Volume 3 Number 1 , Article
Tome 3 numéro 1 Article

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Guest editors: Trish Audette-Longo, Christine Crowther, Nana aba Duncan, Chantal Francoeur and Shenaz Kermalli

ABSTRACT

Introduction

Forced change: Pandemic pedagogy and journalism education

“Forced Change: Pandemic Pedagogy and Journalism Education” is a special multimedia issue of Facts and Frictions that examines how journalism educators in Canada have reimagined course content and delivery since the COVID-19 pandemic prompted stay-at-home orders across North America in March 2020, and since journalism’s lack of diversity was widely spotlighted after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020. In this introductory essay we review journalism studies and journalism education literature published since 2020 and reflect on our own efforts as special issue editors to facilitate the participation of precarious, part-time or emerging educators in this collection and in broader peer-reviewed and institutional discussions of journalism education. These efforts are contextualized by a survey of cultural studies, feminist, and critical race literature that addresses uneven challenges continuously faced by potentially marginalized educators and academics that were crystallized through the pandemic. We put this research in conversation with the insights, experiences and critical questions shared by contributors to this issue, and argue for strengthened networks of support, recognition and resource sharing across post-secondary journalism programs in Canada.

Keywords: COVID-19, reckoning, journalism education, crisis, academic labour, professional training

Introduction

Changement forcé : Pédagogie de la pandémie et enseignement du journalisme

Changement forcé : Pédagogie de la Pandémie est une édition spéciale multimédia de Faits et Frictions qui examine comment les formatrices et les formateurs en journalisme au Canada ont réimaginé le contenu et la réalisation des cours depuis que la pandémie de COVID-19 a donné lieu à un confinement dans toute l’Amérique du Nord en mars 2020. Elle porte aussi une réflexion sur le manque de diversité dans le journalisme qui a été largement mis en lumière suite à l’assassinat de George Floyd en mai 2020. Dans cet essai introductif, nous passons en revue les études sur le journalisme et la littérature sur la formation journalistique publiées depuis 2020. Nous réfléchissons à nos propres efforts en tant qu’éditrices d’un bulletin spécial pour faciliter la participation du personnel de service du milieu de l’éducation qualifiée comme précaire, à temps partiel ou émergent, dans les comités de lecture, contextes institutionnels et autres discussions sur le sujet de la formation journalistique. Ces efforts sont encadrés par une recherche sur diverses études culturelles, féministes et de littérature critique de la race qui aborde les défis inégaux, devenus apparents durant la pandémie, à laquelle font face les éducateurs et les universitaires identifiés comme potentiellement marginalisés. Nous mettons cette recherche en relation avec les idées, les expériences et les questions critiques partagées par les contributeurs à cette édition, et plaidons en faveur d’un renforcement des réseaux de soutien, de reconnaissance et de partage des ressources dans les programmes de journalisme postsecondaires au Canada. 

Mots clés : COVID-19, bilan, formation en journalisme, crise, emploi universitaire, formation professionelle

Forced change: Pandemic pedagogy and journalism education

Trish Audette-Longo, Christine Crowther, Nana aba Duncan, Chantal Francoeur and Shenaz Kermalli

We left our classrooms in March 2020 not knowing when we would return, when we would see our students again, or how we would finish the winter semester. More uncertainty may have awaited us off-campus, as reports of a global pandemic and its toll on our communities rose, in crowded grocery stores, and as our own children were sent home from their schools. “The biggest initial thing that stands out to me, if we set the scene of the beginning of the pandemic: we closed on a Friday, and everyone was told to go home and work from home — staff, faculty and students,” recalls Roger Martin, the IT coordinator for Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, in a podcast episode included in this issue. “The university was closed for three days the next week, and we were to be back Thursday, switching all of our classes to online instruction. So, we had a window of five days to work with in order to get our initial classes off the ground.” In the same department, Trish Audette-Longo — an assistant professor and the lead editor of this special issue — remembers navigating the first online newsroom days with her second-year students during the final weeks of that semester. She guided them by phone, tried different video platforms and set up instant-messaging channels. Her students reported on government press conferences and announcements at a distance, recorded videos about washing their hands, and found community stories that spread farther away from Ottawa as some returned to their family homes earlier than planned. Days of pivoting became weeks and months. As Université du Québec à Montréal journalism professor and special issue co-editor Chantal Francoeur conveys in another podcast episode, we grew accustomed to looking at screens filled with empty black boxes when students chose not to show their faces. We turned lively lectures into shorter notes or podcast episodes. We waited. 

“Forced Change: Pandemic Pedagogy and Journalism Education” aims to examine — for the first time — how educators in Canadian journalism schools approached experiential learning for online delivery in response to COVID-19 health and safety guidelines, and how their teaching continues to change through crises and reckoning with the news industry’s foundational “gendered, racialized, and colonial” roots and structures (Callison and Young, 2020, p. 24). Conceptually, we apply Stuart Hall’s approach to cultural studies and conjunctural analysis, drawing out questions about how crises foster transformation and opportunities to scrutinize their “conditions of existence”, points of connection, competing ideologies, power, and politics (Hall and Massey 2010, p. 59). In this introduction, we outline the purpose of this special issue of Facts and Frictions. The issue is structured around four themes: forced change, novel approaches, trauma-informed reporting, and building community. In addition to this introductory essay, this issue includes podcast episodes, panel videos, research essays, written reflections or commentary pieces, a multimedia resource list, and “listening party” handouts designed to accompany podcast episodes and built to be used by journalism educators.

We call this issue “Forced Change” to acknowledge the speed with which journalists and journalism educators acted to meet the demands of external pressures through the pandemic: doing (and sometimes re-learning) their jobs and connecting with their communities remotely, at a distance, often at any or all hours. “Forced Change” also aims to recognize the necessary and forceful calls for transformation coming from inside and outside journalism schools to better reflect and engage with the needs and lives of all students, inclusive of race, gender, sexuality, religion, citizenship, ability and class. In this introductory essay, we review three years of journalism and education scholarship published since 2020 to situate the case studies, articles, provocations, and conversations collected in this issue. We also offer questions that still demand answers. This is not a history project but an opportunity to consider a range of journalism education futures and contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning in our field and in other fields oriented toward practice-based instruction. We view this period, and what comes next, with some insistent hope, by which we mean a refusal to see pandemic disruptions as lost time or a year of missed opportunities in journalism education. Many educators in Canada have returned to their classrooms after years of telling colleagues and students they were still “muted,” or waiting for someone to join them in “breakout rooms.” What did they learn about responding to disruption and emerging crises that can be put to future use? 

