I’m an Associate Lecturer in the Media School at LCC, working mainly across several BA and MA degrees in the Journalism and Publishing department, and also in Media and Communications.
My career spans 30 years on national newspapers and magazines including The Times, the Guardian and Observer, The Independent and Prospect, primarily as a features editor and writer on staff, but also freelance. I love the scope and creativity of features specialising, but I’ve also specialised in lifestyle, consumer and health and wellbeing journalism. I wrote a healthy lifestyle book as a result of the latter, which was translated into seven languages. As journalism has migrated online, I have gone with it, learning to create digital content and use social media.
My father was an artist and I am particularly interested in 20th century British painting. I have also been lucky enough to meet and write about some of the leading female artists of that time. My father’s friendship with the poet Dylan Thomas inspired me to write two books about the poet, both published.
I started teaching at LCC seven years ago and enjoy it enormously. I love being with young people from such a diverse range of social, ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The UK media, which is still very white, male and middle class in its decision-making upper echelons, needs these young people badly if it is to properly reflect the multicultural society we now live in and appeal to younger generations. I’ve written about this in one of my blog posts. I’m hoping in doing the PG Cert to explore the kind of barriers to this both within the university and the industry, and how they might be dismantled.
One of the most enjoyable things about doing the PG Cert is meeting some amazing colleagues from different disciplines across UAL, some of which I know little about like game design or contour fashion. I enjoy all the sessions too, broadening the way I think and challenging me. Being a student is also reminding me why learning new ways of doing things like using WordPress and Workflow can be stressful – not to mention assessment deadlines. It really helps understand why the students I teach can feel the same way too – and why compassionate tutors and lecturers can make such a difference.
This session was online within our tutor groups, and was about finding out more about each other, and sharing something about pedagogy. We had to make a brief presentation. It turned into a wide ranging discussion about how we teach and how students learn, possible barriers to learning and how to overcome them, power and disempowerment. It was fascianting to ‘meet’ the other students in my group – some very interesting people who I am looking forward to getting to know better.
I chose a cartoon, Death by Powerpoint.
I chose this because sometimes I feel we rely too much on slides and talking when we are teaching, and not enough on student participation and activitiy. You can feel the energy draining out of the room sometimes – it’s worse online because you can’t see or feel what the mood is like. I rarely give lectures, nearly all my teaching is seminar or workshop based, often for three hours at a time so there needs to be a lot of variety and change of pace in the activities.
I’m very conscious of the difference between teaching and learning and try not to assume they are the same – ie is what I think I am teaching what the students are learning? How do I know, minute by minute in the classroom?
This and the other presentations provoked a lot of discussion about notions of powerin the classroom, and different approaches of getting people to do things, including how we interrupt. Silence is something many of us are afraid of in the classroom, but it can be very productive.
Tash, who works in theatre, talked about notions of playfulness and ‘What if?’ This resonated with me as journalism is always trying new ways of creating and presenting material, especially now with all the different platforms available.
Tracey Ann, who works within the prison system talked about her experience of barriers to learning, and different types of learning styles. We discussed how these can be helpful but also risk labelling and categorising people who might be limited -self-imposed and externally – as a result.
Makeba – an “international academic” reminded us not to only think about students within UAL but international students who are disempowered by lack of access to technology or materials. This became clear here in the UK too when students were forced to learn online during the pandemic lockdowns, but often with little access to the internet or expensive mobile data.
These are just a few of the presentations that made an impression and reminded me of how diverse UAL is as a community, and the richness of its community.
Professional journalists consume news on a daily basis, whether it is “hard news” about the current conflict in Ukraine, or the latest stories about their area of specialism like fashion or film. They are expected to know what’s going on in the world and for this to inform their pitches to editors or contribution to meetings where ideas are hatched – the creative side of the industry.
MICHAEL GOVE – WHO HE?
Employers expect journalism students and graduates to be reasonably knowledgeable about current affairs, but in my experience at LCC this is not always the case. For example, in my first year of teaching in 2015, I referred to the then education secretary, Michael Gove, a highly controversial figure whose conservative reforms alienated many teachers. The conflict was prominently reported in the media, especially his use of the term “The Blob” to refer to his critics in the profession. It still rumbles on, as a new book co authored by former local authority chief education officer and chief government adviser Sir Tim Brighouse testifies.
