The Summer Institute for Journalism Education is an inaugural program for our campus. It will be held August 12 - 14, 2024 and is focused on this year's theme of "Teaching Tomorrow’s Citizens Today: News Literacy as a Tool for Critical Education."
This institute is a wonderful opportunity to develop key concepts in your research, apply new lessons to the classroom, and address educators across the Commonwealth and beyond about issues facing journalism, news literacy, and new media technologies.
Our keynote speaker will be Dan Kennedy from Northeastern University, speaking about his latest book What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate (with Ellen Clegg).
We have many additional speakers lined up, and the event is FREE to educators and attendees interested in learning more about the issues facing journalism and the classroom. Furthermore, we are happy to offer food and multiple PDPs for attending the conference.
Background
The past twenty years have seen an unprecedented rise in challenges facing journalism at the local and national levels, ranging from dwindling subscriber numbers to the manipulation of news and information via social media platforms and bad actors. This has created several news deserts in communities where journalism is necessary to inform the people of the activities, policies, and decisions made by their local, state, and national governments. It also requires new strategies to engage - or re-engage - audiences, and to orient them to the new models of journalism and publishing, focusing on the differences between straightforward reporting and opinion-based media content that is further facilitated by new media technologies.
Fitchburg and its surrounding communities are no different, requiring unique strategies and hands-on involvement of an entire community of practitioners, audiences, publishers, reporters, and educators. This summer institute will offer educators whose disciplines intersect with issues of news and information literacy, along with high school educators, a hands-on opportunity to learn more about the growing crises facing our country - including journalism, civic engagement, civic life, and news and information literacy - and ways they can integrate their classroom and curricular work into the solution. This institute will be particularly relevant to professors and instructors who teach courses and content including journalism, communication, media and news literacy, research methods, and history.
Early Bird Registration
Please register for early bird registration before Friday, May 31. Early bird registrants receive a free copy of Dan Kennedy’s book for signing!
Contact
If you have any questions, please send them to Kyle Moody at kmoody4@fitchburgstate.edu.