In the latter half of this essay, we share our approaches to producing this multimedia journal issue and a challenge we have grappled with throughout this project: what kinds of collaboration and co-support structures must be in place to ensure precariously employed, racialized, migrant, women, non-binary, disabled or emerging journalism educators are positioned to share and amplify their research and practice expertise within broader academic settings? In keeping with the theme of pandemic pedagogy, it is necessary to take note of the unique pressures that are often placed on potentially marginalized faculty. When journalism courses moved online, these pressures compounded, taking on multiple layers for different people. As a pandemic baseline, many educators met new student or department needs while caring for others at home, living and working in a new kind of isolation, or experiencing the loss of loved ones (cf. Auger and Formentin 2021; Belikov et al. 2021; Keith 2023; Tugend 2020). Those in precarious or contract teaching positions may have additionally lacked job security, support, or time to plan new approaches to course delivery. Those already expected to take on academic “mothering” or care roles may have done more emotional labour as their students navigated online learning, financial or housing precarity, or experiences of racism, including increased incidents of anti-Asian racism during the pandemic (cf. Docka-Filipek and Stone 2021; Guyotte et al. 2023; Newcomb 2021; Sakamoto et al. 2023; Shalaby, Allam and Buttorff 2021). Black, Indigenous and educators of colour, likely to be asked to take on more academic and community service before 2020, were also likely to be leaned on to create and deliver anti-oppression training for colleagues and students that could respond to the Black Lives Matter movement and begin to remedy the workings of white-centred and colonial post-secondary institutions (cf. Arday and Jones 2022; Elhinnawy 2022; Martis and Okeke in this issue). These experiences were not universal. Later in this essay we discuss pandemic labours and potential burnout, but for those educators who worked through multiple layers of new and old pressures, it is reasonable to expect they had less time or bandwidth than normal to reflect on change, make original research contributions or produce new journalism. 

As editors of this special issue, we aim to make space to share experiences and foster conversations about how lessons learned in journalism education can be more inclusively recognized and circulated. Our efforts to ethically engage journalist-educators from across Canada in acts of peer-reviewed scholarship are not presented here as the panacea for every roadblock that stood or stands in the way of precarious or overburdened colleagues sharing their pedagogical and research expertise in traditional academic settings. Nonetheless, in reflecting on how this issue came together we are making a case for collectively pushing harder to attend to uneven power arrangements before, during and after periods of forced change. We want to see continued conversations about how journalism operates, who it serves, and how it can be done better. By sharing pandemic research findings and teaching experiences from across the country, we can compare, contrast, and learn from responses to transformative questions about journalism in and outside post-secondary classrooms since March 2020. 

Journalism education and conceptualizing change

Journalism students are trained in “teaching and learning spaces that closely resemble the environments in which [they] will be participating as professionals” (Young and Giltrow 2015, p. 46). As they move through their studies, emerging journalists spend time interviewing people, collecting audio and visual materials, and producing public-facing stories that meet professional standards of accuracy, style and timeliness. The process of practice, reflection, and then adding or refining skills aligns with experiential learning goals (cf. Brandon 2002; Byrd and Denney 2018, p. 49; Keith and Cozma 2022; Kolotouchkina, Vallés and Mosquera 2021, p. 49). The outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 forced Canadian newsrooms to move online or shut down altogether (cf. Fenlon 2020; Lindgren 2020; Lindgren 2022; Wechsler 2021). Stay-at-home mandates also pushed journalism education from classrooms, campus newsrooms and studios to online platforms, and interrupted already critically contested classroom-newsroom pipelines (cf. Gasher 2015; Haney 2015; Picard 2015; Public Policy Forum 2017; Shapiro 2015; Valencia-Forrester 2020; Watson 2020). 

COVID-19 presented an opportunity for journalism to change course, transform, start anew — or pick up the pace of layoffs or closures (Quandt and Wahl-Jorgensen 2021, pp. 1201-1202). Quandt and Wahl-Jorgensen note analysis of this “defined breakpoint” is not a descriptive exercise but one that serves a critical purpose, demanding new case studies as well as deep theorization to better understand the workings and implications of change (p. 1202). Writing relatively early in the pandemic, the authors observe the difficulties of anticipating post-pandemic futures but remain optimistic in their defence of journalism’s social roles and positive service to citizens:

… some of the transformations are only just becoming visible, and the long-term effects can be barely surmised. While some may consider the coronavirus crisis a cataclysmic event for journalism, it also offers a chance for reflection and reconsideration. … More than anything, the pandemic has vindicated the importance of journalism as a social institution, for societies and citizens across the world. In doing so, it has highlighted areas of resilience and vulnerability, showing that journalism can never be insulated from external pressures. Instead, journalism is essential and therefore, at least to some extent, needs to be protected from such pressures to guarantee the functioning of democratic societies. (Quandt and Wahl-Jorgensen 2021, p. 1204)

This strong defense of journalism, its responsibilities and its contributions to democracy emerges from a period of existential tension. On one hand, more people sought and needed accurate information as a global pandemic unfolded all around them (García-Avilés et al. 2022, p. 10), and news organizations could fill a public information void, delving into and showing daily case, death and vaccination statistics (see Bosley 2021). On the other hand, journalists faced a range of risks and challenges while working longer hours with fewer boundaries between their professional and personal lives. After interviewing journalists in the United Kingdom, Jukes, Fowler-Watt and Rees (2022) found participants were working with little rest through trauma and grief; they write, “All of the journalists interviewed felt the relentlessness of covering the pandemic, the sense that this was not a normal short-term crisis that disappeared from the headlines after a routine news cycle” (p. 1004). Studying metajournalistic discourse about pandemic journalism in the United States, Perreault and Perreault (2021) wrote that journalists saw themselves in “a vulnerable position” (p. 977) as they did their work in already endangered newsrooms that were subject to being closed, or where colleagues were being laid off, furloughed or getting their salaries cut back (p. 983). Against a backdrop of media distrust, political polarization and public resistance to pandemic safety measures, journalists also faced violent threats while doing their work (cf. Audette-Longo 2022; Buchanan 2022; Holton et al. 2023; Wahl-Jorgensen and Quandt 2022). 