I was shocked to realise that none of the first years in the class, mostly from the UK, had heard of Michael Gove, despite the fact that his “toxic image” had led to his removal from his post. This was the start of a big learning curve for me as an industry practitioner, teaching practical journalism skills. Since then I have gradually tailored my references to current news stories to ones that I hope at least some students will be aware of. For example, when teaching media law, I don’t assume that even UK students will have heard of “national treasures” like Sir Cliff Richard, who won £2m from the BBC when it breached his privacy in 2019 – a huge, recent news story.
To encourage students to read journalistic content, I have built time into sessions for them to talk about stories that interest them, asking them to bring printed articles and links to share with the class. With a student body as diverse as LCC’s, this can really encourage diversity and broaden horizons, but it doesn’t really work on a voluntary basis, and even students who commit to bringing stories to the next week’s session may not turn up, without any advance warning.
Below:Talking to students about high profile media stories can be problematic for different reasons
WHAT ARE THE REASONS?
Assessment and Algorithms
As this kind of real-world engagement with current affairs isn’t built into learning outcomes or assessment criteria, it can fall by the wayside. It’s also probably partly due to the way that young people access news through social media sites or search engines whose algorithms serve up content that the students have shown an interest in. The serendipity of flicking through a newspaper or listening to a radio bulletin has been lost. This year’s annual Ofcom report showed, for example, that those aged 16-34 use YouTube as their main viewing outlet.
Another reason could be that teachers shy away from difficult hard news topics that students find upsetting, or “triggering”. In one PG Cert session, a colleague from a different discipline said that when students who wanted to talk in tutorials about the abduction of Sarah Everard from Clapham Common, because they lived nearby and were understandably anxious, “colleagues shut it down”. That’s a kind of censorship that as a journalist I find worrying.
Over the years I have come to self-censor, trying to use examples that I think the students, or enough students to contribute to a discussion, will have heard of. One successful example is an online interview by Vanity Fair with drag artist Ru Paul, a masterclass in asking personal questions for teaching interview skills, which students can really “relate to”. Other times, this can risk cringe-making attempts to be “down with the kids”. Does it also stifle the very values of curiosity, enquiry and open-mindedness that we need to foster in our journalism students?
HOW COULD THINGS CHANGE?
Colleagues in the media industry agree that it needs to reach out more to school pupils to explain the importance and value of journalism (at its best) that is a mirror to society and holds those who rule us to account. Organisations like Journalism for Schools and News Academy offered workshops for schools pre-pandemic, but have an uncertain future.
Raising awareness across UAL of organisations like the Association for Journalism Education, which offers content about emotional resilience and wellbeing could be helpful.
WHAT STUDENTS TEACH US
It’s not a one way process however. Students teach us so much about subjects and issues they care about, such as transgenderism, that eventually make their way into mainstream media. International students raise awareness of important issues in their worlds. Students also understand, and in many cases create, the kind of content on platforms like Instagram and TikTok that media companies are desperate to engage with to keep attracting young audiences. We hope our students will be the journalists and content creators of the future, but we to achieve this we do need to foster their engagement with current affairs.
Mushrooms, made from recycled bottles by Veronica Richterova. Photo c. Michal Cilar 2005 https://www.veronikarichterova.com/en/my-works/pet-art-sculptures/#
At an in-person cohort session we were asked: ‘Sustainability: How do we reclaim the buzzword, and what can we do with it?’
This led to a wide ranging discussion about what sustainability means in the context of a university – especially one that claims it has “placed the need to live and teach more sustainably at the centre of our mission”. This prompted some criticism of making grandiose statements on UAL’s website, while failing to put basic measures like effective recycling and rubbish bins in its buildings, and running heating systems that can, at LCC at any rate, make rooms either boiling hot or freezing cold with no ability to turn radiators up or down. This can come across as “do what I say, not as I do” and demotivate students and staff alike to take the mission statement seriously. For example one colleague, a theatre technician, told us how the university decided a room used to store props on drama courses was to be put to another use. This meant that there was nowhere to store the props, so that they had to be bought for each production, then disposed of. The props room has remained empty, several years after the decision was made. What is sustainable about that, he wondered.
