Some Basic Choices

Planning to incorporate new media elements into a visual communication course begins with deciding how this new class will fit in our overall curriculum, and that decision must take into account the nature of our program here at Lehigh. Some background will help:

Lehigh University’s journalism program began in 1927. We’ve had a student newspaper since 1894, and it was the newspaper that provided the momentum to offer a journalism degree before the Great Depression. Until I gave it to our library archivist recently, I had the 130-page manual from that era that spelled out the new system for how the student newspaper, called The Brown and White, would be run. The creative force behind this new system and the advent of a more formal journalism program was a young professor named Curtis D. MacDougall, who later went on to teach at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University from 1942 to 1971 and wrote one of the great journalism texts of all time. He was working on the ninth edition of “Interpretive Reporting” when he died in 1985. I digress, but the point is that we have some deep and interesting roots.

Prof. MacDougall went on to teach in a much larger program, where students had many choices, or “tracks” that were designed to fill a traditional job market: photojournalism, magazine editing and writing, radio and television, newspapering, advertising. At Lehigh, he left behind a program rooted in the liberal arts. Our philosophy is that every student should get a strong and broad liberal arts education, and that we can provide it through the lens of journalism and media studies. For the more than three decades I’ve been at Lehigh, we’ve graduated about 30 students each year. In our major, they complete basic courses in news writing, editing and reporting. They all have internships in the senior year and capstone senior seminar courses. They have media ethics and law, and they can choose from a menu of other courses to suit their interest. Most of them have second majors or minors in subjects like political science, English or sociology.

When the Internet came along, we began a web version of the student newspaper, hired a journalist with a background in website work in newspapers, and incorporated training in most of our courses. Seems like a long time ago.

These days, few of our students take jobs in the “traditional” media. They more often are hired by social networking startups, or by organizations that are trying to increase their social media footprint. These graduates need a broader set of skills, along with a fresh understanding of media and society, to take into the workplace. The choices we’ve made about incorporating these elements into our curriculum are dictated by being a small department with a focus on liberal arts.

While we lack the breadth of larger programs, it’s probably simpler to retool at Lehigh than at schools where entrenched field-of-study specialties have made training more specific. Since all of our students are cross-trained because of the nature of our program, incorporating new media and community journalism concepts into our curriculum boils down to deciding how to revamp existing basic courses, and how to add new courses that emphasize these skills at a higher level.

So we’ve made some of these choices, and this new course I’m developing in visual communication is an important part of the change. It will be taken by freshmen and sophomores who, by the time they take this class, will have a foundational course called Media and Society, and our entry-level Writing for the Media class, which includes blogging and use of Twitter.

Next blog: The Other Pieces of the Puzzle

Old Dog

I often tell my students that one of the nicest things about design is that it’s not an exact science. For any given design problem, there are many elegant solutions. For those of us who always had trouble coming up with the right solutions in calculus, it’s a comforting concept.

But just because there’s more than one acceptable answer doesn’t mean all answers are good. Some solutions are better than others. Some are just plain bad. And it’s often difficult to pin down what separates the elegant from the awful. We study rules and conventions. Typography. Grid systems. Graphics. Color. Similarity. Proximity. Contrast. Repetition. Hierarchy. We try to apply the rules, and we learn how to break the rules effectively. We can talk about what succeeds and what doesn't, but to a large extent, whether we like the result is subjective.

After 32 years of teaching “Publication Design” in our journalism program, in the fall I’ll be introducing a new course, titled “Visual Communication.” What’s the difference, you ask. Nothing. And everything.

Our former course taught the sort of design one needs to create posters, newspapers and magazines. I have always been surprised to learn that many journalism students don't think a lot about visual communication. They're focused on writing. Part of my job has always been to explain why they need to know about typography and graphics. Today's students have an even greater obligation to learn about telling a story visually: They need to be able to shoot and edit video, to create a slide show, design and maintain an attractive blog site.

In our small journalism and communication program, our goal will be to teach these things throughout the curriculum and to all of our students, but my new course will be an important conceptual and skills foundation.

Talk about an old dog and new tricks.

So this blog will help me explore some of the challenges and opportunities as I develop a plan for this new class in the coming months. I hope along the way to engage some of my colleagues at other institutions and in the profession in a discussion that will help me find the way. As with design itself, the beauty is that there are a lot of solutions out there to the problems of teaching visual communication.

I’m building on a fairly good foundation, I believe. I’ve been a newspaper editor, doing production that included layout and design as a part-time job for more than three decades. My college training at the graduate level was in photography and cinematography, and I’ve continued to have an interest in those. So I’m not new to visual storytelling. But I’ve been doing these things intuitively all my life. Teaching others to do them is much harder. I learned this when I first began teaching news writing and reporting. I had been a reporter, but teaching other people to be reporters took a lot of thought. I also learned a lot in the process. In the end, it made me a better writer, a better editor.

So I’ll be trying to get a fresh blog out a couple of times a week. I’ll post the topics out there in Twitterland and see if anyone’s interested in having this conversation. I know there are many of you who have been teaching this sort of class for some time ... probably others who are just starting, like me.

Let’s share.

Next blog: Some Basic Choices