Tag Archives: leadership

Waking Up to New Approaches to Community Media and Librarianship

28 Jan

Two amazing professionals have been literally keeping me awake at night: Maureen Sullivan and Tom Stites.

Waking Up to Innovation

Waking Up to Innovation

For days now, I find myself conscious, alert, in the middle of the night, pondering a bit of conversation, or an echo of a phrase, or an idea I seem to have heard recently from one or both of them. I pick up my dream notebook and scribble something furiously before hitting the pillow again.

Both of these remarkable individuals are aiming for nothing short of reinventing their chosen professional fields of librarianship and journalism. And I can’t think of anything more timely, more inspiring, and more important than the work they’re doing.

Tom Stites has had a distinguished career in journalism, working at the Kansas City Star, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times. Now he is the founder and president of the Banyan Project, which aims to strengthen democracy by pioneering a sustainable and scalable business model for Web journalism that serves the broad public of everyday citizens and engages their civic energy. I got to meet Tom at the Convergence and Community invitational conference we hosted here at the University of Rhode Island’s Harrington School of Communication and Media on January 16 – 17, 2013, where a diverse group of librarians, information professionals, technology experts and journalists gathered to explore how to prepare future workers in journalism and librarianship for careers and community service.

Spending time with Maureen Sullivan, the President of the American Library Association and the brand-new Interim Dean of the GSLIS program at Simmons College, is profoundly mood-altering experience. She’s an inspiring leader! Maureen is an organizational development consultant whose practice focuses on the professional development of librarians. She understands the process people use to create strategic change in their institutions. She has managed the human resources departments for academic libraries at the University of Maryland and Yale University. I saw Maureen only days ago at the recent National Forum on Teens and Libraries in Seattle, Washington, in an event sponsored by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA).

Maureen Sullivan has been at the forefront of a movement to enable librarians to “face outward” towards the communities they serve. She’s been encouraging librarians to reinvent their social role by building a sustainable, scalable national plan for library-led community engagement. And in the world of journalism, Tom Stites has been doing the same thing, in a way, encouraging journalists to engage directly with people in their local communities using a new funding model for community journalism based on the co-op model, a business structure developed by credit unions when credit dried up during the bank failures of the Great Depression.

What Universities Can Do

To meet the information needs of people in our local communities, we need creative and inspiring new ideas like this. And I can’t help but think that the University of Rhode Island can be a small part of the solution, right here, using the power of partnerships to help people across the region get the knowledge, skills, job training and services that will enable them to thrive.

This is the reason why I’m delighted that Harrington School journalism and library faculty will be exploring opportunities for interdisciplinary connections that use the power of convergence and community to help students develop the new competencies they need for 21st century careers as information professionals. This fits with our mission to use the power of information and communication to make a difference in the world.

What’s Possible?

How can universities support the needs of people in our local communities? Imagine the possibilities:

  • How about designing and implementing project-based learning experiences that put our students –future journalists, public relations and information professionals, filmmakers, librarians — into partnerships and collaborative projects that serve the community, like the Rhode Island Library Report?
  • Or perhaps it will be a new core multidisciplinary course organized around a deep-dive exploration of concepts like SEARCH, which is itself a core practice of inquiry with deep resonance for journalists, educators and librarians.

We’ll see what the faculty cooks up this spring, with help from Visiting Research Fellow Bill Densmore, a consultant and researcher on the future and sustainability of journalism who is an expert on Internet information technologies and business models. Bill is a consulting fellow to the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) at the Missouri School of Journalism and director/editor of the Media Giraffe Project at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He helped create the New England News Forum and is a founding member and director of Journalism That Matters. Thanks to Bill, we’ve made new friends with a number of innovative thinkers and leaders who care deeply about both journalism and libraries, including Mike Fancher, Amy Garmer, Leigh Montgomery, Colin Rhinesmith, Kara Andrade, Peter Phipps, Brian Jones, Josh Macht, and Graf Moen. Thanks to all of you for keeping me up at night imagining the future!

