Deliberative pedagogy and journalism education: Lessons from classroom-community projects in Four Countries

Community-based learning activities are highly valued by most universities and colleges, with common options for students being internships, practicums, and different types of service or community-engagement learning experiences. These learning activities offer opportunities for students to apply skills in real-world settings, broaden their knowledge, deepen their expertise, meet new contacts and mentors, and build a portfolio of practical work to showcase to potential employers. Political theorist Harry Boyte notes that classroom–community projects also increase students’ exposure to civic forms of knowledge about the experience, knowledge, perspectives and philosophical frameworks of community members and about matters that affect community life. This chapter focuses on core approaches to deliberative pedagogy that educators should consider if their goal is to help students to acquire these civic forms of knowledge through classroom-community projects. The chapter presents a case study of the basic pedagogic issues addressed by university educators who have designed learning projects that engage journalism students in deliberative community projects in four countries: the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In the four learning projects described in this chapter, community members can be considered partners and co-educators of students. Community members play a key role in informing how students identify, frame, and analyze public issues. In return, the students create or co-create journalistic stories about under-reported issues, experiences, and activities that are important to those communities' civic life. In doing so, students learn important skills that will serve them as engaged and informed professionals after they graduate. Underpinning these connections between the campus and community has been an approach that prioritizes public listening and strategies for respectful, productive exchanges with diverse community members. Approaches used include civic mapping, partnerships with community organizations, progressive scaffolding of students' encounters with community members, and targeted instruction/assessment that both introduces students to significant community spaces, organizations and stakeholders, and illuminates the links between them. Such approaches can be adopted not just by journalism educators but by all educators who seek to boost their students' connections with community actors, processes of public decision making, and initiatives to improve public life