Despite these challenges and the lengths to which journalists worked to meet them, we consider Quandt’s and Wahl-Jorgensen’s (2021) calls to safeguard the field as it functions now with some caution, noting journalists’ roles and practices also demand critical reflection, particularly given the uneven outcomes of journalistic work (Callison and Young 2020, p. 24). In Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities, Callison and Young (2020) closely document not only the external pressures on journalism — “economic decline and/or technological disruption and change” (p. 2) — but its internal and harmful colonial, white and masculine structures. Advocating a deeper “reckoning” with journalism practices, Callison and Young write, 

Even while delivering what is considered vital information in democratic societies, journalistic representations often fail to consider the harm they have done to peoples and environments, historical shifts in the cultures of journalism, and the colonial contexts for the practice of journalism. Instead, what gets substituted for self-examination by journalists and journalism educators working in a North American context is still a kind of paean to the role of the so-called fourth-estate functions, the need for watchdogs and accountability, and the power of storytelling to bring justice and to speak for those who cannot. (p. 24)

Callison and Young urge us to collectively ask why journalists do what we do, what explicit and implicit ideas or beliefs inform our editorial choices and who is imagined as the audience and beneficiary of works of storytelling. Within Canadian journalism studies, their research provides a critical conceptual framework for re-assessing what constitutes crises in journalism and how to address industry and training failures. 

In the field, before COVID-19 was widespread in North America, the Canadian Association of Black Journalists and Canadian Journalists of Colour issued a joint statement underlining “glaring racial inequity” within newsrooms and advocating for changes to make those newsrooms “truly representative of Canada’s racial diversity and commitment to multiculturalism” (Li, Stewart et al. 2020, p. 1). Among seven calls to action, three explicitly address training and commitments that newsrooms and post-secondary journalism programs need to make to future journalists: 

• “Take a structural approach to improving representation beyond corporate training and workshops,” including “developing new ideas and solutions” through discussions led by journalists of colour (p. 3);
• “Create scholarships and mentorship opportunities targeted towards aspiring journalists of colour,” coupled with newsrooms meaningfully reaching out to and working with racialized communities to “nurtur[e] overlooked talent” (p. 3); and,
• “Start the work of diversity and inclusion in Canadian journalism schools” (p. 4).

In their final recommendation, the Canadian Association of Black Journalists and Canadian Journalists of Colour describe Canadian journalism schools as “a talent pipeline for media outlets” and the place where emerging journalists need to be taught the “current best practices in journalism” (p. 4). They argue, “More focus should be placed on covering racialized communities, providing perspectives from experts of colour, hiring more diverse faculty and developing strategies for recruitment from racialized communities,” and remind schools of their duty to respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call for Canadian journalism schools to require students learn Indigenous people’s histories (p. 4, see also Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015, p. 10).

About two months after COVID-19 first disrupted traditional flows of news production and journalism education in North America, footage of George Floyd being killed by a police officer in the United States was widely shared in May 2020. As Pacinthe Mattar (2020) writes, the deaths of Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and many others, signified violent “inescapable” racism and “incited a tidal wave of anger and fatigue from Black people who had long been calling out the discrimination that they face in their daily lives” (para. 10). Critical discussions about newsroom inequity, marginalization, inflexibility, lack of representation and lack of support for racialized journalists followed, as did renewed calls for accountability and change (cf. Clark 2022; Finneman, Hendricks and Bobkowski 2022; Lowery 2020; Mattar 2020; McCue 2023). While demands to reckon with racism in journalism and journalism education are not new (see Alemán 2014; Bains 2021; Chowdhury 2020; Kermalli 2020), calls for change extended to open letters penned by journalism students and alumni at Carleton, King’s College and Toronto Metropolitan universities in 2020 and 2021. 

These letters responded to different institutional contexts, but their contents share some similarities that demand continued attention and action across post-secondary journalism programs — not only those in Ottawa, Halifax and Toronto. The authors of the Carleton and Toronto Metropolitan University letters cite examples of discrimination in their schools and argue their journalism school experiences worked to deter students who identified as Black, Indigenous and racialized from pursuing careers in the field. The authors of the University of King’s College open letter note their 2019-2020 graduating journalism class was largely white and they “had limited exposure to perspectives and knowledge from journalists who identify as Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC)” (McNamara et al. 2020). In each letter, authors demand more faculty from under-represented communities be hired and offer recommendations for specific and general curriculum updates (Bowden et al. 2020; McNamara et al. 2020; Rizvi et al. 2021). 

To Carleton’s faculty, students and alumni write, “If students are not equipped to address systems of oppression within the media and the world, oppressed and disenfranchised groups will be continually misrepresented through stories produced by graduates of the journalism program” (Bowden et al. 2020, p. 3). In all letters, professors and instructors are urged to engage in critical discussions about systemic racism and critique the concept of “objectivity.” Carleton and Toronto Metropolitan University students and alumni additionally urge their teachers to take part in regular and regularly updated anti-bias training. 

It is important to analyze the characteristics and implications of these two moments as two separate series of events: (1) an abrupt shift to remote journalism and online delivery of traditionally in-person practical courses, and (2) clear demands issued to reckon with perpetuated racism, colonialism and discrimination in classrooms and newsrooms. But it is also necessary to view them as a conjuncture, “a period during which the different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specific and distinctive shape” (Hall and Massey 2010, p. 57). Examples of conjunctures for Hall include the sprawling “post war” period or the Thatcher/Reagan political era:

A conjuncture can be long or short: it’s not defined by time or by simple things like a change of regime — though these have their own effects. As I see it, history moves from one conjuncture to another rather than being an evolutionary flow. And what drives it forward is usually a crisis, when the contradictions that are always at play in any historical moment are condensed … Crises are moments of potential change, but the nature of their resolution is not given. (Hall and Massey 2010, p. 57) 

The purpose of analyzing these moments is to intervene (Hall and Massey 2010, p. 58) — to assess crises from multiple angles to understand their complexities, roots and branches, and seek opportunities for “radical rupture” or even “revolutionary resolution” (Hall and Massey 2010, p. 58). 

