Teaching is funny. I guess I really mean odd. I have been teaching in higher education for 16 years now. That means I have been teaching longer than I worked in print media, which was eight years, and broadcast media, which was 15 years.
I am not convinced that I am a good teacher, but I have my moments. I teach to the best students, hoping that the middle students can keep up. I provide somewhat of a safety net for the poor students. Simply put, I try to help them. If they don’t really understand journalism, I counsel them to do something else.
I have taught more than 20 different courses over the past 16 years, including mass media, research, computer methods, writing, broadcasting, history, international journalism, law, and multimedia journalism at the undergraduate and graduate levels at five universities in the United States, Poland, and Russia.
Now much of my teaching focuses on multimedia journalism as co-director of the Urban Reporting Lab at Temple University, which can be viewed at www.philadelphianeighborhoods.com
Philadelphia Neighborhoods is a tough course. My colleague Linn Washington and I send students in teams of two to under-covered and under-reported neighborhoods in Philadelphia. Simply put, the mainstream media go there when the yellow police tape goes up for a multiple homicide. The students need to produce multimedia stories in places they normally would avoid. Magazine students don’t really want to broadcast stories; broadcast students don’t want to write in Associated Press style.
I have won four teaching awards during my career, but I get killed on the evaluations in this class. It hurts. One student wrote in an evaluation: “Harper is micro-manager who has created a Web site that sucks.” I don’t know who that individual is, but the site won four awards from the Society of Professional Journalists. I wish that student had brought his or her concerns to me.
I am heartened by some students who understand what Professor Washington and I try to do, which is to prepare them for what the changing media landscape is about.
I think my generation has totally mucked up journalism. I think my students can change that. It is a critical time for what journalism can do and can be.
I also am heartened by a recent letter I received from a former student and now editor of an online publication. “Professor Harper’s dedication to quality, community journalism has helped me as a student, and now as an editor,” the student wrote. “Working with Professor Harper’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods class has been nothing short of an editorial blessing.”
I have frequently considered leaving Philadelphia Neighborhoods, mainly as a result of criticism I have received. It’s not a fun course to teach, and students think it’s not a fun course to take. I would rather teach beginning students who are not so entrenched in their attitudes about journalism. I love teaching the history of journalism. I relish the opportunity I have had to teach media and the law.
I have decided to stay on because I know what Professor Washington and I do is important to the future of journalism. It is far more important that what I did for more than 20 years at the Associated Press, Newsweek, and ABC News.
I just wish students would stop killing me on how tough I am in the final class before they graduate. At 58, I wish I could change my approach, but I am not optimistic. I guess I am an old, green-eyeshade editor at heart. I doubt that many of my students know what the previous sentence means. Nevertheless, I just want my students to change journalism, because it isn’t very good right now.
Students’ problem with your teaching is often undeniably rooted in an almost inevitable tendency to underachieve and slack off in the final class as a college student and attribute it solely to your “toughness.” This is something that not many people should be denying.
Unfortunately, the real problem with your teaching is that you deem yourself worthy of an inarguable viewpoint on everything based solely on your “experience.” While it is valid as an older teacher, it is not endearing nor is it constructive to be arrogant and condescending. Within this very same post you disregard a student’s valid and clearly important opinion (those evaluation forms are not mandatory therefore implying a sense of honesty and need to convey his or her opinion of you) by citing your site’s awards. Instead of addressing the real problem you spout off your achievements. How constructive would a father be if every time his son questioned him, the father simply told the son that he had been around longer and lived through much more and therefore was right. You even go so far as to condescend by assuming that many of your students don’t know what the term “green-eyeshade editor” means. You manage to reconcile this false sense of humility (my generation has totally mucked up journalism) with a blatant sense of arrogance and a holier-than-thou mentality. Nobody is asking you to forget your years of experience and accomplishment. If that were the case, there would be no need for professors.
