Is journalism dying? No, it is just the reverse!

2014-11-25

How an American teacher uses a school newspaper to prepare her students for life

Esther Wojcicki is known in the United States as a journalist, social activist, innovative educator who combines educational process with the latest modern technology. More than half thousand students are now enrolled in her modern high school journalism program. She believes in importance of teaching children to think critically. According to Mrs. Wojcicki, that means ability to search and analyze information; lack of such skills results in a distorted view of the outside world. Thus critical thinking is crucial not only for a particular individual, but for society as a whole. Esther is an American of Ukrainian descent; our first question is about her family and relations with Ukraine.

My relatives lived in the area that was all the way from Lviv to Chernivtsi and Kamianets-Podilskyi. They were mostly scientists, philosophers, or rabbis. Their life would have been good if not for the pogroms. They were so hard to withstand that my parents decided to move from Chernivtsi to New York City. Most of the relatives who stayed behind perished in the Holocaust. Recently I met some of the survivors in the United States; many of them are journalists, writers, teachers, or academics. A few years ago I also tried to find relatives in Ukraine, but it seems that there is no one left.

Did you get your education in the United States?

I went to school in Los Angeles. In the elementary school there were about 25 students in the class, and everyone had to sit quietly while others finished their work. I was usually done too quickly and then I talked and got in trouble. At the end of 1950s I went to a large high school that had something called “double session” which meant that half of the students would have classes in the morning and the other half in the afternoon. I managed to go to both sessions. It was exciting. I became a valedictorian of the class and got a scholarship to go to University of California Berkeley. There I got a bachelor’s degree in political science and in English, master’s degree in journalism, and a teaching credential from the graduate school of education. At Berkeley nobody would help you; the classes were so big and the professors so remote that you had to pretty much learn to do everything on your own. I also pretty much had to pay for the education myself working as a journalist and as a model. That prepared me for doing what I ended up doing, because in life there is nobody there holding your hand helping you do things. It also prepared me to do well in Sorbonne where I continued my education after moving to France with my husband. I learned that you have to fight for yourself or you would not get anything.

COMMUNISM AND FIRE HOSES

Were you active in social life during your student years?

1960s was the era of the revolution. At the same time McCarthyism seemed to be very prominent and growing and I did not like the way it was impacting the whole United States. I became an activist as I thought if nobody took action the authorities would be able get away with doing whatever they wanted whenever they felt like doing it. I remember there was a huge rally in San Francisco; I was in the front line of that whole thing. Fire department came and started to unroll fire hoses. I was watching them and thinking to myself: “What are they doing? Why do they need fire hoses now?” And then they hooked them all up, and the next thing I knew was they turned those things on us! Their goal was to knock the protesters to the ground, arrest them and take away their passports. Afterwards a lot of people could not get their passports back for ten years! Luckily I managed to run away.

This experience made me more of a protester. As the President of University Student Cooperative Association at Berkeley I was invited to many other protest groups. I think it is important for people to have the right to speak out and just to be heard, even if they do not have enough people to agree with them and they might be in a minority. I majored in political science and then got a degree in journalism, because I did not want just to sit there and think about it, I wanted to actually do something about it.

Was Communism really a threat in the United States at the time?

It was to some extent, but I do not think it ever was as serious as McCarthy thought it was. On the one hand young people like me would be invited to the Youth Festival in Vienna where the organizers would try to make them Communists. On the other hand the United States at the time were obsessed with the Communist threat.

To be a teacher in the State of California I would have to take an oath that I was not a Communist. And then after several years in Europe in order to renew my teaching credential I had to travel to Zurich and swear in front of the Ambassador that I was not a Communist again. Communism was a threat, because according to this ideology you could do anything including lie and deceive in order to get your philosophy across. I faced it when I went to the Soviet Union in 1960 as part of a group of young leaders. I do not think anyone else in the group spoke Russian except me. You cannot believe how many people came out to me to tell me how terrible the life was there for them. They invited me to buildings that looked pretty nice on the outside, but what I saw inside was terrible. And Soviet officials tried to convince us Communism was great…

Were there other problems except McCarthyism that you had to fight?

Or course. It was just a very different world than it is now. You could only get to the San Francisco Press Club if you were a man; if you wanted to write about politics, you were supposed to be a man. They used to have a special section in the newspaper named “Women’s News”, and it would be like cooking, sewing, cleaning, and things like that. It was hard: I could not get people to take me seriously because I was female. That made me mad, too, and I fought that as well.