The pandemic has been described as “a critical incident in journalism education” (Olsen, Olsen and Røsok-Dahl 2022, p. 1). Critical incidents are game-changing because they force us to reflect and reconsider what we do, how, why — and how we can continually improve. “Critical incidents shed light on the ideals that journalists uphold, the boundaries they build around their work, the inconsistencies that they otherwise would not discuss, and the weaknesses that they otherwise might not articulate” (Jenkins et al. 2020, p. 2). In journalism education, lingering inconsistencies include whether an academic field of study ought to be so geared toward preparing students to work in the journalism industry (cf. Picard 2015; Shapiro 2015; Skinner, Gasher and Compton 2001), whether students need more critical distance to question the objectives of journalistic storytelling, their roles, and the limits of the journalism industry as it exists now (cf. Callison and Young 2020; Gasher 2005; Mensing 2010), and in Canada, how to change a field rooted in colonialism. Heeding Wilson David’s (2021) cautions against simply returning to pre-pandemic teaching approaches (p. 43), we are interested in questions about how journalism schools should or do mirror a changing industry, what educators have learned from this period, and what practices they plan to refine or abandon. Below, we briefly discuss the limits and opportunities of ambitious changes to journalism education forced by the pandemic.

Pandemic pedagogies

Pandemic pedagogies are critical curricular and extra-curricular responses to delivering courses online, fostering professional skill development at a distance, and taking leadership to address how the industry and journalism schools have fallen short in welcoming and centring students’ lived experiences. By applying this broad definition, we resist the temptation to centre technological change or remote learning as the driving force behind changing journalism education beyond the pandemic. 

All over the world and in Canada, journalism educators needed to innovate quickly to build newsroom-like experiences online, and to teach visual storytelling and production at a distance (Duncan et al. in this issue; Fowler-Watt et al. 2020; Ma 2020; Ma and Hanna in this issue; Olsen, Olsen and Røsok-Dahl 2022). But courses delivered online during the pandemic were examples of emergency remote teaching — “not the same as online or distance learning,” which demands time and dedication to rethinking lesson delivery and student engagement in planned asynchronous or synchronous settings (Brunner and Mutsvairo 2021, p. 366; see also Darby 2019; Hodges et al. 2020). In the days and months following March 2020, educators employed crisis responses and weighed students’ overall wellbeing (Jordaan and Groenewald 2021, p. 435). 

In other words, in addition to finding and introducing new platforms for online course delivery, determining the most important lessons that could be taught at a distance, and how best to teach them, educators had to change the way they interacted with students, ushering in heightened attention to and transparent discussions about students’ wellbeing and “affective learning conditions” (Olsen, Olsen and Røsok-Dahl 2022, p. 12, p. 16). Meanwhile, in some places, online course delivery compounded existing digital divides as students lost access to the internet or computers (cf. Duncan et al. in this issue; Jordaan and Groenewald 2021; Nkoala and Matsilele 2023; Pain, Ahmed and Khalid 2022). At Concordia University, journalism program head Andrea Hunter and colleagues wrestled with students’ unequal access to digital reporting tools once they left campus. “The big question was: how do we work with whatever students have at home?” Hunter asks in this issue’s second podcast episode, “Technology and changing course delivery through the pandemic.” While some students were able to buy equipment as good as what might be available on campus, that kind of investment was out of reach for others. “How were we going to adjust our teaching so that we could teach courses in radio and video and multimedia to everybody?” 

Instructors redesigned journalism assignments, re-assessed learning outcomes and figured out how to build virtual classroom communities. In some cases, they also needed to address unique regional challenges. In this issue, Aphrodite Salas describes how Montreal’s nighttime city-wide curfews (accompanied by steep fines) added to students’ overall exhaustion, had an impact on teaching a practical multimedia course, and contributed to a new orientation toward solutions journalism and co-acknowledgement of the problems that arose for students and their communities through the pandemic. Elsewhere, Audette-Longo and Crowther (2021) discuss honing critical risk evaluation skills alongside their students through the pandemic, including constantly weighing how close was too close for emerging reporters to get to their sources even as COVID-19 restrictions lifted or changed. Fowler-Watt (2020) argues COVID-19 lockdowns not only added texture to her journalism students’ engagement with “themes of emotional literacy, marginality and voice,” but seemed to motivate new questions about whether media coverage effectively “silenced marginalized voices” (Fowler-Watt et al. 2020, para. 20). 

Abrupt and continual course and lesson re-evaluation inform the guiding questions we asked in our initial call for proposals to this journal issue:

• How have field reporting and production been taught remotely through a shifting public health crisis? How has the pandemic influenced thinking about the importance or role of the reporter’s body “on the scene” or “in the field?
• What lessons were learned in centring accessibility, disability and inclusion in journalism education?
• What are the intersections of pandemic pedagogy and reckoning with racism, oppression and colonialism that have emerged in the journalism industry? How are these issues being addressed in journalism schools?
• How have lessons focused on data journalism, science journalism and specialized health journalism developed or changed?
• How have the demands of gendered, precarious or emotional labour inside and outside of the COVID-19 experiential learning “classroom” shifted or changed? What is the role of empathy in journalism education? Should empathy play a bigger role in the practice of journalism?
• How have journalism educators engaged with students’ mental health? How can broader findings regarding journalists’ mental health (see Pearson and Seglins 2022) influence (post-) pandemic classroom practices, discussions or reporting assignments?
• How has student work on and off campuses changed? What new practices have campus media employed? What are the promises or pitfalls of new international or remote internship or training opportunities?
• How has “I” journalism – testimonials, sharing, questioning aloud – developed through the pandemic? How can critical subjective skills be taught or facilitated in the journalism classroom?
• How has the pandemic put a spotlight on the challenges and opportunities of preparing students for newsrooms and journalism careers in the future? What kinds of training demand recovery or re-examination?

