So Happy Together
Much more can be achieved by
working together. By Sandy Woodcock
Teamwork is the focus of many of this issue's articles, and it's a concept with which I'm very familiar.
Working as part of a team to achieve the greatest positive change has been the focus of most of my working life. When I was teaching, everyone involved - students, parents, teachers, administrators and the community - had to work together if students were to achieve educational gains.
This year, leadership changes and economic factors have led the NAA Foundation to examine its program priorities and to identify ways in which the various programs can work together and with others to achieve the greatest good with fewer resources.
Working with others to achieve the greatest good sums up the mission of an educator, doing more with less is another constant of the job.
When there was no funding to purchase journalism textbooks at my last teaching assignment, my local NIE program stepped up to the plate. It enabled me to bring the newspaper into my classroom as my journalism ‘textbook.' By sharing classroom papers with another department, I was able to double my classroom delivery days. Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays when it contained content written by and for youth, each of my students read and worked with the newspaper. On those days, my kids got to see themselves in multiple sections of the paper's content.
Seeing themselves in copy and advertising made a profound difference in their attitude toward the paper. They believed that what they did and what they thought were important to the newspaper. They believed the newspaper desired them as readers. While a few of my students did go on to become working journalists, the majority of them went on to become working Americans, some professionals, some not. And the skills they learned in that classroom and the understanding they gained of a newspaper's role in a democratic society were, I believe, instrumental in helping them to achieve success.
It took lots of teamwork to accom-plish that end. It took reading the local newspaper, supplied to the class through the paper's NIE program. It took a solid journalism program supported by that same newspaper and other newspapers who invest in scholastic journalism outreach and teacher education. It took the paper's commitment to providing content that allowed my students to see themselves in its pages - its newsholes and its advertising spaces.
That newspaper lent itself to the teaching of journalism terms, law and ethics, bias and balance, journalistic writing, design and layout and advertising. But perhaps more importantly, by engaging their interest it taught my students not what to think, but what to think about.
It took efforts to achieve that end. Many of those efforts are supported, encouraged and improved through NAA Foundation programs. We'll work to continue those efforts. There's a lot of room for us to be a force for positive change.
Sandy Woodcock is director of NAA Foundation.
SUMMER/FALL 2003