By Lauren Milideo
American University Professor Sherri Williams partners with national media outlets in a course she teaches each spring called Race, Ethnic and Community Reporting which includes graduate and undergraduate students in the School of Communication.
The partnership idea started with a virtual class open to students across the country, Williams said. And in that first cohort, in 2018, Williams chose to focus on the experiences of Black students on campus. The idea for this focus, Williams said, came about via discussions about providing students with support to pursue substantial news stories. Working with Anna Julia Cooper Center of Wake Forest University founding director Melissa Harris-Perry, Williams co-led the course and chose its direction.
“So because there was so much going on, on my campus and other campuses across the country, I said, ‘Why don't we do Black on campus? Like, why don't we get Black students to write about what it is like to be a college student on a campus, a Black college, students on a campus right now, whether that campus is a predominantly white institution or a historically Black college or university?’”
The project, Black on Campus, produced about 13 pieces, Williams said, in partnership with The Nation that were seen by more than 50,000 readers of the iconic news magazine. (Williams wrote about the class in a journal article here).
One student, Candice King, wrote a story focused on the exclusion of Black women’s experiences from the national conversation about rape and sexual assault on college campuses, Williams said. The piece, entitled “We Need to Include Black Women’s Experience in the Movement Against Campus Sexual Assault,” won an award from the National Association of Black Journalists.
During the spring 2020 semester, Williams worked on another project with The Nation and students from her advanced race and reporting class (COMM 588 Race, Ethnic and Community Reporting): Vision 2020: Election Stories from the Next Generation project. Williams created the project with The Nation to provide opportunities to hear the voices of students on campus other than white, straight, cisgender students who were typically seen and heard in news reports. The student journalists provided unique insights into “what their peers are thinking about,” said Williams, what they wanted to see from political candidates and the issues that concerned them. The Nation also chose one student from Syracuse University and one from the University of Kansas to contribute stories to the project.
When Williams taught the course for the third time, she worked with Teen Vogue on a project entitled “Racial Reckoning: a Year After a Movement Rocked the Nation,” to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. The goal of the project was for the students to write to a national audience and use sources from across the country, city and campus. Teen Vogue infuses the voices of young people into their journalism as sources and writers, Williams said.
“So it's really an ultimate partnership in that they are able to get content that is solid, that is journalistically sound, and also that's written by younger people who will ask different questions, explore angles, and also bring in the voices of sources that probably are not usually on the pages of that publication,” Williams said.
However, these courses take an enormous investment, Williams said. “But knowing that this work is going to be seen by a national audience really raises the stakes for students, and it raises the level of investment for me. So that means whenever I… do one of these partnerships, it really doubles the amount of work that I have to invest in that class. So then that's taking from my own research and my own work.”
The importance of creating and continuing the class’s work lies in the opportunities it creates for students, the insights it provides to readers from student journalists, and the high-quality content the students provide to media outlets. But the class also has personal value to Williams herself.
"But I continue to do those types of projects because I went to a historically Black college in the Deep South, Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. And in order for somebody like me going to a school like that, very far from magazines, very far from New York and L.A., where a lot of these magazines are based... it was really difficult for me to be able to write for magazines like that, or a national publication. So really… the reason why I continue to do this kind of work is because I'm really just trying to create the kinds of opportunities for students that I wish I had.”
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