What you lack in your teaching abilities is the fundamental tenet of a common ground with your students. To you, there is only a common ground with the “best students” and a form of help for the “middle students” and some form of paltry pity for the “poor students.” Is that the ideology you intend to rest your supposed sterling career on? Advice to maybe get into a new field? As opposed to encouragement? Or maybe at the very least, just that plain old, grassroots work ethic you seem to espouse.
If you do not enjoy teaching a course, it will inevitably affect your teaching and consequently, how the students react. You should not stay on the MURL program for what seems to be some sort of prestige. What you do is important to the future of the journalism? I believe your time has come and gone by your own admission and that you are only here to guide students, not remind them of how great you once were or think you still are.
I read some of your other blog posts. Very good journalism, though unfortunately, bogged down in this very same need to list your resume. To be frank, students are much more impressed with a teacher who can relate to them and get off any personal pedestals long enough to look them in the eye and help without telling them how much better they are than them.
It saddens me as a younger prospective journalist to see that you wind down your post with the affirmation that at your age, change is looking like a dim prospect. If it is some form of stifled and thinly-veiled desire for glory, then I offer you this. There seems to be much more glory in taking the future by the hand and showing it all your mistakes, than in sitting back and watching the future make them anyway, all the while saying “I walked the path much better.”
Dr. Harper, pardon the following cliche and the countless typos within this post, but…it is never too late to change. Although I do believe that one must have a glimmer of hope in their chances of changing.
If you are to do anything with this “important” task of changing the future of journalism, as you seem to deem it, please just listen to the students. Don’t shrug them off with the proverbial defense of alternative approval. Students don’t need to know how many other people have given you praise. They need to know why they should.
Thank you for a thoughtful response.
Dr. Harper,
No thanks is needed nor was it expected. I am only anxious to see what thoughtful response you will offer up for students like me. It must be reciprocal, as with anything else. You should know that. There is a beautiful irony in the teacher-student relationship, isn’t there? The amount of things to be learned from each other is infinite and only bound by either side’s willingness to accept the other as an equal. That equality is the response we all need and deserve.
Actually, I guess this is where we differ significantly. Students and teachers are not equals. I am here to help students to learn. You may disagree, but I actually do have more knowledge about the craft than students do. I certainly can learn from students–as I acknowledge in seeing your point of view. But the notion that we are equals is off the mark.
Also, have you ever taken a class with me?
I don’t really think at any point I offered up the argument that students know just as much about the craft as you do. By outlining the idea of students and teachers as equals I am proposing the idea that as a teacher your duty is not to make a hierarchical distinction the benchmark of your tutelage. If you offer so much more, than why is it imperative for you to affirm that we are not equals? Do you realize there is a clear and obvious elitism within your words? Experience and age do not justify the elitism,it only gives reasons why you think that way. It is a bit funny to me that you follow up your acknowledgment of my point of view with what I presume you intend to state as fact. My notion of us as equals is only really off the mark to you. I could offer up the idea that I am not your equal because I am physically more fit and younger as well as more attuned to a more immediate, more community driven, and consequently a much more viable form of journalism for the future. Your immersion into the digital world of journalism is limited to contribution and cannot extend to the scope of my generation’s interaction and development with it since childhood. All these things can be proposed as ways I am not your equal and am much more of an asset to society than you. But that is arrogant and wrong and your renown as a professor, whether you like it or not, is molded by your student’s opinion. Where will your craft take you when you have made it clear to every last one of your students that you are not their equal? Resumes get misplaced as do awards and commendations and rank. Teaching does not.
“But the notion that we are equals is off the mark.”
Quite the mission statement.
Not made as a challenge, but simply an observation about assumptions. I happen to hold two black belts in karate, including a third dan rank. I also am a member of the World Multi-Martial Arts Hall of Fame.
Your assumption about physical fitness may be slightly off the mark. ;0)
But that’s the problem with assumptions without basic reporting. I will grant that you may have ideas that are fresher than mine. Again, however, I would have to do some reporting on those ideas.
