I would love to have my students critically analyze the local and school newspapers! We would do this in a very similar way to how we were asked to do the local television news analysis that went along with this assignment.
I would bring copies of the school paper in for the first part of the activity. We would brainstorm all the different types of articles the class would be likely to find in the paper (local, national, world, film and music critiques, etc.) and each student would list them in their notebooks. I would then give each student a copy of the paper and I would give the students time to read through the articles and classify them in their charts. I would allow some discussion during the activity, as students may want to classify articles in different ways. Their discussions could lead to talks about editorial responsibilities and privileges. After they were done categorizing, the class would look at how many items fell into each category. My predication is that there will be few “news” items and a lot of “fluff” items.
For the next part of the activity I would bring in copies of the local paper and we would do the same thing. This time, though, I anticipate the class finding much more “news” items and a lot less “fluff,” except in the Entertainment section. We could now discuss why there is such a large difference between the two papers. If the discussion didn’t get there on its own, I would bring up the following points: writing for different audiences, different writing ability (professional vs. student), and editorial processes and expectations.
Finally, I would ask the students to take one article from the school newspaper and rewrite it in the form found in the local paper.
15 years ago
This sounds like a great assignment!! I am wondering, does the school you work at have a school newspaper? I student taught at Central high school in St. Paul, and the students actually reported the news via broadcasting. Fortunately, Central has a man there who is very savvy with technology and media. It was a course that was offered and it was the students' responsibility to capture the news at central and video record themselves like an actual news station. Needless to say, it was quite impressive!! The news was aired in every classroom for about 5-10 minutes and provided the announcements for that day as well.
ReplyDeleteWith that being said, I think I could have taken your idea with news that is televised! This way, I could integrate technology into the assignment as well! I agree with you that it really gets students thinking about audience! I doubt that the students would be as engaged if they did a news segment that paralleled that which is televised on the local stations. It would be a really interesting experiment!
Oh God, contrary to the competent individual at your school, the dude at Simley that was supposed to be the "expert" with all of the "Spartan Spotlight" stuff (the school telecast) didn't have a damn clue what he was doing.
ReplyDeleteAs such, if another teacher didn't intervene (of which he complained about a TON at lunch), the telecast ended up looking like crap. My question for you is this David; if you perceived your school newspaper / telecast as being of super "poor" quality, would you chose to look at it? I ask because as teachers we often decide not to use other texts that we perceive as being of "poor" quality for whatever reason. Or, do you think that the paper / telecast would still have valuable / redeeming qualities?
Nice work, see you Th.