Not every one of these questions is addressed or answered in this special issue, although many of the broad themes and challenges feature prominently in this collection’s conversations, reflections, and articles. 

Drawing from Francoeur’s (2020) previous work, questions about how the journalist’s body and senses might be reintroduced to reporting post-pandemic — and how journalism educators grappled with the body’s absence from the field, presence behind screens or fears of potential illness — are not fully examined in this collection. Adjacent to this area of further research, the promise of doing journalism in more accessible ways and breaking down ableist barriers, which Loeppky (2020) flagged as a potential outcome of the pandemic’s work-from-home mandates, remains under-examined here. This absence extends Jones’s, Saujani’s and Zbitnew’s (2021) argument that “crossover scholarship between communication studies and critical disability studies is uncommon” (p. 100), directing our attention to the need for closer future examination of the intersection of critical disability and journalism studies, particularly in the areas of practice and education (see also Jones, Collins and Zbitnew 2022; Page 2022). 

It is also notable that most contributors to this issue focused on their students’ experiences, almost to the exclusion of discussions about their own labour and how it changed. In Teaching Journalism Online: A Handbook for Journalism Educators, Keith (2023) shares a list of changes or additions to journalism programs since 2020, including the “realization that widespread online instruction is possible” and faculty can also meet future crisis demands (p. 109). But, Keith writes, journalism programs also have “Instructors who may be deeply tired” (p. 110, also citing Auger and Formentin 2021). Risks of burnout and service demands such as committee participation, advising students, and answering myriad invitations to contribute within the academic community — especially for racialized faculty —are discussed in this issue’s podcast episode dedicated to unpacking oppression fatigue led by Martis and Okeke, while this issue’s French-language episode about teaching through the pandemic emphasizes the potential for faculty and mentors to empower students to navigate their classes and careers (Francoeur 2023). 

We wonder if the relative absence of educators’ labour as an object of study elsewhere in this issue reflects an overall research and practical focus on journalism pedagogy and training in many journalism schools, the long-term weight of focusing on student needs and recalibrating course delivery, or a lingering reticence among some to “be” the story (perhaps learned in newsrooms). Below, we briefly survey studies published since 2020 that document the uneven pandemic pressures put on postsecondary educators. Many of these studies are based on critical race theory or feminist scholarship, and authors’ findings and recommendations have helped situate our approach to building this special issue so that it could benefit from the participation of tenured, tenure-track, contract, practitioner and emerging journalism educators and scholars.

Pandemic labours

In 2020, the United States-based Chronicle for Higher Education released the results of a survey of about 1,100 college and university professors that showed, across the board, “their workloads are higher, their morale is lower, and their work-life balance is almost non-existent” (Tugend 2020, p. 6). Survey respondents were exhausted and reported “much higher feelings of other draining emotions, such as grief and anger” (p. 6). The study underlined the extent to which scholarship and discourse to date had focused on teaching and exerting care, to the exclusion of faculty members’ still-present research or pre-tenure demands (p. 15). This survey and early research showing women academics’ research outputs had slowed compared to men’s (cf. Viglione 2020), provided quantitative footholds for studies that followed as well as an anecdotal sense that some faculty experienced more teaching, care-giving and service demands through the pandemic depending not only on their gender, but their race, citizenship, employment status, and other factors. The U.S. survey found, “Women, faculty of colour and gender non-conforming faculty often also do more service on committees, as well as mentoring and helping students” (Tugend 2020, p. 15). Auger’s and Formentin’s (2021) 5,000-educator survey, also conducted in 2020, highlights the extent of pandemic-specific demands on care. Their respondents were anxious, overwhelmed (p. 391) and responsible for shouldering the emotional labour of supporting or reassuring students who shared their own experiences of “anxiety, their fears of the coronavirus, job insecurity for themselves or their parents, concerns about grades and getting work done, inability to concentrate, and in some cases, food insecurity” (p. 377). 

Arday and Jones (2022) interviewed and conducted focus groups with Black faculty and students at universities in the United States and the United Kingdom, and found participants experienced a “pandemic within a pandemic,” which included, “racial (re)traumatisation” and “loneliness and isolation” (p. 9) within institutions that are structured by whiteness (p. 13). Participants also experienced labour exploitation (p. 9), as they were expected to take the lead in responding to or amplifying the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-racism initiatives within those very same institutions:

Where the spotlight on racism following the murder of George Floyd brought with it an increased global awareness of the plight of Black communities, the additional labour required to elevate and respond was outsourced to Black staff in the Academy. (p. 14) 

The burden of Black community care through the pandemic that Arday and Jones (2022) discuss is a stark example of unequal emotional labour (masquerading as progress) in studies published about academic work and fatigue since 2020. Elhinnawy (2022) also discusses numerous double binds in her work as a woman of colour academic expected to cheer on students who did not support her, accept being ignored by colleagues but take on a range of diversity and decolonization service responsibilities, and, as a migrant worker, take on “an additional layer of legal and financial compliance in the form of immigration considerations, which has left [her] more economically vulnerable and exposed than most of [her] colleagues” (p. 59). These studies do not, however, stand alone in a survey of literature about overlooked, taken-for-granted or forgotten academic-care labour, much of which is dominated by discussions of gender and motherhood and all of which contest suggestions that this is simply the nature of the field. 

