By Emily GlazerThe Daily Northwestern
Medill School of Journalism announced preliminary changes in its curriculum Thursday in the beginning of an evolution of the school that is scheduled to take shape by the end of May.
The changes will change on- and off-campus class locations, teaching assignments and curriculum structure. Medill Dean John Lavine said they will “fine tune” the changes and take student input and feedback into consideration.
Most recently, three course names were changed to reflect the course content, said Medill Assistant Dean Michele Bitoun.
Students were alerted to the new course names because the Fall Quarter course schedule was uploaded to CAESAR last week.
Editing and Writing the News, the introductory journalism course, has been renamed Reporting and Writing to emphasize the “distinction between the fundamentals of news reporting and writing,” Bitoun said. The second class in the sequence focuses on incorporating different technology into reporting.
Newswriting, the second writing-based journalism course, was renamed Enterprise Reporting in Diverse Communities. Bitoun said the change was made because students will do more off-campus reporting. This year, students in the class were assigned to Chicago neighborhoods, where they reported out of university-owned makeshift newsrooms.
The Teaching Media internship, when Medill students spend a quarter working at a newspaper, magazine or broadcast station, will be renamed Journalism Residency.
Bitoun said the internship program will stay the same despite the name change.
“Teaching Media has been a name that we’ve always had to do so much explaining about,” she said. “We thought Journalism Residency describes what that experience is like.”
Students said they have mixed reactions to these curriculum changes.
Medill sophomore Mari Fagel said she benefited from reporting outside of Evanston during her Newswriting course earlier this year, rather than writing “the same old stories” around campus.
“I got to report on a really interesting story that took me out of my element,” she said.
But Fagel added she sometimes felt in danger.
“Finally they brought in a policeman to talk to us about the area and inform us of what areas were safe,” she said.
Though Fagel said she thinks it’s important for Medill to keep up with the ever-changing journalism world, to do so will be challenging.
“It’s just hard because we’re the first classes to go through this and we have to test out the kinks in the curriculum,” she said.
Reach Emily Glazer at [email protected].
