My intense journey to complete my final master's project

A course proposal:

Photography/Photojournalism CEU course for high school teachers

By Lori King

Kent State University grad student

Journalism Educators program

Week One

The justification

   I wish I had stats to state on why a continuous education unit (CEU) course on photography for high school teachers is a good idea, but I don’t. I just have a gut feeling that it is.

   I’ve yet to collect research to justify the course because I’m only at the starting gate for a race to finish my master’s project proposal by July 15. A master’s project is similar to a thesis, except I’m actually accomplishing a concrete goal of providing a real service to high school teachers who will benefit from my final project.

   My idea germinated during my first semester at KSU more than three years ago. I was taking a law and ethics class and I learned that too many high school journalism teachers/advisers are actually English teachers thrown into the position because it was the closest subject to journalism. After all, they both involve writing, right?  That logic is flawed, and is harmful to the future of journalism.

   My initial idea was to do something involving law and ethics, which are fundamental. I’m always surprised when a working journalist/pj breaks our code of ethics. The result is an eroding trust in a once-proud profession.

Keeping it simple

   At first I wanted to offer something like a journalism boot camp: a workshop that covered many topics: law and ethics, news writing, social media, photography, news design, etc. But that would require bringing in other instructors/professionals who were experts on their topics. I quickly decided I had too little time for so much bureaucracy.

   A rule of thumb when developing a master’s project is to NARROW DOWN the focus. The boot camp idea was too ambitious, so I decided to stick with what I know: a single course on just photography and photojournalism.

The survey

   The next step was developing a survey to find out:

• which local schools have journalism, photography and/or yearbook teachers/advisers 
• which local schools have print or online newspapers
• the journalism background of journalism teacher/advisers
• how many yearbook advisers have photography experience

   I developed the survey using Survey Monkey. The first draft was too broad. The second draft narrowed it down considerably. I’m at the third draft, and am still tweaking it, but it’s pretty much complete.

A sample survey question

The IRB

     Two weeks ago I sent the survey off to my three chosen committee members at Kent State University: Candace Bowen, John Bowen and Mark Goodman. I made their recommended changes.

   Last week I took a day trip to Kent to meet with the committee members for the first time. It was a productive meeting.  They reviewed hard copies of the survey, and then gently reminded me that I need to get the survey approved by the KSU Institutional Review Board (IRB).

   I forgot about that requirement. Sigh.
   I was tempted to scrap the survey idea, but that's not an option.  I need the results of this survey to gauge what I need to focus on, and to ultimately help justify the course. .

   Because a survey involves “human research subjects,” it needs approval by the IRB. I sent off a quick email to my KSU professor who taught the research methods course I took last summer, Dr. Jeff Child, and he said I first needed to take a Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) course before I can submit my survey to the IRB. Another sigh.

   So I took the course and its quizzes, which wasn’t as bad as I feared. It only took about two hours. I printed out the curriculum completion report, which will be a part of the IRB approval package. I will send the survey, the nine-page IRB documentation I had to fill out, and the CITI report to my committee co-chair to sign, who will then forward it to the IRB. Once it’s approved (which should only take up to two weeks), I will FINALLY be able to send out the survey. In the meantime, I’m creating a database of teachers to send it to (about 40).

Scholarly research

    My committee members also told me I needed to cite about 30 scholarly articles in my proposal. THIRTY! To do that I need to connect to the Kent State library via VPN, so I installed the VPN mobile client on my desk top MAC, though I’ve yet to search a single article.

   So, that’s how my first week went.

   I’m documenting the experience for myself, and for anyone else who could use this information. As for the stats, well, those will come much later…

   I will probably post every Thursday, so stay tuned!