People today say that journalism is dying. It is just the reverse! The journalism is exploding because each of us has many ways to express a view. If you know how to use the Internet and know how to write a little bit, you can publish things on a blog, you can write on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ - there are so many outlets for you to write on everywhere, all over the world.

“CITIZEN JOURNALISTS TEND TO DO STORIES THAT ARE SUPERFICIAL”

But now that everyone is kind of an online journalist how could a professional journalist make a living and at the same time be independent?

I think we need professional journalists, because they are the ones who are trained to actually get the information, analyze it, and write it up in an objective way. Citizen journalists tend to do stories that are superficial. They do not have the access, they cannot interview the people that professional journalists can, and they also do not have the training that a professional journalist has to write an in-depth story. On the other hand, there are a lot of stories written there by journalists who are paid to write a certain slant on that story. In the past, ten or twenty years ago, the editorial department would always be separate from the business department, just so that editorial could not be impacted by money. But in the today’s world, I think, it is a little bit harder, because these big companies can hire people, pay a journalist or a writer to write something, and it looks like it is legitimate – and it is not. One of the things that I teach in my class is how to recognize who is actually writing those things on the Web. If you take a look, for example, at Martin Luther King … the second site on him you find on Google is a white supremacist site. There is a lot of manipulation, and if you do not train people to understand how this happens, then they believe everything they read – and they should not.

METHODOLOGY OF COLLABORATIVE LEARNING

How did your high school journalism program become so big and famous?

I came in 1984 and it was a small program with nineteen students. They were doing what a typical high school does: publishing stories about the dance, student government, and who won the game. I encouraged them to be more independent and look out for more things that could be possibly more interesting to them.

In 1987 I was lucky to get a grant from the State of California that allowed me to get eight computers. The only problem was that I did not know even how to turn them on! What I decided at that point actually changed my teaching. I decided that I would just tell my students that I had these machines, and I had no idea of what I was doing, and that could they please help. We opened the boxes together and tried to make them work. One of the kids had a Dad who gave us software. That was the beginning of this methodology of collaborative learning with my students.

As time passed the number of students enrolled in the program grew, and so did our paper. It now consists of twenty eight pages. It comes out every two or three weeks and we mail out five thousand copies to all the parents. In addition to the paper we now have Web sites, a radio broadcast program and three magazines. The reason I started all these things was to take some of the students out of the newspaper program, because their number grew and I could not handle so many. So every two years I started another program. First I had to prove the concept to the administration so I divided the class in two and had the second group start another publication. It is difficult to run two groups at the same time, but it is only for one year. And then they usually get another teacher to teach it. It is getting more difficult now because this is the largest program in the school, having more than six hundred students of ages fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and eighteen enrolled. So I am asked: “How many magazines are there going to be because the program continues to grow and the question is: How can we meet the demand?”

Could you talk more about collaborative learning and the role of a teacher in the publishing process?

I have all these groups of students within the classroom, so students work in groups collaboratively. And within each project they are doing, I embed all the skills they need. You cannot do the project unless you can write a complete sentence, spell properly, punctuate properly. If students don’t know how, they want to learn how quickly. It makes all this learning relevant, so there is an answer to the question: “Why learn all this stuff?” You have to be able to write well and know something about technology, to be able to speak intelligently to other people, and collaborate.

In order to maintain respect and credibility, the students always have to make sure everything is factually checked, and I am there to help them. I do not tell them what to do, but I advise them what to do. Sometimes I advise them to do something, and they want to do something different. If it is not libelous, if it is not defamatory, if it is not inciting to riot, if it is not obscene – I allow them to do it. They get the same responsibilities and rights as the public press. My role is that of a coach. I provide all the equipment for them. I teach them how to use the equipment. I provide the software and hardware. I keep the rooms open and the building available.

Basically, it is preparation for life. It is the same thing I learned at Berkeley. You cannot take your mother to college with you. You cannot take your teachers with you. You have to be independent. You have to learn to do it yourself. And the better you are at doing it, the better life is going to be both for you and for society as a whole.

Oleksiy Stepanovskiy, specially for “Освіта України” (“Education of Ukraine”)
The interview was published in “Освіта України” (“Education of Ukraine”) # 36 on September 29, 2014

Esther Wojcicki and the interviewer holding “Education of Ukraine” newspaper opened on the page with her interview

First Amendment to the Constitution of the USA displayed at the entrance of modern Media Arts Center built especially for Esther Wojcicki's high school journalism program: “Congress shall make no law… abridging freedom of speech, or of the press”

Esther Wojcicki with her students