Cynicism aside, the discussion went in two directions: material and pedagogical.
The plastic bottles bit
Colleagues who teach at LCF talked about how they address criticisms of an industry for its wasteful and environmentally destructive practices.
There are different approaches, such as promoting use of environmentally friendly materials, or making students aware of organisations like the Ellen McArthur Foundation which promotes a circular economy “where waste is eliminated, resources are circulated, and nature is regenerated”. Another approach is to encourage students to “produce less but do it better”.
Fashion staff also spoke about how students may feel they can’t “be sustainable” in their own practice, it’s “too conceptual”. Another colleague, who teaches architecture, also a practice accused of waste and environmental destruction, suggested that instead of talking about sustainability, “some future concept that possibly involves new technology,” changing the noun to a verb, eg, asking ourselves: “What we are sustaining?”. As a journalist, this resonated with me – language and how we use it matters.
Or is it about pedagogy?
The other direction the discussion took was around pedagogical issues, especially the important question of to what extent we should or can help students to pursue sustainable careers/practice after they leave. UAL offers students a lot of support in this regard with offerings such as collaborative industry projects, DPS units, mentoring schemes and the Student Careers section of the UAL website, which all help prepare students for life after graduation.
However, in my experience of teaching practical skills in seminars and workshops in the Journalism & Publishing department at LCC, one important issue with a huge impact on future careers is somewhat swept under the carpet. Accurate written English and the ability to write in various journalistic styles and formats (eg news stories, reviews) are key for students wanting to get jobs in a highly competitive UK media jobs market (if they plan to work here) which is awash with journalism graduates. In many cases our students are graduating without the level of skills required by the industry. The reasons for this, from my understanding in discussions with colleagues in, eg revalidation meetings include: “We are not running a training course.” Or: “It’s not our job to teach them grammar and spelling”. Or: “The university doesn’t think these matter for the creative industries.”
If sustainability means supporting students in their future journalism careers, this needs addressing. As an AL I discuss this with colleagues a lot and it is possible to for me to build teaching these skills into Unit Guides and timetables, but on learning outcomes and assessment criteria set at university level, it’s hard to see how to make an impact.
Sustaining teachers
One colleague spoke about “academic maximalism” – teachers being asked to do more and more. Another talked about wanting to work more on their own artistic practice to “recharge batteries and feel like you are a better teacher”. An example of “academic maximalism” is the creeping hybridisation of online and in person teaching. This may be positive for online lectures for example, which can be given, recorded and listened to at home, but practical workshop sessions involving haptic experiences, interactive group activities or client-based projects, are more challenging and time consuming to organise and teach online. Not knowing if students are really “in the room” during online sessions is worrying – “like teaching through a keyhole without knowing what’s going on on the other side of the door,” as one colleague described it. These points raise questions about sustaining an effective and fulfilled teaching staff for the university if workloads become overwhelming, as the ongoing strike action has illustrated. Who, indeed, is sustaining who?
In 2021, in the wake of the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, Women in Journalism, (WIJ) the UK’s leading networking, training and campaigning organisation for journalists in the UK, undertook research into the representation of Black people and ethnic minorities in national newspapers and on the main TV and radio news bulletins (measured by audience).
Five years earlier, WIJ had undertaken a similar project, analysing the representation of women on the front pages of the national press. The title was – The Tycoon and the Escort. As the introduction stated:
It refers to the descriptions used in the coverage of the murder by a businessman of his lover, for which he received a life sentence in 2016. The Tycoon and the Escort exemplifies the kind of loaded language which often reveals the bias of the male media lens where men are millionaires and business tycoons while women – even powerful ones – are judged by a hotness quotient or ‘would-ya?’ yardstick on their arm-candy factor.
The research analysed the front pages of newspapers – “shaping the ‘hard news’ which we see on coffee tables and garage forecourts across Britain” over a week in July.
The Daily Mirror had the lowest count of female front page bylines in June-July 2017, with only 10% of stories written by women. This was followed by the Evening Standard and The Sun, both with 15% of front page stories written by women, and the Daily Express with 16%. Across the print press, the average percentage of front page stories written by women in June-July 2017 was 25%, just 2 percentage points above the average in 2012.
