Using Narrative Media Instruction and Experiential Learning to build Cultural Competency in Future Journalists
By Michael Longinow
and Tamara J. Welter
Introduction — Few lessons are more vivid from the presidential election of 2016
Using Narrative Media Instruction and Experiential Learning to build Cultural Competency in Future Journalists
By Michael Longinow
and Tamara J. Welter
Introduction — Few lessons are more vivid from the presidential election of 2016 than the awareness that many of those most prominent in U.S news media do not know the real people that comprise audiences they claim to be serving. Linked to this lesson is the attention given, since before that election, to the growing effects of “fake news” that uses stereotype and false perceptions of cultural reality to promote stories about marginalized people groups.
Student journalism stands as a key resource for reform of these problems. As tools for guiding a grasp of critical thinking through investigation, narrative discovery and understanding of audience, the campus newsroom and classrooms of student media advisers have the potential to equip future leaders in American journalism with a deeper grasp of, and respect for, cross-cultural encounter, making students aware of the ways that audience can inform their approach to those far different from themselves.
Few research studies have brought learning theory to an examination of cross-cultural encounter as a teaching tool for guiding Millennials toward excellence in long-form journalistic storytelling in the 21st century. This paper will use experiential learning theory to show the ways that a cross-cultural pedagogy can have lasting effects on students’ approach to understanding themselves as journalists and their readers and viewers as a globally interactive audience. It will highlight ways in which experiential learning serves as an important pedagogical tool to bring Millennials from cross-cultural awareness to cross-cultural competency through encounter in pursuing long-form journalistic storytelling. It will suggest experiential learning as an antidote to cynicism among this age group about the role of fact-based journalism in 21st century media cultures.
Theory background: Experiential Learning, Cultural Inquiry, and Millennials
Students in the 21st century who put hands to the tools of journalism—keyboards, cameras, phones—to learn the work of news-related storytelling are illustrating the latest iteration of the power of experiential learning. And experiential learning as preparation for journalism careers in the U.S. traces to the earliest known coursework in North American journalism of the 19th century. Its roots are in on-site learning by apprentices in print shops of Western Europe and the American colonies. But it is not a method without controversy.
After the U.S. Civil War, debate raged between working journalists and those who would train student journalists. The fight was about whether the best practices of the American press—done at that time by relatively few workers using limited technical skills—could be taught at all. That debate lingers in the 21st century: some leaders in newsrooms remain suspicious or even disdainful of journalism education and most educators of journalism or media find themselves somewhere on a continuum between strict instruction in theory and training in professional skills. 
John Dewey’s argument for practical education in schools (including laboratory settings) grew out of an era when the middle class first emerged in the U.S. and professions were coming into new prominence. Specialized coursework was emerging, bringing with it schools of journalism, for credentialing professionals as those uniquely prepared for certain duties.
Dewey’s plea was to reach students where they are: young people’s intensity of grasp for life’s complexities, he said, is seen most vividly in how they play or how they adapt to a job situation. But Dewey noted that unguided experience can become a maze of “blind and capricious impulses” that he warned can “hurry us on heedlessly from one thing to another.” Experiential learning, as a concept, ties students’ grasp of new ideas to brain function. David Kolb’s theory of experiential education calls for transformation of experience, a process Lynn Montrose says must take the student deeper into the “why” of what they are doing rather than merely “how” that task should be done.
And part of the guidance is toward reflection on experience—reflection of a kind that research suggests Millennials are less prone than others to do as they learn. Bloom’s revised taxonomy of learning begins with memory—a looking back into prior experience as a leaping-off point into a true grasp of experiential moments as part of analytical thinking needed to begin the best innovative work. And memory, cultural memory in particular, is a crucial starting point for students being led into cross-cultural encounter as an approach to in-depth journalistic storytelling.
Though the research literature is not plentiful, studies of experiential learning as an element in cross-cultural grasp of journalism show the benefits of this approach. But the use of cross-cultural encounter as a teaching technique walks a perilous line between Millennials’ tendency to avoid personal (non-digital) encounter with unfamiliar people and what Maslow and Buber would describe as a basic human yearning to deeply know others.
To use a cross-cultural approach with unprepared students begs cross-cultural encounter done badly—a problem affecting students and those whose stories they approach. Cultural interpretation is a learned behav