A Story Well Told: Developing Journalism Competencies Through an Experiential Learning Multimedia Project

The journalism experiential learning project presented in this study results from an innovative, collaborative approach to experiential learning designed to develop the students' understanding of current trends in content production using various media, including audio, video, photography, data visualization, and text. Two professors, teaching two different journalism courses, developed a semester-long project that required students to produce a multimedia package in partnership with a student from the opposite course. This research explores the implications of incorporating experiential education as a pedagogical approach in journalism education at the university level to develop journalism competencies. This study also extends on Guo and Volzâ's theoretical framework of Professional Competencies in Broadcast Journalism and the Pyramid of Journalism Competence developed by Poynter's Institute Roy Peter Clark by proposing a Competency-Based Framework for Journalism Education with four dimensions of competencies- knowledge cognitive, functional competence, personal/behavior competence, and values/ethical competence-and ten competencies expected from journalism education-news judgment, reporting and evidence, language and storytelling, analysis and interpretation, numeracy, technology, audio-visual, civic literacy, cultural literacy, and mission and purpose-outlined under each dimension. The study is under the data interpreting stage. The researchers have collected all the data and transcribed the audio from the focus group. The next step is to conduct a thematic analysis to determine how participants perceive their journalism competencies resulting from the experiential learning project and how the experience has informed the student's understanding of journalism. The researchers expect the results to indicate that students mention competencies under the knowledge/cognitive and practical dimensions. The researchers also expect that the experience has led students to gain news understandings of the field of journalism. The results of this study will contribute to the research in journalism education by presenting a model of experiential learning focused on developing journalism competencies.