In 2022 WIJ asked the same questions again, this time broadening the scope to analyse how the UK media represents women both in terms of bylines, as quoted experts, and also collecting information on the topics covered by Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) expert guests featured across all three mediums. To determine the nuance of the BAME experience it additionally monitored Black as a discrete category. (The use of BAME was contentious throughout, and Black with a capital B was used at the insistence of Vivienne Francis, a senior colleague at LCC and on the WIJ committee, which I also sit on.
The findings were shocking and showed little progress since 2017.
An example of sexist portrayal of leading government members as reported in the Guardian online
Jen Reid was the only black woman quoted on the front page of a national newspaper in the week following the pulling down of the statue of Edward Colsonas part of the BLM protests – a major news story. His statue was replaced by one of Reid by the artist Marc Quinn
On the PG Cert course, combining 30 years of industry experience, 10 years leading WIJ’s professional-development events programme and seven teaching at LCC, I would like to investigate how these gaps could be narrowed, given that so many of the students on all five degrees in the Journalism and Publishing department are from such diverse backgrounds, and the majority are women.
As a result of research by WIJ and other organisations such as the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism the industry is well aware of the need to recruit from a far wider social and ethnic base, and there is anecdotal evidence that this is happening at entry level, although data is not in the public domain.
At the time of WIJ’s 2017 report, there was one woman editor of a national newspaper – Katharine Viner at the Guardian. Now there are seven, ie 36 per cent (Press Gazette, 2020). In another five years time, could we see a similar shift, so that newsrooms reflect far more social and ethnic diversity? And what is the role of university journalism departments in helping make that happen?
References
Women in Journalism. 2017. The Tycoon and the Escort: the business of portraying women in newspapers
Mayhew F. Press Gazette. Feb 7 2020: https://pressgazette.co.uk/more-than-third-uk-national-newspapers-now-edited-by-women-fleet-street-shake-up/#:~:text=This%20means%20that%20of%20the,third%20(36%20per%20cent).
In their article ‘Key aspects of teaching and learning in the visual arts,’ Alison Shreeve, Shân Wareing and Linda Drew outline the benefits for students of working with external partners:
Students can put their knowledge into practice through collaborative work with partners. These can be business, community or schools links, but the student takes on the role of practitioner with a client from the world beyond the university. These kinds of interactions enable students to feel that they are capable and are learning the additional social interaction skills that will be needed on graduation. (Shreeve, Wareing & Drew, 2008)
These points apply equally to journalism students and while I agree with all of them in principle, in practice I have worked on a dozen client projects with journalism and publishing students at LCC with varying degrees of success. I am going to describe briefly one successful and one less successful ones
Collaborative project with MeeToo
The unit was “Professional Practice”, intended to prepare BA Journalism 2nd years for their future careers. It involves an element of work experience, and in this case students who had been unable to secure placements produced content for MeeToo, an award-winning safe social media app that allows young people to talk anonymously about difficult things with other people of a similar age or experience. This was pre-covid, and the co-founder, Suzi Godson, a former graphic design student at St Martins, briefed the students to write 500 pieces about their own experience of mental health issues, gave them feedback half-way through the 10-week unit and again at the end, all in person at LCC.
Suzi Godson as a St Martins student
Support from me as their tutor in honing ideas, interpreting and realising them appropriately for the client was part of a three way collaboration between me, the client and the students.
Setting up such opportunities requires support from the tutor who can maximise the learning opportunities through preparing students with ideas about what to expect … and through constructing more permanent learning resources to explain processes, give examples and hear from employers, clients and the students themselves. (Shreeve et al. 2008)
Another collaborative aspect was the involvement of the course leader, who brought her own perspective and was very supportive in explaining how to access facilities such as printing facilities, recording and photography studios, and as she said “how to ace the assessment”.
The outcome was that the majority of students had their work published in a handbook produced in 2019 by MeeToo, which went on to win a prodigious award as the Health and Social Care Book of the Year from the British Medical Association – a win for the client as well as the students and me. I didn’t mark the reflective reports for this unit so I can’t measure the success based on grades, but if having this to include on a CV is a measure of success, this was an A+.
