What’s the secret the being a great teacher of SJ? “Let students develop their own conclusions.”
How Oregon’s Kathryn Thier teaches solutions journalism
Every month, the Solutions Journalism Network highlights a Member of the Month — a journalist doing, or supporting, excellent solutions-focused reporting. This month, we’re featuring Kathryn Thier, the journalist-educator-researcher extraordinaire who’s been called — by about half the staff at SJN — “one of the best people out there teaching solutions journalism.” We talked to her about her teaching secrets, her proudest teaching moments, why she came to the SJ world in the first place, and how she’d like her kids to experience journalism down the road.
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JH: Tell us a bit about how you ended up where you are today.
KT: So I was a journalist for seven years — for Newsday for about a year, then the Charlotte Observer for six years. And while I was at the Observer, I worked on a story that was pretty traumatic for me and the community.
That story took place in a county north of Charlotte — the one I covered — and it involved seven African-American teenagers killed in a police chase. It wasn’t racially motivated, and the officer didn’t know who was in the car. But it re-opened a lot of racial wounds. So we, as a paper, went into overdrive and questioned everything: Why didn’t the officer radio for help? Who were these teens? Why did he chase them?
We felt like we were doing our job — reporting what happened and answering questions. We learned the driver was a 13-year-old drug dealer. We learned the officer wasn’t aware that it wasn’t best practice to chase people for tiny traffic infractions. But with everything we reported, the community became angrier: why were we questioning the police? Others asked why were we painting the passengers as bad kids? It just seemed no matter what we did, people were furious at us.
Journalists aren’t here to make friends, but at the same time it really disturbed me, because even though we thought we were being noble and seeking the truth, that’s not what the community thought what we were doing.
JH: Wow. So, what happened next?
KT: We eventually wrote a series recapping the last night of the kids’ lives. I learned there was an African-American barber who was an unofficial leader — an actor, and a playwright — in the community. He wrote and produced a play that took us back to this situation as a way to heal. It was a way of saying, “This was everybody’s fault and nobody’s fault.”
So I wrote a story about that, and the series won some state and regional awards. And the community responded positively: “Thank you for showing us the good. Thank you for showing us that there is hope. Thank you for keeping your word. You told my story truthfully.” This story really stuck with me about what we were doing as journalists — and what we could do better.
JH: So how long did you continue there?
KT: About four years later, I ended up taking a buyout from the Charlotte Observer. And when I left journalism, I really struggled — I felt [the industry] was dying, but I also felt conflicted about what it was doing.
When I was in this existential questioning mode about where [journalism] was going, I started reading the New York Times Fixes column and paying attention to what Tina and David were talking about. How there might be a different way to do journalism? I wish I had that knowledge when I was a journalist. Anytime I tried to propose something more solutions-oriented, I was shot down.
JH: Why’s that?
KT: In fairness, I didn’t do a good job because I didn’t have a framework. Maybe the newsroom thought [SJ] was along the lines of PR and not critical enough. And at the time, there was no room for that in the newsroom, and nobody wanted to question what we were doing. So, that’s how I became very interested in SJN.
JH: Right and, spoiler alert, SJN came back into your life in 2015, while you were teaching at University of Oregon. Tell us more about that.
KT: After I had been teaching at UO, I mentioned to my boss that we should really be teaching our students solutions journalism. “If you want to have effect on society, you start by teaching the students,” I told him. So he encouraged me to apply for a grant from the Agora Journalism Center for innovation in journalism and civic engagement.I proposed teaching a class, and ultimately I got the grant to teach the course.
So [UO Associate Professor] Nicole [Dahmen] and I chatted and it turned out she had just interviewed David [Bornstein] for a different Agora project on restorative narrative and she connected us.
When I had a call with David, he had already called a few other folks from different colleges who wanted to learn how to teach solutions journalism and asked them to come to SJN to brainstorm how to teach solutions journalism.
Within a month, there were five of us. Over a day, we kind of hashed out some initial ideas on how you might go about teaching SJ. Most of us taught it the next term. I quickly realized that something interesting was happening in my course, that we were sort of at the forefront of something. I taught my first class winter of 2016.
JH: What was that first class like?
KT: Really exciting. I was honest with the students and told them that this hadn’t really been taught before, so we were going to co-create the knowledge together. And that’s something I honestly have become more and more convinced is the right way to teach.
JH: And what did your students think of it?
KT: There were a lot of different reactions, it was interesting. There were students for whom this revolutionized their conception of what journalism could be and made them feel they had a place in journalism. There were students who were really more of the traditional investigative watchdog type but they found that this was really complementary. And then you had a few students for whom this was just a course they took because it sounded interesting.
I quickly realized that the course had to both be about teaching students the skills and writing of solutions journalism. But it also had to be about the role of the journalist in society, and exploring why they may want to consider solutions journalism. I knew that going in, and I designed a lot of assignments around that. But as time went on, I got smarter about how to make activities, low-stakes assignments, big picture ideas, to drive that idea home.
Then I saw a call for papers in an academic journal about “Innovations in Journalism Education.” I conducted an online focus group of the first educators teaching solutions journalism and wrote up the results. It was the first academic piece on teaching solutions journalism and found that the courses inspired students and teachers, and that there were opportunities and challenges in teaching an emerging genre within an established field.
