Project helps assistant professor balance teaching, service, scholarship
Larry Taylor presents Breakdown Editor, Penny Barker (center), and Tattler Editor, Tammy Hutchinson (right), with state student newspaper awards. Both newspapers were honored for their efforts by the North Carolina Scholastic Media Association.
For many new tenure-track professors, the most difficult challenge is balancing the priorities of teaching, service and scholarship. Finding this balance can make a real difference in a successful bid for tenure.
For Assistant Professor Larry Taylor in the Department of Communication this balance seems to be working out through a project that uses his teaching and professional skill set to help support media literacy efforts at two area schools. The effort, which Taylor started in 2006, is called “The Student Newspaper Project.” The project’s goal is to support authentic context-based student newspaper projects at area elementary and middle schools.
“Initially, I was just searching for a way to get community service credit by farming out my skill set to a student newspaper in a local elementary school more as a favor than anything else,” Taylor said.
The school was Westwood Elementary and what Taylor did was bring organization knowledge and a professional journalism skill set to the Timberwolf Tattler.
“I was very interested in the teachers’ goal of using the newspaper as a school newsletter thus creating an authentic context for the student efforts. They used me to help create as authentic a newsroom context as possible and I began training 6th-graders on the use of professional pagination software to serve as legitimate copy editors. I was shocked by both student buy-in and the students’ ability to absorb the material,” Taylor said.
As students left Westwood for Ashe County Middle School, they apparently took the desire to be journalists with them. Taylor followed in 2007 becoming the advisor for Ashe County Middle School’s newspaper the Bulldog Breakdown, modeled after the Tattler.
“What was different, and very intriguing for me, was ACMS Principal Bobby Ashley’s willingness to integrate the program into the curriculum as a discovery block course option for students,” said Taylor. “I had only hoped for a matching extra-curricular project at the middle school. I could not pass up the chance to help support an authentic context-based journalism class.”
Taylor might have been happy with a project that was providing community service and positive public relations for Appalachian, but the project had something else for him.
What Taylor also discovered while working with the newspapers was an authentic context of technology integration into education.
“I was attending a public relations conference in Chicago in 2007 and heard a speaker discussing a bottom-up strategy for companies to use in making decisions about integrating technology,” Taylor said, ” I thought, ‘that’s what’s happening with the Tattler and the Breakdown!’”
At that point Taylor and his wife and research partner, Westwood AIG specialist Mary Taylor, began discussing a bottom-up strategy for schools.
“We had pitched the value of authentic context in literacy education at a poster session at the national conference for the National Association for Gifted Children in Minneapolis in 2007,” Taylor said, “but it was at the 2008 Summer Leadership Conference & NCASA Superintendents’ Retreat in Asheville that we first presented the idea of administrators becoming pivotal players in a bottom-up tech integration strategy. We didn’t get much traction on that first run regionally.”
However things seemed to change a bit later that year when he presented a new version of the idea at “Ubiquitous Learning: An International Conference” in Chicago. The presentation and subsequent article written by Taylor, “Tech Pushers: Making Administrators into Tech Integration Facilitators,” was well received winning the publication’s International Award for Excellence in the area of learning and education.
“I am now slated to make a plenary presentation, and Mandy and I have proposed another presentation and article that fleshes out the theoretical framework and methodological application of D3 in greater detail for application across various educational context levels,” Taylor said.
According to Taylor, what started out as merely an effort to score some community service points, has become a primary service and scholarship effort.
“It’s really turned into a win-win-win for me. I get to use my primary teaching preparation to drive the training of the students on the copy desk. While there, I get to see how practical need can drive teacher buy-in on technology integration. At the same time, I get to support student newspapers that are winning state awards and garner App State community recognition and appreciation from parents and students that may one day decide to make ASU their choice for college education. I feel really fortunate to have found a project that gives me and ASU so much in return for my efforts,” Taylor said.
Taylor credited College of Fine and Applied Arts Dean, Glenda Treadaway, for her support of the project in 2006 as chair of the Department of Communication as well as the continued support from current Department of Communication chair, Janice Pope. Taylor’s current goal is to secure funding support to allow him to provide teachers with the opportunity to attend next year’s North Carolina Scholastic Media Institute in June.
“I think this would help the teachers to see how our newspaper projects differ from others and might give us a chance to pass on the authentic context value concept to other schools,” Taylor said.