Journalism and Activism Anew: Participatory Movements With Adolescents Writing for Change

• In Event: Journalism Education as a Gateway Discipline Toward Fostering Moral, Civic, Ideological, and Activist Transformations

Abstract

Purposes
This study followed students through a journalism summer writing camp, in an online community, and during school-year meetings as they engaged with journalist mentors and in journalistic research/writing about issues relevant to their communities. Over six months, I researched with middle and high school students as they wrote journalistically and studied individually and together ways such writing can serve as forms of activism. This presentation highlights how students’ expanded understandings of themselves as writers and researchers shift civic participation (Ito, et al., 2015; Kahne, Hodgin, & Eidman-Aadahl 2016) and journalism (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2014), particularly relating to youth and the digital.

Theoretical Frameworks
Smirnov (2017) et al. link engagement in journalistic writing practices with connected civics and youth participatory politics. These links extend to youth participatory action research (YPAR), especially Mirra, Garcia, and Morrell’s (2016) three-part conceptualization: engagement in the research cycle, mentorship through social-scientist role models, and publication of findings about social issues of personal relevance (p. 2). This study brought journalism education, research, and writing together with broader forms of participation and movement, further aligning with a transliteracies framework in examining movements writers made “across interactions among people, things, texts, contexts, modes, and media” and “tracing systems of relations in literate activity while emphasizing issues of power and ideology in those systems” (Stornaiuolo, Smith, & Phillips, 2017, pp. 72, 76).

Modes of Inquiry and Analysis
Data collection and analysis traced such participation and movement and included participant observation and field notes, surveys, interviews, and student-created artifacts. The latter entailed student-researcher logs, news articles and radio broadcast recordings, audio and video journal entries, online community participation, and academic presentations collaboratively created and delivered about the program experience. Using constant comparative analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), sources were analyzed by the researcher and jointly with students.

Conclusions and Significance
By engaging in and with journalism as a means of enacting social change, students expanded their understandings of what journalistic writing is, what it means to engage in activism, and what purposes and impacts their digital writing practices have.
Students shifted from viewing journalism as non-creative and done by “professionals” to understanding it as a hybrid genre, blending journalists’ individual takes with conventions. Students came to link their writing with the profession and with activism in personally relevant ways, moving from feeling that journalism and civics could only pertain to “big P” politics to believing that writing as a form of activism around their local schools, neighborhoods, homes, and lives—“little P” politics (Janks, 2012)—is equally important and still connected nationally and globally. Similarly, students began conceptualizing their digital connections and practices as having greater purposes and meanings in effecting change and did so with more critical eyes toward audiences.
Overall, students articulated their own understandings of what “participation” entails—in terms of journalism, activism, and writing and research practices more broadly—highlighting “the increasingly murky line between journalism and activism” (Neason & Dalton, 2018, para. 2) and calling into question access, uptake, and outcomes in relation to student journalism and activism.

Author

• Emily Plummer Catena, Florida State University