Constructing Media: Students Making News

Friday, March 12, 2004

John Richards, Ph.D., President, Consulting Services for Education, LLC
Founder, CNN Student Bureau
Respondent: Kate Bielaczyc, GSE faculty

Just a few years ago, CNN aired a story about religious tensions in Northern Ireland, focusing not on political leaders or riots--but on youth. The report featured Protestant and Catholic teenagers who wanted to date, but who have inherited a Belfast segregated by ancestral hatred. To get together safely, these young people choose neutral locales, and sometimes change their names.

There's not an adult in the world who would have thought of that story, former Turner Learning executive John Richards told an audience of HGSE students, faculty, and alums at the TIE March Seminar.

Indeed, it was a group of students who produced this story, and hundreds like it, as part of CNN Student Bureau, an initiative that Richards spearheaded eight years ago when he took over educational outreach for the news network. The effort, which trained classroom teachers how to create broadcast-quality segments with their students, was founded on the premise that news is the new curriculum.

Richards, a former manager of educational technology development with Bolt, Beranek, & Newman, arrived at CNN when the network was searching for a way to connect with younger audiences. Richards and his staff discovered that the millennial generation did not have a consistent source for news. Rather than tolerating 30-second accounts passively served up on television, children raised on the Internet were accustomed to seeking in-depth coverage of topics they cared about.

News outlets would need to create a new approach, rooted in the preferences and approaches of today's youth. The first step, Richards felt, was to get students involved. Enter CNN Student Bureau.

Based in the Dewey tradition of learning through experience, the concept of Student Bureau is authentic, team-based, project-centered, cross-curricular, multi-media -- all of the elements of a 21st century curriculum, Richards said. By writing, directing, producing and appearing on camera in their own news reports, students learned to present both sides of an issue, dig deep into the background of a conflict, and hone research and presentation skills.

The project also taught student producers about the professional world. CNN set a tight deadline for all news segments, so when schools submitted their shows a few hours late, the stories didn't air.

In addition to Student Bureau, Richards promoted CNN Newsroom, a half-hour program geared at schools, linking several stories of a given issue together and creating a curriculum around them. A regular CNN story about NATO, for example, would assume that the audience knew that there was this thing called World War Two, and NATO grew out of that, Richards noted. In a CNN Newsroom piece, students would be given more of the historical context behind the headlines, and classroom lessons would supplement the news report.

He added that delving deeply into news stories fulfills the fundamental aims of education as stated by HGSE professor Ted Sizer: it enables students to think critically, to prepare for the world of work and, to become thoughtful citizens.

Assistant Professor Kate Bielaczyc, a former colleague of Richards and seminar respondent, noted how professionally the students performed. There was nothing that made this feel like 'kids' work,' she said.

She did, however, bring up Jerome Bruner's critique of Dewey, asking if students are learning discipline knowledge that would transfer outside the context of the news. They could build a tree house, she said of Dewey's students, but they couldn't carry their math outside it.

Bielaczyc also asked how the program assessed student learning -- and how the effort could be scaled up, particularly if only a handful of storied make it on CNN.

Richards said that Bruner's critique did not apply to the area of news because news is about information you want students to master. He acknowledged, though, that he had not given a great deal of thought to assessment with the project.

One audience member noted a discrepancy between the research that indicated a novel media sensibility among young people -- and the news stories of Student Bureau that resembled their adult counterparts. We forced them into a mold to get them on broadcast news, Richards conceded, but he also pointed out that style is only one aspect of a broader contribution that young people can make. Youthful choices about content -- stories that were reflective of their place -- added a new perspective to CNN's coverage.

Turner Learning has scaled back its commitment to Student Bureau and to educational outreach in general since Ted Turner left AOL-Time Warner, Richards said. When a corporation whose main job isn't education is doing education, your support depends on personalities, explained Richards, who noted that Turner arranged for CNN Newsroom to be broadcast commercial-free. We weren't doing what would make it a successful business.

But Richards encouraged the TIE audience by noting that entrepreneurial teachers can take the ideas of CNN Student Bureau and create their own broadcasts within their schools or with local cable providers.

-- Andrew K. Mandel, TIE 2005