Balancing Arts and Sciences, Skills, and Conceptual Content

Abstract

Journalism and mass communication is not one of those ancient disciplines that has had centuries to evolve into a mature, respected part of the modern university. Some disciplines were hundreds of years old when a "rather meager course of journalism instruction'' was established in 1869 at Washington and Lee University (O'Dell, 1935, p. 2); when the first newspaper printing class was offered in 1873 at Kansas State University (Wilcox, 1959, p. 5); and when the first school of journalism was established in 1908 at the University of Missouri (Dickson, 2000, Journalism and mass communication education, which endured substantial growing pains as it evolved during the l g t h and 2Oth centuries, clearly has an ongoing identity crisis. More than 80 years ago, Harrington (1919) felt justified in writing, "Of all subjects that have recently found a p. 12). place in the college curriculum, probably none is more intensely concerned in working out a pedagogical method than journalism" (p. 197).More recently, Rakow (1993) says journalism and mass communication education is " ... (a) gridlocked by real and imaginary obligations to students and employers, (b) fragmented and overly specialized, (c) partial and incomplete, and (d) passive in response to the pressing need for global change" (p. 155).' This study attempted to determine the status of two aspects of journalism and mass communication education that have been widely debated: (a) The relative weight of skills development and conceptual content, and (b) the extent to which students study the liberal arts and sciences, in courses outside communication and in communication courses.2

Teaching Button-Pushing versus Teaching Thinking

“…The evidence from this study confirms Ryan and Switzer's 2001 study and shows that most new media programs in the USA have balanced the teaching of technological skills and that of thinking skills. However, such endeavors are not without struggles, and new media education is far from getting past this argument.…”

“…Many university programs in the later part of the 20th century were oriented primarily toward technological skills' development, turning themselves into no more than trade schools (Ryan and Switzer, 2001). Even though studies (e.g.…”

“…Even though studies (e.g. Reinmann-Rothmeier and Mandle, 1998: 33;Kraak, 2000: 51) have found that experts from economics and education nominated critical thinking as the most important skill in knowledge management, the industry in practice usually prefers to hire graduates with high hands-on skills (Ryan and Switzer, 2001). Philip Meyer, a Knight professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill said: 'Every time our growth leads to approval of a new faculty slot, we have to agonize over whether to fill it with a craft person or a theory person.…”

Bridging Newsrooms and Classrooms: Preparing the Next Generation of Journalists for Converged Media

“…In the face of increasing demand for technically skilled journalistsconversant with QuarkXPress, Photoshop, Avid, and Dreamweaver and able to crunch statistics using spreadsheets and other statistical methods in order to uncover the hidden story-should longstanding staples such as ethics, law, and theory remain at the heart of journalism curricula? Or should such materials, commonly grouped together as "critical thinking" (Hamilton & Izard, 1996), share equal billing with technology or "skills" training?a In other words, how should journalism schools balance the teaching of professional skills and that of critical thinking in an era when technology penetrates every facet of news gathering, preparation, editing, production, and delivery (Kunkel, 2002;Ryan & Switzer, 2001)?…”