by Julie Dodd
JEA Mentoring Committee
What are the issues that are affecting journalism education today?
We asked the mentors to write headlines that reflect the issues nationally, statewide and locally that impact journalism educators.
Here are some of those headlines:
- Recession threatens funding for education
- Common Core Standards marginalize high school electives
- Principal edits first issue of newspaper
- Journalism: If it’s not tested, should we teach it?
- Media’s future uncertain
The mentors agreed that major budget cuts for education, educational reform efforts, such as state-mandated testing, are having a huge impact on journalism educators.
They discussed how the emphasis on testing and assessment has made teaching more difficult now than when they were beginning journalism teachers.
The discussion was a helpful reminder to the mentors of how they need to thinking about helping today’s teachers deal with some challenges that they didn’t have to deal with themselves as new journalism teachers.