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Activating Young Leaders To Create a World Where Hate Cannot Flourish

16 Jul

Brianna Pescok and Renee Hobbs visit the State of Deception exhibit at the United State Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

One of the best things about my new job is the extent to which I’ve been able to think deeply about the needs of college-age students in relationship to the unknowable future we all face. In aiming to create a school of national distinction, I’ve been asked, “Who is the ideal University of Rhode Island Harrington School student?” My answer never wavers. It’s someone with three essential qualities: (1) a “doer” with intellectual curiosity, tenacity, and ambition; (2) someone eager to develop outstanding skills of expression and communication using a variety of forms (written, oral, visual, multimedia, digital, etc); and (3) someone who is relationally-oriented, full of compassion and community-mindedness, and possessing a deep sense of what it means to “do the right thing.”

This summer I was delighted to meet many young people with all these qualities and boy, was it inspiring! For the second year, I participated in a special leadership development program, held in Washington, D.C., called “What You DoMatters,” a three-day program for college students supported by the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum. Students came from more than 40 colleges and universities around the United States and across the world.

The lineup of presenters was impressive. We heard from Carl Wilkins, the last American to remain in Rwanda after the genocide began in 1994. And Eboo Patel offered wise words about the ways that religious understanding can change ourselves — and the world. Former University of Maryland wrestler Hudson Taylor inspired us all with the tale of how he grew into the role of becoming a LGBT rights activist, helping change the culture of college sports.

The conference is designed around a special exhibit at the Holocaust Museum, State of Deception, which is an exploration of the rise of German propaganda in the 20th century. To open the event, Sara J. Bloomfield, director of the Museum, welcomed the student leaders, explaining that Nazis didn’t just spread hate. They also promoted an agenda of freedom, unity and prosperity that many people found alluring, using mass communications and the ability to exploit the Germans’ hopes and fears.

JoAnna in action

JoAnna Wasserman created “What You Do Matters” as part of her work for the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Musem.

One of the things I liked best about the conference was the time allotted to dialogue and informal sharing. Conversations were real, personal and authentic.

Some sessions took a close look at contemporary propaganda. Journalist Lou Jacobson took us behind-the-scenes at Politifact.com to see how they help readers distinguish between many shades of lies and truth in the propaganda machine that is Washington, D.C. You’ll also be pleased to know that I offered a session entitled, “Lessons from KONY2012″ where we critically analyzed various perspectives from journalists, activists, critics, and social media experts on the meteoric rise and fall of the activist Jason Russell, whose creative new ways of reaching audiences with powerful messages captured the world’s attention in the spring of 2012. I’ll be sharing the lesson plan that I created for this session as part of a back-to-school suite in September. Stay tuned!

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Why Leadership Matters

13 Sep

I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership recently, and some of you know why. In January, I’m going to become the Founding Director of the Harrington School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island. It’s a terrific opportunity to help the faculty grow and develop a distinctive new type of communication school that connects the traditional communication disciplines of journalism, film/media, public relations and communications studies with programs in writing and rhetoric and a graduate program in library and information science. In my view, this is the perfect constellation of departments for a 21st century learner. So imagine how excited I am about the possibilities!

Which leads me to reflect on the nature of leadership. Some of the best leaders I know I encountered at business school. For nearly 20 years, I taught media studies at Babson College and was fortunate to have been mentored by distinguished faculty leaders including Al Anderson, Allan Cohen, Sydel Sokuvitz and Dick Mandel.

So when the National Association for Secondary School Principals asked me to write about digital and media literacy, I wrote about some Philadelphia leaders, including Sam Reed of Beeber Middle School and Jessica Brown, principal of the Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush High School. I thought about all the principals and school leaders who I have learned from, beginning with the legendary John Katsoulis, Assistant Superintendent of the Billerica Public Schools and Damian Curtiss, Chairman of the English Department. Back in the early 1990s, these two school leaders inspired me to help them make a difference in a single school district, and from them, I learned alot about the process of making change by supporting teachers as learners and leaders. One of my former students, Amy Purcell Vorenberg, is now a principal. She started her career as a teacher at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, where she participated in the Felton Scholars Program in Media Literacy, which I ran at Babson College. Today she is the Principal of the Philadelphia School.