And you really do love talking about yourself.
Actually, I don’t. Guess you really didn’t understand me and the purpose of the class. Sorry that the class and I had no worth for you. Please have a good and fulfilling life.
Following is the mission statement for the Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab:
The MURL program parallels the changing media landscape where convergence influences the way journalists do their jobs. The technology changes in the journalistic landscape demand a new kind of journalist who can translate efficiently and effectively stories across the converging media platforms. Increasingly, stories are reshaped, repurposed and distributed across a variety of content platforms: print, broadcast, Internet and digital media. New distribution technologies, from RSS feeds, podcasting and cellular telephones, are quickly changing the way news is reported, produced and consumed. This new multimedia environment means multi-dimensional news reporting over multiple platforms is becoming the norm in the 21st century newsroom. Journalists must be competent in writing, reporting and producing news across these digital media platforms, while maintaining the traditional core values of accuracy, balance and fairness—all within an ethical framework. MURL competences include reporting in print, broadcast, digital and photography. Good journalists must be tenacious, resourceful, enterprising and flexible.
I went to journalism school with Prof. Harper. No one was more dedicated back then, and I am glad to see he is still trying to make journalism better. (Some of us have given up, gotten old, gotten lazy, etc.) As for those student reviews, well, transparency just makes you better, right?
Chris,
Thanks for the kind words! I think I owe you a tall, frosty beer sometime soon.
While I have no current opinion in the quality of Dr. Harper’s teaching ability either way, having not yet taken his class, I will say this:
Paying close attention to this nearly passive aggressive altercation has left me quite apprehensive about enrolling in this class (though the choice of doing so ultimately is not my own) . I find it rather intimidating, and fear that it may effect my ability to question or disagree with Dr. Harper while I am enrolled in MURL. Equal or not, students should not be afraid or intimidated into silence by their professors.
Furthermore, it is my concern that this debate may evoke similar feelings in other current and/or future students.
[To clarify: I do think that the concept of MURL is a good one, and on that basis alone, look forward to taking this class despite these comments]
I am sorry you feel that way. I hope you find the course useful.
Don’t be scared. Harper wont bite.
My first introduction to MURL and Harper, other than being signed in during the previous semester was a request to change my neighborhood because I didn’t have the time or interest in going to Strawberry Mansion.
I was flatly denied. But the class took away the fear of going into unknown territory. Doing things I didn’t know I could do and even if my camera work was shaky, I did the job.
It’s a class that’s not gonna change the world or the neighborhood you so desperately need to spit a story at you, but it will change your outlook and yourself. And if it doesn’t, maybe you didn’t belong there in the first place.
Thanks Harper
As a former MURLer I must say that if a student cannot handle MURL then they will struggle or fail at being a professional journalist. This is because MURL is more a real newsroom than a classroom. You must prove yourself and use all of your skill and time to succeed. There were about 25 students in my class and not a day went by without many of them complaining about how much work this class required. I guess that they expected an award winning capstone course was supposed to be easy! Good work comes from being challenged, and strong journalists come from editors who aren’t willing to compromise. Let the whiners and underachievers fall through the cracks, because they are certainly not capable of responsibile journalism!
I have had you for two journalism courses at Temple, and I have to admit something. I heard stories of how hard history in journalism and MURL was before I got to take it. Personally, I enjoyed each course. It was not as scary as I heard it was going to be. Everything is do-able.
We are college students getting ready for the real world. Seriously, if I was in junior high again, okay I expect a break. However, those days are over. I need to be constantly doing work to build myself up for the real world. As far as I heard, there are barely any breaks out there.
For you as a teacher, I don’t think some student understand how great you are at what you do and would go far and beyond your job description to help a student out. I am happy I get to work with you for my last year at Temple. Thank you for your immediate responses on just about everything.
Sorry, for the rant, but I really do believe that you are a great teacher. I am not saying any of this to suck up, but there will be students that will put you down. Evaluations at the end of the semester will have hurtful comments, but hey, if you were not great at what you do, you definitely would not be winning awards for it.
I’ve never had Professor Harper but after taking three years of courses in the Journalism department I’m embarrassed by my fellow classmates. I’ve witnessed so little effort, quality, and pride in their work. Why is doing poorly so “cool”. Maybe I’ve just followed a bad batch or something but I seriously haven’t met more than 5 people who has demonstrated they are even capable of putting a story together let alone be in the position to tackle hard news.
So I totally agree with the teach to the “best” approach. Too much of this country especially through our 5th grade reading level media has really catered too much to the “audience”. People are smarter than we have been pretending, especially the audience that is going to pay for news in the future. The news is changing and I feel like news organizations need to take back control and stop selling themselves and their journalists short. Let the world try to function without quality news for even a day. Stop giving so much away.
@ TT
Good God, Man.
Get your head out of your a** and grow up. Your judgments are small-minded, childish and unprofessional. Harper is paid to be your professor, editor, boss and media industry mentor, not your psychiatrist. This is real life training. Put your tuition to use. Stop wasting time “rating your professor”, get over yourself and learn something. Otherwise, the real work is going to eat your alive.
BE PRODUCTIVE.
Thanks to everyone who commented. I did learn something. I learned that maybe I shouldn’t blog about what a teacher thinks about a course. ;0).
I appreciate those who have taken my courses and found them useful. I appreciate those who may or may not have taken my courses and commented on what they consider the errors in my teaching methods.
It was a dialogue, which often doesn’t happen these days. The school held a conference today on that very subject with respect to democracy and technology.
I just hope that those who take courses from me will find them useful and learn something. That is my mission statement.
MURL is great preparation for students who want to follow through with their careers, but many of them don’t care to stay in the field, and many won’t. The class was overwhelming and hard to balance with my other subjects, and a job. I understand it is meant to be a reflection of a “real job” in journalism, but it is too hard to do when you have other things on your plate. I barely passed the class after years of doing well in all of my subjects, because I had a life and a real job that required my time and efforts. If MURL were my career, I could focus on it and give it the attention it needs, while earning the money to feed myself, but having to do both was a difficult process. As a former student, I think you should reconsider the workload.
Actually, MURL is great preparation for doing just about anything in the working world. Sorry you did not find it useful.
I must say, there is simply no winning side to the debate that’s transpired here via “T.T”‘s harsh and cynical conclusions.
What will happen in this class is many students will find they are not, indeed, passionate enough, hard-working enough, or devoted enough to journalism to one day be the type of journalist so desperately needed to change the face of journalism.
There are many types of people in this world, and two of which are those who see a challenge and work hard to rise to it, while others will slack and justify that with an “unfair” professor or an “irrational” course load. We don’t need this latter breed in our field at all.
As new journalism students/graduates, we must acknowledge that this course, in every way, prepares us for the ever-changing world of journalism — one that has no place for those of us who cannot and will not pass this course, and it’s true.
My opinions on Harper as a professor are fresh and new, and I haven’t yet received a grade on my first individual assignment, however my partner received a very low grade — one that was based on the technical semantics of her video, and not the quality of reporting, ethics within reporting, or journalistic ability which leads me to believe that his grading (while not “unfair”) is actually a little too harsh, too brutal, too unrealistic for magazine students who have only interacted with video editing in ONE A/V class taken over a year ago.
I find that his expectations of us as students are also a little unrealistic. As a previous commenter stated, we are not solely students, but adults living in the real world with jobs, dysfunction, and pain embedded in our lives. Throughout my entire college career I’ve had a difficult time repsecting professors who cannot respect the fact that their class is not the end-all-be-all of our existence. On the first day of class Harper said he “understands” that we have jobs and commitments outside of class, but this isn’t true because it was followed immediately by, “BUT, you did *choose* to take this class.” This is a gross overestimation of the control and priorities we have as students trying to graduate.
I know, without a doubt, that I will pass this class regardless of Harper’s hypercynical, sometimes petty method of grading because I have the ability to devote time to what the class requires — being published on the blog will only reaffirm this. Unfortunately, I do think Harper speaks with an air of pompousness and arrogance which is truly not conducive to garnering respect from students, and when coupled with the irrational scale on whic he grades, there will certainly be those that flatly hate him. Throughout my academic career, I have had many professors who have practiced journalism for many years, accumulated numerous degrees, and then went on to teach and while their resumes were not touted in the way Harper’s often is, there was a mutual respect because of these professors’ willingness to acknowledge that I am a *student* with *potential* and that my performance in school was affected by extraneous factors. Most of us simply are not freshmen, living in dorms on campus with a weekly stipend from our parents, but working adults in need of an income to supplement the tuition for this class. (Mine MURL this summer is costing me over $3000, alone.)
These professors garner the same, if not more, respect from their students as Harper because empathy in every aspect of life proves to be appreciated.
Unfortunately, MURL and money are two necessary evils in the careers of college students, but without the understanding of a professor who grades too harshly already, these same students living and working in the real world will find it hard to respect someone with such delusional expectations.
I am sorry that you and your partner feel that way. I think I will just stop teaching this class. I enjoy teaching History and Law a lot more. I guess I do not have much to offer in this course. All the best.
No, Professor Harper, I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong. I did not argue that your guidance in this class is not helpful or valuable. I just think your expectations are pretty high of your students who are thrown into a multimedia class when you know that many of us have been trained to solely be writers — regardless of the one required A/V class. That’s not an unfair assessment. There’s no doubt in my mind that your experience makes you the right person to teach this class, but instead of suggesting that you will stop teaching it, perhaps just approach it with a little more empathy, a little more understanding. At least at that point, the resentment of MURL will not equate to resentment of you. We all acknowledge that we must take this class, furthermore that we must learn it in order to be able to enter the journalism world — but a difficult class is made much more difficult by a professor who refuses to empathize.
BTW, I forgot to mention, there is never any time when I do not comment on content. Therefore, I suggest you, as a reporter, might want to see the actual response I gave. All the best.
I did see your comments.
Just tendered my resignation. All the best.
Prof. Harper,
Before I say what I’d like to say, I’d like to preface this e-mail by telling you a little about myself. I was a lackluster student in high school. I rarely completed assignments, never studied and only got by because teachers allowed me to get by. I’m terrible at math, athletics, science and everything in between, but I always had a bit of a knack for writing. In 10th grade I signed up for a class called “Creative Writing and Journalism”. I had no desire to do the journalism part, but I wanted to take a class that would force me to write. Well, I was quite wrong about the class. Turns out it was just a journalism class with two creative writing assignments over the course of the year. Oddly enough though, I actually liked it.
By my senior year of high school I was editor-in-chief of my high school paper and to be perfectly honest, this was a high quality high school paper. I loathed my adviser at the time for the same reasons I respect her now (partially because I knew that it was adviser with an “er” without even a moment of hesitation). I’m trying to make a point here and I promise I’ll get there soon.
I went on to Cabrini College for my freshmen year. There’s a wonderful professor there named Jerry Zurek. He was my adviser at Cabrini when I wrote for The Loquitur. He saw something in me from day one. That I was a hard-worker, committed to excellence, but most importantly compassionate. You may be wondering why I’m at Temple now. Well, there’s a lot of answers to that question, but quite simply it came down to money–not having it.
Now that you know about my past, let me tell you about my week and then I promise I’ll get to the point. After Wednesday’s class I spent hours researching a story. There were dozens of easy stories I could have done, but one of them caught my eye. I was looking at the activities schedule for a church in my neighborhood and I saw something about a recreational basketball league that meets once a week in a gym that’s roughly the size of our MURL classroom.
Rachel and I spent hours trying to get in touch with the man in charge of the league, but were unsuccessful. We thought about giving up, but I wanted this story and so did Rachel. So there I was on Friday morning, walking down the streets of North Central, Philadelphia, carrying expensive camera equipment in the burning sun, trying to find a tiny recreational basketball league in a church gymnasium.
Let’s pause here.
Six years ago I was just a kid who wanted to write short stories. Four years ago I was fitting right in on the main line at a small Catholic university. Now I’m walking down the streets of North Central, Philadelphia. A place that used to scare my slightly more than Baghdad and slightly less than Hell itself.
Rachel and I managed to track down the league and found some incredible people. Two men who felt obliged to help kids play basketball and a couple of kids who love basketball and are willing to wake up at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning just to play. To make a long story short, Rachel and I found some incredible people and through hours of editing and work, we think we’re close to creating a pretty good story.
Today I walked down the streets of North Central and found five large African American men standing next to a sign that said “Hand Car Wash $5″. Every fiber of my being wanted me to run away from these guys, but I forced myself to ask them questions. I asked them why they were there and how long they’d been there among other questions. One of the men confessed he only does this as a supplement to his real job–drug dealing.
Let’s pause again.
Now I’m talking to drug dealers in North Central, Philadelphia.
Here’s the point. I’ve been at Temple for three years now. I never once left my comfort zone, my safe little bubble of main campus. Now this area that I used to treat like a war zone is where I spend my weekends. I have to be honest with you. I really don’t think I want to be a journalist when I graduate. I certainly think that honing my multimedia and writing skills will help with any job, but overall the content of this class probably won’t get me to my career goals. But I am getting something incredibly important from this class–getting over myself.
I could have stayed on the main line, at my 96% white university and floated by and got my degree and gone on to a successful life. But I didn’t. I had a very prejudiced point of view before I went to Temple University and I’m slowly breaking it down. Sure I’ll run across some bad guys, but I’ll also find the two coaches in a small gymnasium teaching kids how to play basketball and be good people. The fact is that in order to succeed in this class, we need to get over ourselves. We need to drop our egos and realize that we are a part of something really special in MURL. I’m doing and seeing things I’d never thought I’d do and see. The fact is, Professor Harper, that I’ve never been a self-starter. I would have never done this on my own. And to be perfectly honest I love this class for the same reasons I hate it.
I’m slowly getting over myself. I’m realizing that this world is bigger than me. That’s more important to me than anything else. The fact is, it’s not easy to take people out of their comfort zones and force them to get over themselves. You can only give them the push, what they make out of it is up to them.
So here I am today. Working 25 hours a week in a restaurant, roughly 20-25 hours a week working for Philadelphia Neighborhoods and spending my weekends in one of the most crime-ridden and poverty-stricken areas in the entire country. But, when someone asks how I spent my summer vacation, I’ll smile and have a great answer.
My heart dropped when I saw that you wrote at the end of your blog. I understand how difficult it must be to undergo a constant stream of criticism from students. I also appreciate the irony of someone calling you pompous and egotistical and at the same time talking about how their lives are more important than this class. I don’t blame you for giving up on this class, hell I probably wouldn’t have lasted two weeks before throwing in the towel. But I don’t want you to leave MURL without knowing that some of us appreciate this class.
We all hate people who force us to do things that make us uncomfortable. But those are the people who help us grow the most. I hope that you get back to teaching what you love–history and the law. I hope that the cynicism that you’ve encountered in this class doesn’t sour you too much on the future of journalism. But most of all, I hope that you realize that you’re doing something important and that I’m sure you’ve helped countless people grow as journalists and as people.
I only hope that the next person who teaches this class pushes students the same way that you pushed me. Because if they don’t, well then future journalism students will really be missing out on something special.
I’ll see you on Wednesday.
VR,
Christopher Campellone