After interviewing faculty members to better understand how they grappled with the “emotional impacts of the pandemic and anti-racism movement” (p. 2), Belikov et al. (2021) argue and show examples of faculty investing time in supporting students’ well-being well “beyond what they would have normally provided to students during a regular term” (p. 6). They also found faculty had “difficulties in separating and balancing their personal and professional lives” (p. 10), arguing, “One of the most significant sources of emotional impacts was managing one’s workload while caring for children,” as daycare centres closed and children enrolled in elementary or high schools were home learning remotely (p. 8). A Polish study highlights an interesting gap in perceptions of demand and capacity, as women academics participating in their study saw their work as flexible enough to be able to take on more care work at home, while participating men did not (Górska et al. 2021, p. 1554). Docka-Filipek and Stone (2021) challenge the notion that “mothering” is a personal or private decision, particularly given “ongoing gendered burdens of ‘public’ caregiving, which are constituted primarily by the twin pressures of extensive and intensive expectations for women’s service and teaching” regardless of whether they are mothers (p. 2159). Guyotte et al. (2023) pointedly differentiate the roles of “mother” and “women,” noting, “the burdens of academia (and beyond) remain squarely shouldered by those who, whether correctly or incorrectly, are gendered as academic mothers” (p. 3).

The purpose of this section is not simply to note or check off a list of the ways in which care-academic labour, teaching and service of racialized, gendered or otherwise precarious educators went un- or under-recognized in institutions during the pandemic. We are interested, instead, in contributing to and advocating for reimagining how academic labour is understood and co-building journalism education networks, in part by ensuring the challenges and solutions identified by a range of scholars are also named and discussed in the context of journalism education in Canada. Just as student learning and course delivery cannot revert to a post-pandemic “normal,” moving classes back into classrooms or seeing children go back to daycare centres or elementary and high schools will not re-level an already unequal playing field. To situate our own efforts to intervene in this landscape, we consider recommendations offered by the authors surveyed in this section, and others. Broadly, recommendations fall into two categories: (1) reimagine the place and importance of service and teaching in academic labour, not as secondary to research but equal in its rigour and value, and (2) build teaching communities for sharing resources, providing co-support, and sharing the labours of service and instruction. 

Górska et al. (2021) argue post-secondary institutions ought to “recognize and value the gendered and invisible work of academics, such as emotional support of students and care work,” including by creating systems of “documenting and reporting such work by faculty” (p. 1556). Bray, Khamis-Dakwar and Hiller (2020) similarly suggest re-evaluating tenure and promotion criteria. Giving pre-tenure faculty more time to apply for tenure, to recognize how the pandemic’s demands may have caused them to fall behind or lose access to sites of research, was a common institutional response through COVID-19. Bray, Khamis-Dakwar and Hiller (2020) recommend post-secondary institutions “invest in a more complete mapping of how the pandemic directly impacts women faculty and faculty of colour” (para. 9) to offer more nuanced approaches for those who are “the most likely to undertake a disproportionate amount of service” (para. 7) and suggest “ascrib[ing] equal value to the range of faculty responsibilities, acknowledging how each contributes to the university’s success” (para. 9). Keith (2023) argues “paus[ing] the tenure clock” risks further “disadvantag[ing] the scholars affected — many of whom may be women or members of marginalized groups — by making them work longer to attain positions in which they are underrepresented, because of a global emergency they could not control” (p. 111). At the journalism program level, Keith (2023) likewise advocates explicitly accounting for how instructors “converted high numbers of courses to online delivery quickly and sustained heavy teaching loads” (p. 111).

Belikov et al. (2021) suggest creating “mentoring programs and communities of practice” that can include openly sharing pedagogical and training materials (p. 11). At an institutional level, they also recommend building up faculty development that “acknowledge[s] and include[s] the intersection of academic and personal lives in meaningful and supportive ways,” provision of “resources and support around anti-racist and Indigenous practices” (p. 11), focused funding for scholarship of teaching and learning (p. 12), and focused efforts to address burnout among “women, caregiver, and Black, Indigenous and People of Colour faculty whose professional roles were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic” (p. 12, citing Calarco 2020). These recommendations, and post-pandemic academic labour, demand further research, particularly within the field and context of journalism education. J-Schools Canada has worked toward building a national learning community among post-secondary journalism educators by sharing teaching materials, case studies and leading focused workshops on equity, diversity and inclusion and trauma-informed journalism. The publications J-Source and Projet J provide living homes for ongoing work on journalism education and a changing journalism landscape. This availability of resources does not necessarily tell us how educators used them, whether they had time to do additional research or take on more training, or how they navigated potential feelings of anxiety, overwork or isolation. As we lay out below, our aim is to contribute to research knowledge mobilization and build capacity for more ground-level discussion of forced or necessary changes to journalism education.

Interventions and knowledge mobilization

Our intervention — proposing, producing, and publishing this special multimedia issue of Facts and Frictions dedicated to pandemic pedagogies and journalism education — is one of knowledge mobilization. In Fall 2022, we invited proposals for contributions in three formats: scholarly research articles, commentary or examples of teaching materials, or participation in thematic roundtable discussions that would be produced as a series of podcast episodes. Members of our own editorial team work or have worked as educators on limited- or short-term contracts that focus on teaching (not research), and so we considered the barriers in place to researching and writing traditional academic papers off the side of one’s desk. Unlike journalism, a scholarly publication often expects to see the author’s work in its entirety before it is considered, there is no payment, and the completed submission (as well as months of work and revision) may still be rejected by peer reviewers and editors. In our field, so many journalists and contract instructors take the lead in delivering the very practical courses that needed careful rethinking through the pandemic. We wanted to ensure their voices and original contributions were included in this collection. We also wanted reflections and lessons learned in teaching through the pandemic, and discussions of care, teaching and service, treated to the same level of peer review as more traditional research contributions. 

To limit the labour of or barriers to entry, our call for proposals invited 500-word abstracts for potential academic articles, 250-word pitches for proposed commentaries, calls to action or annotated teaching materials, or a question that could be addressed as part of a roundtable discussion that would inform a podcast episode. The call appeared on the Facts and Frictions website in English and French, we amplified it via social media, and we emailed it to journalism organizations and journalism program directors across Canada, asking the latter to forward the call to full- and part-time faculty. We also offered suggestions to program directors for ways in which they could support their team members’ participation in the journal, including:

• Making space for faculty discussion and team or pair proposals for contributions, while ensuring any part-time faculty members are compensated for their time;
• Sharing any information available about institutional funds that could support contract or limited term educators, including allowing them to hire students as research assistants; and
• Reaching out to team members whose course contributions, pandemic planning, student mentoring or critical questions were extraordinary, and asking what faculty support would allow them to answer the call for proposals.

