Adviser Update Summer 2012

DOW JONES NEWS FUND

SUMMER 2012

VOLUME 53, NUMBER 1

CONTEST A14
WSJ Classroom Edition

Copyright © 2012 Dow Jones News Fund, Inc.

https://www.Newsfund.org

FANCY SECTION
Beijing Blogger

Cultural interaction’s power
The long-term impact of the camp cannot yet be
measured, but we are hopeful that our additional
goals will be realized: foster an appreciation for
newspapers and develop media literacy skills; build
capacity of teachers to carry on in our absence; and
the engage Chinese educators and administrators to
support and sustain journalism.
By ALAN WEINTRAUT
hina is rapidly rising as the
C
world’s second most economically powerful nation. The country

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P01.V53.I01

Teaching digital journalism in Vietnam – Page A17

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Continued on page 2A

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Northwestern
Normal High’s
summer special
issue covered
the journalism
camp.

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of 1.3 billion people is poised to
overtake the Gross Domestic Product of the United States as early
as 2018. Despite this progress, the
country has no real free press, and
it lags behind the rest of the free
world in being … free.
Facebook and many other Internet sites are routinely blocked,
and the youth of China have had
no real exposure to what a free
scholastic media looks like — until
now.
The Student Journalism in
China Program launched in 2010
to address these issues. Under the
three-year grant from the International Research and Exchanges
Board (IREX), Chinese teachers
and students were provided training in scholastic journalism and
the production of newspapers.
IREX is a Washington, D.C.-based
nongovernmental organization
(NGO), and it had several goals
from the start of the program in
2010. Chief among them was to
“empower student journalists to
produce objective, ethical school
newspapers with international

standards.”
I was fortunate enough to be
a part of three different training
trips, the last culminating with a
weeklong journalism camp in July
2011 with 13 participating schools
in Lanzhou, China. The schools
traveled as far away as 250 miles
to come to Northwest Normal
University in Lanzhou, a gritty
refinery town that is near the Gobi
desert — it also has the worst air
quality in all of China.
Our mission was simple: teach
the fundamentals of scholastic
journalism and help each school
produce a four-page newspaper by
the week’s end.
Like many American summer
journalism camps, we had to blend
instruction with summer fun in a
friendly, competitive environment.
We balanced the didactic, lecture
format of instruction with experiential, in-the-field learning.
The school groups separated
into ability levels. Some already
had newspapers, some were starting from a blank screen. Using
heterogeneous grouping, we placed
experienced schools with nascent
learners. Each of the groups had
an American peer tutor and a Chi-