she will share with us!). The Masterfile emphasizes the key ingredients to a successful data investigation: a robust, well-researched hypothesis, transparent documentation that is entirely reproducible and a highly structured step-by-step process that keeps journalists focused. Attendees will be able to explore the Masterfile structure and how a Masterfile led to a story featured in late May by GIJN as a top data investigation of the week by a journalist who, just one year earlier, had no data skills.
We’re launching a series of course design workshops as part of our TEACHER SCHOOL 101 series.
Are you designing or rethinking a class for the fall semester? We are! But this year, we’re planning to have some professional pedagogical help! Dr. Anita Sundrani, who led us in a conversation about standards-based data journalism instruction in April, will join us for a three-part Course Design Workshop Series this summer. The events will be held online on July 10, Aug14 and Sept 27 at noon ET. If you’d like to ****join, tell us a bit more about what’s on your mind! We’ll follow up with a signup link closer to next month.
https://noteforms.com/forms/we-want-to-hear-from-you-edcr9v
Everyone seems to be talking about AI these days, and many professors are worried about students using ChatGPT to write their assignments. But AI generated text detectors have significant reliability concerns, leaving some educators scratching their heads about what to do. One solution to this new problem may be to lean into old (well...pre-ChatGPT) knowledge.
This book was recommended to us by pedagogy experts at Harvard during a teaching and learning session as a resource to lean on when re-thinking course design for the era of ChatGPT. It encourages instructors to ask deeper questions about why students cheat and provides practical research-backed solutions that instructors can implement in their classes to create the conditions that disincentivize academic dishonesty.
We’re planning to read this book over the summer and schedule a time to discuss in the fall 🍁. Read with us!
DJTC had its very first workshop in April with Dr. Anita Sundrani, a researcher at Northwestern University. Dr. Sundrani talked to our group about the purpose of instructional standards, and how to design our courses using these as a tool. For those of us who’ve never been formally trained in journalism education (most of us on the call!), we got to learn much more about the kinds of instructional standards that exist, and their nuances: practice standards, content standards, hierarchy within standards, and how these can build on each other year-over-year. Most importantly, we were able to work together to brainstorm how to write some usable instructional standards for the data journalism topic of ‘pitching a good data story.’ Check out Dr. Sundrani’s slides and our workshop video on this training!
Want to invite friends to the club? The more the merrier! Sign up on our website, http://datajournalismteachers.club/, to receive updates. Questions? Comments? Concerns? Please message [email protected] or find us on the #teaching channel in the NewsNerdery Slack.