In Fall 2022 we held follow-up “ask me anything” sessions on Zoom in English and French to field potential contributors’ questions; the English-language session included time for participants to meet each other, share their ideas and brainstorm. Our efforts yielded a number of proposals, although we note that the final collection — outside the podcast episodes — is dominated by the writing of English-language full-time faculty members currently based in Ontario. Throughout 2023, we responded to proposals, met with authors and reviewed their drafts in an effort to support ongoing work. We coordinated and recorded roundtable discussions in Spring 2023, and recruited two volunteer peer reviewers for each piece included in this issue. We sought funding and in-kind support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, J-Schools Canada, and Carleton University. Our own editorial team member whose research is not institutionally supported was nonetheless remunerated for some of their work, and we were able to train and hire journalism students at Carleton University and Université du Québec à Montréal to contribute to producing the podcast episodes and multimedia journal.

Looking to the future, we also aim to contribute to creating a sense of community, first by disseminating pandemic-tested teaching materials — syllabi, lesson plans or assignment descriptions — and reflections that could inspire new approaches for other educators working in similar fields. We developed accompanying “listening party” materials for each podcast episode, which include teaching resources and discussion questions to tie each podcast episode to related text-based articles and prompt school- and program-specific assessments of opportunities or challenges. We take seriously Keith’s (2023) advice for journalism schools to “consider codifying — while pandemic memories are fresh — what worked in the transition to emergency teaching so that the advice is available for future emergencies” (p. 111).

Contributions

This special multimedia issue of Facts and Frictions is structured in four sections: forced change, novel approaches to new technology and teaching, innovations in trauma-informed journalism training, and assessments of how journalism education must expand to be more inclusive.

Forced change

This introductory article, the podcast episode “Mentoring, kindness and empathy in teaching and data journalism during the pandemic,” and the article “Creating the new journalism classroom for a future in the balance,” make up the first section of this special issue and frame broader critical questions about the pandemic’s pedagogical legacies. In her podcast episode, Chantal Francoeur meets students and journalism instructor Jean-Sébastien Marier for wide-ranging discussions about how journalism education changed through the pandemic. Students talk about how mentorship helped them navigate online-only education and reflect on compassionate teaching practices. Their reflections help anchor later pieces in this journal issue, underlining the pace of change and contributions to community-building, while raising questions about what kinds of approaches should remain beyond the pandemic. In his written piece, Adrian Harewood expands this conversation in an investigation of the intersections of emancipatory pedagogy and journalism education.

Novel approaches

The second section of this issue turns to innovation and includes one podcast episode, three reflections, one text- and video-based resource list and one research article. It is led by the podcast episode, “Technology and changing course delivery through the pandemic.” Nana aba Duncan leads a discussion with Andrea Hunter, Roger Martin and Winston Sih that explores how educators found balance between experiments in technological innovation and prioritizing journalism basics. Their discussion raises questions about how to address differences in access to technology (and differences in familiarity with technology) among students. How to teach everyone regardless of their access to resources is not a question entirely addressed by bringing students back to classroom-newsrooms, as it speaks to class-, geography- or experience-based digital divides. The episode is followed by Aphrodite Salas’s written reflection on delivering a solutions-based mobile online journalism course that aimed to tell community stories despite distance. Salas closes “Getting their mojo back” by sharing an example of her pandemic-specific syllabus for teaching multimedia journalism (p. xxx). In “How to create a virtual newsroom,” Adrian Ma and Lindsay Hanna also share resources, offering descriptions of platforms they used to build virtual and hybrid classroom-newsrooms and incorporating short videos that show how these tools work. 

Beyond technology, in the written commentary “All together now,” Archie McLean weighs the potential for new collaborative journalism projects to match journalism students to newsrooms, urging readers to consider the value of cooperation. In so doing, he also provides a resource list for educators to use in their own teaching. In their research article “Fake news and fact-checking,” Brooks DeCillia and Brad Clark share the results of interviews with journalists and educators about the elevated role of fact-checking before and through the pandemic. Their original research highlights skills needed for emerging journalists to counter misinformation and disinformation, as well as the unique challenges of teaching reporting during a time when conspiracy theories related to vaccines were in circulation or students may have been confused about the roles of public health officials. In “A new approach to teaching public health advocacy,” a written piece that bridges communication and journalism studies, Kate Mulligan and Robert Steiner reflect on how journalism training can introduce relational thinking to a public health classroom, potentially laying the groundwork for better information sharing in future crises. Their contribution invites readers to consider the value of building more interdisciplinary journalism courses or workshops.

Trauma-informed journalism

The third section of this issue focuses on trauma-informed journalism. It is led by a podcast episode that asks how trauma-informed approaches to journalism can be taught and works toward defining the foundational skills of an emerging trauma-informed reporter. In their discussion, Matthew Pearson, Saranaz Barforoush, Duncan McCue, and Kelly Roche unpack the beliefs and approaches that have over-determined journalism practices and education, and they ask how journalism training can be more inclusive and inform more welcoming newsrooms in the future. In the written research article “Simulated solutions,” Matthew Pearson shares a case study of bringing actors into a reporting classroom — virtually — to simulate traumatic interviews and give students space to make mistakes and shape their own approaches to doing trauma-informed reporting. Through follow-up interviews with the students, Pearson provides insights into the value of this exercise and how or why other educators might consider employing similar practices.

Building community

This special issue closes with a section dedicated to lingering questions about how to foster belonging in journalism and the academy. The final podcast episode, “Teaching anti-oppressive journalism in a time of pandemic fatigue,” is led by Eternity Martis and Shari Okeke and includes Adrian Harewood, Asmaa Malik and Duncan McCue. It investigates oppression fatigue among scholars and educators in Canadian journalism programs, including the frustratingly “slow pace of change.” It also revisits the spaces educators can carve out for student-centred care. This episode is followed by our last written reflection on teaching, “Newsroom notes.” In this piece, Angela Misri shares her efforts to build extracurricular programming at Toronto Metropolitan University that can bring together journalism and non-journalism students, professional journalists, and a faculty facilitator to discuss topics that matter to students. Free of the demands of submitting assignments, earning participation marks or other instructor evaluation, the sessions provide a case study in in-person, post-pandemic community building.