One of the best principals I ever met was Dr. Paul Folkemer, who was the principal of the Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, New Jersey and then became Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction in Scarsdale, New York. Paul’s insight on managing educational change was informed by his own passion for “teaching the news.”

From these leaders, I discovered how important it is for educational leaders to listen well, take strategic risks, build meaningful relationships, see the big picture, work the system, and hold on to your own passions – even in balancing all the many challenges of management and administration. Leaders need the same kind of intellectual curiosity, flexibility and openness to new ideas that should drive the entire educational enterprise.

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What You Do Matters

29 Jun

A Student Leadership Summit on Propaganda, Hate Speech and Civic Engagement, June 22 – 25, 2011

I was lucky to be able to participate in a fascinating event at the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. More than 50 students from 40-plus states came together for a leadership summit. In three days of learning, students gained knowledge about the Holocaust and examined the role of Nazi propaganda in promoting political polarization and a spirit of indifference.

At the heart of the program was a visit to the special exhibit entitled, “State of Deception,” an examination of the Nazi’s use of print, film, broadcasting, and even toys, parades and other media to convey their messages, which sometimes seemed benign and even positive. Students learn that the loudspeaker was a new technology of the time, enabling Hitler to speak to more than 10 million people in over 200 large-scale rallies in a single year. During Hitler’s rise of power, propaganda enabled the Nazi party to gain visibility in a crowded political landscape. Then it was used to consolidate power and exclude Jews and others from the national community. By 1939, propaganda helped create a climate of indifference to the elimination of the Jews and others deemed “undesirable.”

Today, propaganda is a ubiquitous part of everyday life. Truths, half-truths and lies are part of daily discourse in news, advertising and online. Complex issues are simplified and activate our emotions, targeting audiences very precisely in order to influence public opinion. But despite the negative connotation of the term, propaganda has a key role in contemporary life. When it is not deceptive and when people can freely choose to accept or reject the message, propaganda is used for many worthy purposes. Bit since every message comes with a visible (or invisible) agenda, media literacy competencies are more important than ever before.

At the leadership summit, there were many opportunities for reflective discussions; probing questions encouraged students to make connections between the historical past and their own lived experience. Today’s college student leaders have grown up exposed to a wide range of 21st century propaganda in both the militaristic legacy of September 11th and the rise of social media.

“Even though we are surrounded by it in the world of politics, entertainment, news, in the workplace, and even among our family and friends, we are not immune to propaganda,” one student pointed out. “Propaganda has evolved, and it’s perhaps even more effective today.”

In discussing with students the promise and perils of social media, I examined how social media can be used as a means of propaganda and a tool for celebrating hate, as well as a powerful vehicle of civic engagement. Students recognized the power of connecting people through interest-group networks as well as the danger of Facebook “liking” becoming a substitute for genuine political action. They identified the importance of being self-aware and reflective about how their online actions line up with their ethical values.

Highlights of the program included a conversation with Bob Behr, a Holocaust survivor, who described the psychological pain of growing up and being increasingly alienated from his culture. Benches that said, “For Jews Only” and big signs at the ice cream shop and the municipal pool that read: “Jews not wanted here” created fear and promoted deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. Carl Wilkins, an American missionary who stayed in Rwanda throughout the genocide in order to support the needs of children in a Kigali orphanage, also inspired the hearts of all participants, helping us see both the resilient spirit of the Rwandan people and the flawed thinking at the heart of genocide: the belief that problems can be solved by excluding people. Charles Haynes, Director of the Religious Freedom Education Project at the Newseum, explored the relationship between campus “speech codes” and the First Amendment. Martha Bixby shared her experiences as a leader in the Save Darfur Coalition. Amy Lazarus, Executive Director of the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network, modeled practices that show how “everyday leaders” emerge when dialogue creates trust and respect that inspires new ideas and fresh ways of thinking. And Bill Adair, founder of Politifact, pulled back the curtain on the current spin-centered, media-hyped politics where a sensational soundbite often leaves truth in the dust. Throughout the program, Holocaust Museum Education Initiatives Manager JoAnna Wasserman, along with a team of student leaders, guided participants towards recognizing the heart of leadership: cultivating respect, love, and generosity as a means to create a culture where hate cannot flourish.

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