Katherine Reed - Designing the trauma journalism course
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Katherine Reed, associate professor on the Print and Digital faculty, Missouri School of Journalism, spoke about about how to design a trauma journalism course at "Trauma Journalism: Training for Educators" on Oct. 17, 2015. This two-day conference at the Reynolds Journalism Institute focused on teaching journalism educators about how to prepare students for the impact of trauma on individuals — including themselves — and communities, how to build resilience through reporting, and provide hands-on help in creating units or standalone courses on trauma.
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Katherine Reed - Designing the trauma journalism course
- 1. (or module) Katherine Reed/Missouri School of Journalism
- 2. What trauma is What trauma does (the immediate impact on the human body and brain) The science of post-traumatic stress disorder The prevalence of resilience How communities are affected by traumatic events How to evaluate media coverage of media coverage of traumatic events, from breaking news through rebuilding and recovery
- 3. THE RESEARCH The good news about resilience Self care What they can appropriately expect from employers or as free-lancers
- 4. A starting place to help students organize media coverage you may want to ask them to analyze Act I: The horrifying event Act II: Its impact on the victim(s) Act III: The search for meaning, the hardest part
- 5. Conduct a good interview with a trauma survivor, using some aspects of empathic interviewing skills (dartcenter.org)
- 6. Produce a good trauma story of any kind, on any platform
- 7. Students should be able to think and talk their way through complex ethical challenges that arise in reporting on trauma
- 8. Your colleagues across the quad Advocates and activists Trauma survivors Law enforcement and prosecutors Journalists with extensive and exemplary work in reporting traumatic events Your local VA
- 13. Real talk about the job of the war correspondent
- 14. “SELF CARE: The study of traumatic events often elicits strong emotional reactions, among both individuals who have experienced traumatic events and individuals who have not. Some of the material we will cover in class may likely cause discomfort and anxiety. As journalists in training, it is important for you to learn how to tolerate and cope with intense experiences and emotions, including your own. Please come and talk to me if you anticipate that you may need extra time or space to process something we discuss in class, or if you become aware that you’re feeling unusually anxious. Remember that “talking it out” is a great, first step and sometimes all that you will need. If not, I can point you to excellent resources.” Katherine Reed/Missouri School of Journalism
- 15. Share with your colleagues, start early and repeat as needed Keep adjusting for new tools and ethical challenges Emphasize resilience Katherine Reed/Missouri School of Journalism
Editor's Notes
- Fit it to your community or your students, and know that choosing a project based on one kind of traumatic situation can teach your students the fundamentals about many other kinds of situations. It’s not necessary to teach students how to cover every kind of trauma. But acknowledge that there are differences between deliberate acts that produce trauma, like mass shootings and terrorism, and natural disasters or other so-called Acts of God.. Research tells us that it’s harder for survivors to cope with the deliberate acts than accidental acts. But don’t be tempted down the road to doing a course solely on covering conflict. Most of our students will NOT cover conflict. They are much more likely to cover the day-to-day traumatic events that occur in communities like car crashes, homicides, suicide and shootings. Students have approached me about my course on “covering conflict” and have been disappointed to learn that’s only a small part of what we cover in class.
- In addition to being able to evaluate and analyze coverage critically, they should be able to … This is a really important part of any course because this is where there’s the most discomfort for students and the greatest potential for harm. The Dart Center provides excellent guidance on how to conduct interviews with the trauma survivor (314 results are their website – this is just one) Ways to do this…. Many. You can do an interview in class to model this, though it is somewhat artificial. You can do role-play – tap the theater department at your university for a creative approach, though this requires scripts and training. You can also do Skype interviews with journalists who are great at this – part of the team in Charleston, S.C. that did the prize-winning work on domestic violence. Kristin Lombardi who did the series on campus sexual assault. Someone from your local media whose work you’re familiar with and whose stories reflect good sensitivity and training on this subject – but that may be harder to find.
- Having students go through the entire process from start to finish teaches them how to communicate with trauma survivors about the process transparently and collaboratively. This includes even having some difficult conversations about why certain facts must be included or omitted, what verification entails and how editing can change the final product. This gives you, the instructor, an opportunity to help your students develop sophisticated negotiation skills with sources – and how trauma survivors are different from other kinds of sources. ACCURACY IS THE HIGHEST GOOD as always – research on how painful errors are for trauma survivors. Especially painful. Even tiny errors can be deeply hurtful to the trauma survivor
- We heard about one of those yesterday from Tom Teves… What are some others that you can think of? How do you teach these now? Include visual ethics in this part of your teaching because many of our students will be gathering and sharing images themselves. Many will be working in newsrooms with less guidance than ever.
- So how on earth do you go about teaching a subject that delves so deeply into psychology? Fortunately, your campus is full of experts. So is your community. Tap them and you not only enrich your students’ classroom experience, you also build relationships with sources. The head of the domestic violence + sexual assault organization you invite to bring into your classroom becomes a collaborator on a great series of stories about intimate partner violence and how these cases are adjudicated
- This book breaks down the various reactions human beings have to terrifying experiences and lays the foundation for everything that comes afterward in my class. For example, freezing or paralysis is very common for people in a disaster. Sexual assault survivors often report being unable to move their limbs during the event. They also report “blacking out”. This book explains these adaptive mechanisms that can help journalists understand how people behaved in a disaster. It teaches us to remove judgment but also how to evaluate disaster preparedness both in ourselves and in our communities.
- The only actual comprehensive textbook on this topic – covers subjects like interviewing the trauma survivor, writing the trauma story and special subjects like 9/11 and interviewing child trauma survivors. Also includes prize-winning examples of stories with commentary by the journalists who wrote them.
- Anthony Feinstein did the first major study of journalists who have covered combat, and this book came out of that research. It’s beautifully and sensitively written and students like it a lot. It also covers domestic terrorism and some small studies Feinstein did post-9/11.
- A memoir by a woman whose parents, husband and two sons were killed in the Box Day tsunami. Compelling, disturbing and beautiful.
- And Kelly Evers’ Diary of a Very Bad Year – excellent podcast and discussion tool on covering combat. War is Beautiful by David Shields – for visual journalists in particular, a look at how the New York Times depicts war in its front-page photos. Great fodder for debate. I say ethical responsibility because I sometimes fear that college students have an unrealistic idea about covering combat. I don’t discourage their dreams but I do think I have an obligation to provide them with a more complete and realistic picture of what the work entails and how it might affect them.
- It’s a good idea to include language like this in your syllabus if you’re planning a course that will delve somewhat deeply into trauma. It may be inadvisable to ask students to disclose any possible areas of sensitivity to you – that is probably a step too far. But it’s a good idea to build into a class or module a way for students to reflect on how they’re feeling about subject matter. My students blog, and I read those blog posts for “clues” that a student may need to take a break from the subject. I also show funny videos in class sometimes to dispel the gloom – I really do. I also advise students NOT to do all of their heavy reading right before bed. But they usually ignore that advice.