Conclusion

To open this special journal issue and launch continuing conversations about teaching journalism after 2020, we have surveyed journalism and journalism education studies, as well as broader feminist and critical race studies about how post-secondary educators fared through a period of forced disruption. This multimedia journal issue is not only an effort to record the experiences of teaching journalism through the pandemic. While valuable, the project of describing changes made to courses or assignments, or the effects of leaving classroom studios to create virtual newsrooms, is just the start of what we want this issue to contribute to Canadian postsecondary journalism education. As a global emergency, COVID-19 sparked innovation, introspection and — potentially — a series of transformative questions in and about journalism education in Canada and around the world. It is still early to offer final conclusions on the impacts of the pandemic on journalism education: we are writing this introduction just three-and-a-half years after universities, newsrooms and other institutions first closed their doors across Canada, isolating students, faculty and journalists. Many are still in shock, still grieving, still processing the changes they have made to how they learn, teach, work and live together, and how they can contribute to their communities. 

In proposing and producing this special issue of Facts and Frictions, we aim to offer a map-in-progress of better journalism education futures, drawn by educators from a number of post-secondary institutions. By creating a space to reflect and share responses to teaching through crisis, we are pooling knowledge that will serve journalists, educators and students facing future emergencies, too. The articles, reflections and conversations in this special issue place guideposts for journalism educators to pause and re-evaluate their roles in training students for newsrooms and for the world. In this issue, contributors highlight how students have advocated for themselves and show how educators can empower students to build new, stronger, more trustworthy relationships with members of the public. Despite shrinking newsrooms and a changing journalism, media and public trust landscape, contributors highlight the promises of inter-institutional and interdisciplinary collaboration, and explore avenues for further interrogating and perhaps rethinking journalism practices. Contributors also outline our shared responsibilities to continue planning for the unexpected, experimenting with emerging technologies, and evaluating the scope and impacts of potential digital divides. Their work — reflecting, re-evaluating, interrogating, planning and imagining — is research-, teaching- and service-intensive. It demands time, care, and ongoing attention to a range of student needs and changes across the journalism field, as well as recognition, circulation and amplification of the innovations and ideas our colleagues are experimenting with in and outside their classrooms. 

Our approach to including a range of researchers, educators, and practitioners in this journal issue is unfinished work. Returning to suggestions we offered journalism program chairs in Fall 2022, we hope to see continued efforts to celebrate educators’ and staff members’ experiments within and outside their faculties, to foster collaborations between full- and part-time faculty members, and to offer funding that can support conducting and amplifying journalism pedagogy research. A range of pedagogical, research, practical and community expertise is needed to push discussions started in this journal issue beyond 2023.

 

 

Acknowledgements

The co-editors of this special issue thank the editorial board of Facts and Frictions/Faits et Frictions and the board of J-Schools Canada/Écoles-J Canada for accepting our proposal to produce a special issue and providing us with the freedom and support to imagine and realize a multimedia collection. 

We are especially thankful for Patricia Elliott’s guidance as editor-in-chief and champion for this Canadian journalism studies journal and its potential to try new things. A Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Connection Grant, a Carleton University-Teaching and Learning Services grant, and funds provided by Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, Faculty of Public Affairs and the Office of the Vice President-Research and International powered this knowledge mobilization project. Behind the scenes: Nehaa Bimal, Nathan Fung and Constantina Varlokostas provided administrative support; Yanjano Banda designed this special issue’s graphics; Charlotte Nieuwenhuis translated our initial call for proposals, the abstracts in this special issue and this introduction; Colette Brin, Gabrielle Marcoux and Philippe Marcoux also supported translations; Tracey Lindeman laid out this journal issue; Michael Agnew reviewed draft funding application proposals; David Sarazin supported audio production; Noah Sniderman did final audio edits; Fannie Arcand, Wafa El-Rayes and Sophie Kuijper-Dickson co-produced the Forced Change podcast series; and Nehaa Bimal and Zora Ait El Machkouri produced accompanying social media. 

Finally, this issue would not be possible without the many peer reviewers who contributed their time and expertise to strengthen every piece published, or the contributors who shared their research and reflections on how journalism education has changed and what its futures look like.

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Guest editors

Trish Audette-Longo is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is the lead editor of this special issue of Facts and Frictions / Faits et Frictions. Trish holds a PhD in Communication Studies from Concordia University, and has reported for the Edmonton Journal and Canada’s National Observer. Her research interests include digital journalism, journalism education, climate journalism and petroculture studies. Email: trishaudettelongo@cunet.carleton.ca

Christine Crowther is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University in Ottawa, and has previously taught in the Department of Journalism at Concordia University in Montreal. She was a broadcast journalist for 15 years, primarily with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She is a co-editor and author for Journalism in Crisis: Bridging Theory and Practice for Democratic Media Strategies in Canada, and is completing a PhD in Communication Studies at McGill University. 

Nana aba Duncan is an associate professor and Carty Chair in Journalism, Diversity and Inclusion at Carleton University. She is a co-editor of this special issue and led the production of the English-language episodes of the Forced Change podcast. Nana aba leads the Mary Ann Shadd Cary Centre for Journalism and Belonging, a research centre supporting inclusive and belonging-focused journalism. She is also co-founder of Media Girlfriends, a podcast production company led by journalists of colour.

Chantal Francoeur teaches journalism ethics and audio journalism at the University of Quebec in Montreal. She worked as a journalist at Radio-Canada for nearly 20 years, in news, current affairs and public affairs. Her research focuses on new audio journalism formats, the body and audio writing.

Shenaz Kermalli is a journalism instructor at the School of Journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University, University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies and Humber College. She worked as a writer and producer with CBC News, Al Jazeera English and BBC News Online before teaching. As a freelancer, Shenaz has written for The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The Ottawa Citizen, iPolitics, TVO, Global News, The Guardian (UK) and others.

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