JH: You have been called ‘one of the best people out there teaching solutions journalism.” And I’ve witnessed that excellence personally — the way you share your students’ stories online, the way you collaborate with other educators. What are one or two brief soundbites of advice you have for other solutions journalism educators?
KT: I think the key thing is letting students develop their own conclusions about solutions journalism. To be really transparent, while I agree with the aims of solutions journalism, I don’t care whether students agree with it or not. They’re welcome to come to their own conclusions. That’s a high-level approach I take.
The way this plays out is having the participants wrestle with what text or audio means, explore how it’s constructed, how it works, what the effect might be on audiences, and what they think about all of those things.
I almost never directly tell students or participants how to do anything. This comes from teaching research that says “You can teach people things, but that doesn’t mean that they learn it.” You have to have people wrestle with it, internalize it, and match it up to their own experiences and knowledge.
I’ve found that, when you do that, people become invested in what they’re learning. People come to their own conclusions about the material. So I tell students, “At the end of the day, if you decide you’re not interested in SJ, that’s okay, but you still will have learned how to do it to learn what kind of journalist you want to be.”
I also think I’ve been able to do so much because I have great partners like Nicole and [UO Assistant Professor] Brent [Walth]who all share a vision of really altering journalism education by arming students not just with solutions journalism, but also watchdog, and showing how the two are compatible and mutually reinforcing. I haven’t done it alone and being part of a team here that has a mission allows me to do a lot of what I do.
JH: What’s been your proudest teaching moment(s)?
KT: I think there have been a lot of different things. I had a student in my second time I taught solutions journalism who was not the most engaged student in the group. And I ran into him later, six months ago at an Oregon [Society for Professional Journalists] event, and it turned out he was a reporter at a paper at Oregon. He came up to me and said, “I think about our class and solutions journalism all the time.”
I had a student in my first group become so inspired by solutions journalism. This was one of these people who was a journalism major, but didn’t feel she belonged there. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to be in the nonprofit world or journalism world. She ended up writing her honors thesis on nonprofits and journalists. Nicole and I worked with her, and she ultimately submitted that paper to International Communication Association Conference. The paper was accepted and she presented it in Prague. Afterwards, someone said, “I wish my graduate students wrote papers like that.”
I have another student working on an honors thesis with me now, too. Nicole just interviewed her and she said that the reason why she took my class was because she was having a hard time reading the news, and she thought that was weird as a journalist. So she wanted to come find what solutions journalism was about. I’m proud that I offer aspiring journalists a place to explore a different way to practice journalism and I hope they will go out and change the industry, rather than never join it.
I guess the class I just taught on #SolutionsToo #MeToo is one of my proudest experiences as a teacher. I’d never done an issue-based class before, because in a 10-week-term, I thought it might not be feasible. But it ended up being the most powerful class I’ve ever taught, something where the students seemed to learn the most. What I was so proud of was the way that they respectfully approached and engaged with a very difficult topic, and considered deeply how SJ might have a role in addressing the issues of sexual violence. Then we put on a community event after the term. Not all of them were able to come, but many showed up the next term to talk about and present their work because they cared, and because they valued what they had done.
We’ve also had several students take solutions and investigative reporting here and then helped them professionally publish high-impact reporting that combines both on topics such as community courts for the homeless and disparities in discipline for special education students. By teaching students to combine both approaches, they’re producing more powerful journalism. That’s good for our community and not something many student journalists know how to do.
JH: I love that framework. So I’ve heard that you’ll be leaving the teaching world for now to enter the research world at the University of Maryland. Could you talk a bit about that?
KT: I’ll be entering a PhD program at the University of Maryland in the communication department where I will be focusing on communication science and social cognition. Particularly, I’ll be studying the effects of gain and loss message framing. So, for instance, I’ll be a research assistant for an NIH-funded grant exploring whether gain or loss frames are more effective in encouraging African-American women to get an HPV vaccine. Basically, in the long run, I want to apply these ideas of gain-loss framing to measure whether solutions journalism increases audiences’ self-efficacy and civic engagement. To me, that’s what’s so interesting about solutions journalism. Right now, we have some evidence, and it seems common sense, but we don’t really know why, whether, how it works. What we really know is that that the news depresses people and they tune out, so it seems logical that if you don’t depress people, they’ll re-engage. But we don’t know if SJ will change their civic behavior.
JH: Last question for you. Beyond being a journalist, an educator, and a researcher, I remember from our convo at the SJ Summit that you’re also a mother to two young children. And in honor of it being the month of Mother’s Day, I thought I’d ask: by the time your two kids grow up, what do you hope the journalism field will look like?
KT: You know I think it’s almost simple: I want them to pay attention to [the news] again. Right now, for example, I always want to listen to NPR in the car when I’m driving them. And usually they say, ‘Not the news!’. My younger daughter gets upset by the news, she doesn’t like it. And that’s with me screening some of it and turning it off in some instances. So if young children with screened news can’t even stand to listen to the news, we’ve got a long way to go.
I mean my kids are passionate already about politics and social issues, but I don’t think they know or understand how being informed contributes to that. My hope would be that there’s a media landscape supporting democracy that they actually want to pay attention to.