The award-winning MeeToo handbook
Magazines for Moshi Moshi and Campus Society
Third year students on the same degree have to produce content for a client, a project that contributes to half the marks in their final degree. Examples I was involved in include an A5 magazine for an independent record label, Moshi Moshi and in another year, for Campus Society, a social network for students. The difficulty here was that the cohort – c. 30 – is very big to be working as a team on small format magazines of less than 50 pages, and totally unrepresentative of the size of magazine teams in the real world.
The students found it hard to agree on the design of the magazines, which made them visually incoherent and inconsistent, and in the end was imposed on them by design staff, causing resentment. Working in sub-teams to produce content was challenging if some students failed to turn up to editorial meetings or deliver the content they had agreed to create. This was despite sessions on how to work successfully as a team – vital in the magazine industry – during which we discussed in class what they did and didn’t like group projects, and agreed to a code of conduct, as well as teaching on theories of collaboration.
Students shared on yellow stickies what they don’t enjoy about collaborationin preparatory sessions
In both cases the clients did not seem to be very engaged with the projects. The staff at Moshi Moshi were hard to get hold of, and didn’t cooperate very hopefully with eg, providing images of bands. While Campus Society kindly invited us to have several of the unit sessions at their building in Soho, our contacts on their staff were often absent and unavailable for feedback.
As the client project contributes to half the marks in their final year, this lack of enthusiasm and engagement is worrying and may contribute to poor NSS results for the course. Course tutors are left picking up the pieces and doing a lot of the final production work themselves. As a preparation for the real world of magazine journalism, which is all about teamwork, this leaves a lot to be desired.
Possible solutions:
Offer the students a choice of clients to work with so they feel they have more agency – but this is a) time consuming and b) can make final assessment problematic if they are working on different projects. Other degree courses at UAL must encounter this, it would be interesting to know how they respond.
A design staff member could create a flexible design template that allows the students a certain amount of creativity and leeway – this would mimic how art directors work in the real world, creating templates that allow flexibility but create a clear visual identity for the product.
This project is always taught by a team of three tutors. Build in time for tutors to reach out to students who are not attending sub-team meetings to understand why and see what could be done to encourage them to take part.
References Shreeve A, Wareing S, Drew L. 2008. A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education – Enhancing Academic Practice, third edition, Routledge.
What sounded like a very dry session turned out to be one of the most enjoyable, but also controversial. Jheni Arboine, Educational Developer: Academic Enhancement and Siobhan Clay: Educational Developer: Student Experience introduced us to how “data” can mean anything from complex statistical information of the type used to measure student attainment levels at UAL to games like Wordsearch.
We were asked to write limericks and haikus in groups on the theme of data: it was interesting to observe how some students seemed nonplussed by this, perhaps because they had no prior understanding or experience of either form, or of writing them. The collective results expressed a certain wariness of the way data can be used.
This exercise demonstrated how serious topics can be approached in a light-hearted, engaging way.
We were then showed a graph charting attainment levels between different ethnic groups at UAL over a six year period.
While overall it suggests improved results among all groups, it does reflect the current debate about whether attainment levels are in fact improving or this is a sign of “grade inflation”.
“….the pressure being placed on academics by senior managers at universities to lower their standards is also strongly implicated in grade inflation. Some academics have chosen to express their concerns publicly, even though this has on occasion put their own career at risk. One cited the “intolerable pressures on academic staff to pass students who should rightfully fail and to award higher classes of degrees to the undeserving”, while another complained that they had routinely awarded essays low grades “but have been brought under pressure, internally and externally, to provide higher grades.” The sheer volume of similar reports, documented over many years, is concerning and its potential impact on grade inflation is obvious enough.” (Reform: 2018)
The graph produced a fierce backlash from some ethnic minority students, focussing on how Home White Students consistently out perform others. This reaction was understandable, but closer scrutiny shows that the attainment gap for this metric has narrowed considerably. For example, between Home Black students and Home White students it has narrowed from 27 percentage points, ie 47:74% in 2015/2016, to 16 percentage points, ie 73:89%, in 2020/21. The data, could in fact also be interpreted positively.
This nuance was overlooked however in the ensuing debate about what policy or interventions could address the attainment gap, which became quite angry and personal. The session ended on a sour note, which was a shame as at the outset it had been playful.
The whole session did demonstrate however, that how data is collected, expressed and interpreted is a minefield. On reflection, Group 13’s haiku had anticipated this this elegantly:
