Learning Goals & Objectives

Student Learning Goal 1

Journalism majors will value the greater good.

Students will:
  • Objective A: Grasp Journalism’s evolving nature/abiding essence, bottom-line/public- trust tensions;
  • Objective B:  Grasp/apply social responsibility theory, SPJ ethics code, and industry tenets and standards;
  • Objective C: Value/exercise the conscience to do fair, constructive journalism conceived in outrage;
  • Objective D: Know/apply media law, first amendment, Sunshine Laws; invoke FOIA/L to get public records;
  • Objective E: Make public-interest journalism interesting though effective storytelling, platforming.

Student Learning Goal 2

Journalism majors will think critically and creatively.

Students will:
  • Objective A: Know/synthesize/interpret current/coming events to conceptualize meaningful news stories;
  • Objective B: Exercise sound, responsible news judgment even under pressures of immediacy and competition;
  • Objective C: Verify, synthesize, and interpret gathered facts and do accurate stories, making sense of them;
  • Objective D: Ideate strong reporting strategies, platforms; vet unfamiliar sources; exercise media literacy;
  • Objective E: Appreciate imperative of ethics, apply ethical reasoning practically to analyze own methods.

Student Learning Goal 3

Journalism majors will report thoroughly and across platforms.

Students will:
  • Objective A: Interview, observe, scour documents/databases, the web; develop/work a beat, follow a story;
  • Objective B: Answer so what? question; contextualize, humanize, localize; test a premise; get the big picture;
  • Objective C: Practice immersion journalism; report cinematically for detail, scenes, action, a sense of place;
  • Objective D: Use multiple sources and methods; get all sides; over-report for authority, self-preservation;
  • Objective E: Use hardware, software, social media, crowdsourcing, community- building/collaboration, CMS.

Student Learning Goal 4

Journalism majors will write for audience, platform, and message.

Students will:
  • Objective A: Write cogently, compellingly, platform-appropriately in various forms, from news to blogs;
  • Objective B: Read critically and appraise writing across genres—CNF, screenwriting, fiction, and poetry;
  • Objective C: Write leads, nut graphs, and the narratives needed to focus and make the case for all stories;
  • Objective D: Write granularly for reader traction, avoiding opinion, unsubstantiated claims, empty prose;
  • Objective E: Value sentences as the building blocks of prose, write them with grammar, grace, active voice.

Student Learning Goal 5

Journalism majors will tell stores to influence and induce as well as inform.

Students will:
  • Objective A: Invest/influence/induce by conveying fact through use of fictive structure, literary devices;
  • Objective B: Do cross-platform stories informed primarily by emotional rather than intellectual truths;
  • Objective C: Value, find and tell compellingly the stories of ordinary people as lenses on the big picture;
  • Objective D: Work artfully in impression, interpretation, and meaning, invoking the universal uniquely;
  • Objective E: End stories, valuing those that unspool organically, refraining from speeches, summation.
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