Creating Journalism 101
One of the options for the final project in Timothy's College Teaching class was to design a course from scratch. He chose to create a course about journalism for a college that doesn't offer journalism as a major. It was intended to be used as an English elective at a community college, but the course could easily be modified to be taught at either the high school or university level. Indeed, some of the inspiration for this class came from Timothy's time as the Photojournalism Graduate Mentor Instructor with the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay's TRiO program, which served high school students.
He started by selecting a book for the course. After taking a look at several books available, he went with Principles of American Journalism by Stephanie Craft and Charles Davis. This book does a great job combining real-world examples and thoroughly explaining concepts, yet is easy for students to read. Throughout the course, the instructor should also use other books and resources to supplement the readings from the main textbook. Those resources are outlined in the syllabus.
Speaking of, the next step was designing the syllabus. This was a difficult task for Timothy, because it was hard to know what to keep and what to save for an advanced-level course. Having spent six years taking journalism classes and many more in the field, Timothy quickly found it would be impossible to boil all that down into one 16-week course. He started out by creating course objectives, then plotted those lessons out over the course of the semester. Finally, assignments were created to emphasize the most important course content.
To put the project together, several weeks' worth of content was designed for the class, including lesson plans, PowerPoints, in-class activities, assignment sheets (rubrics) and more. The syllabus has a complete calendar for the class which breaks down from day one to week 16 what's going to be covered in class, what readings are assigned and what's due.
I've included the syllabus and a sample of the course materials below.