Quill - December 2008 - (Page 26) Students, teachers and administrators work together to achieve the goal of lowering the bar to the floor without anyone losing contact with it. The challenging activity requires strategizing, teamwork and patience. It helps to illustrate the kind of cooperation and partnership necessary for achieving goals in schools. Photo: Randy Swikle An idea toward education Chaltain hatched the idea for his leadership academy during the 18 months the Knight Foundation gave him to reflect on his five-year tenure as director of the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Schools project. The initial idea when he received the Knight grant, he said, was to continue the First Amendment Schools project, which the Freedom Forum had decided to quit funding. But then he realized he needed to start fresh and improve on that model. “It was through that process that I realized that the key domino is the principal,” he said. “In order for First Amendment principles to take root in a culture, the principal has to see the value and support the work.” Each morning in the leadership academy is spent on one of the five aspects of leadership that Chaltain has identified as critical to foster a democratic environment that balances the tension between individual freedom and group structure. Each afternoon is focused on one of the five freedoms of the First Amendment. The training is focused on “equipping educators with both the theoretical and practical understanding of how to create a democratic learning community so that the work is both grounded in some specific universals and room is also left for local communities to chart their own course,” he said. When Kate McAnelly, principal of Beaumont Middle School in Lexington, Ky., got the e-mail from her superintendent, she said she was instantly intrigued, as her school has a diverse population that can be challenging to manage. “I hope this institute helps us see that even though we all have different backgrounds and beliefs, we all have the same freedoms,” she said. “We need to recognize that and appreciate that and support it while we’re in our school setting. It’s very appealing to me.” Ball State University is in its fourth year of offering graduate-level credit to school administrators for its online course, “The School Administrator and the First Amendment.” So far, about 45 administrators have taken the course, according to Warren Watson, co-teacher of the class and director of J-Ideas, a scholastic journalism organization that until this spring was also a recipient of Knight Foundation funding. Recruiting for the class has always been a challenge, he said, because “the people who need it don’t know they need it.” That’s because the view among many administrators is that giving student journalists the power to make content decisions will only breed chaos and controversy. “The First Amendment and tolerance for free expression is not universally accepted at the administrator level; in fact, there’s a lot of people working against it,” Watson said. “It’s going to take a long time to really get the principal side to recognize the First Amendment is important.” In the past, he acknowledged, his organization and other journalism education groups “were doing lots of preaching to the choir, to use the cliché. Everybody’s doing programs for advisers, everybody’s doing programs for teachers, but a principal of a school who’s not supportive of student media can subvert the whole thing. “It’s our belief you have to have all these elements in place,” Watson said. “A talented, trained adviser, enthusiastic students and supportive administrators to make student media go and to foster First Amendment experiences in general in the school.” That’s why Watson’s group is taking another tack, as well: They’re holding one-day workshops that bring together teams from each school — the principal, the adviser and up to three students. A workshop in Chicago in late February, funded by the McCormick Freedom Museum, drew 10 schools and 52 people, he said. The day included prepared material about the First Amendment and scholastic media law, information about how to develop teamwork around student media and case studies. The teams each prepared an action plan before leaving. Five more are planned — for Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Berkeley, Calif., and East Lansing, Mich. — with sponsorship from the National Constitution Center. J-Ideas and Ball State’s Teachers College also teamed up last year to produce a DVD, “A First Amendment Guide for Principals and Administrators,” funded by the Knight Foundation. They’ve now distributed it to about 2,000 principals, Watson said. (There are 96,000 nationwide.) The Journalism Education Association’s Scholastic Press Rights Commission has outlined a few ways it hopes to reach administrators. It’s sending out posters on “Responsible Journalism” to guidance counselors, couched in terminology that often echoes school mission statements about training students to be responsible citizens, according to John Bowen, the SPRC chairman and longtime student press advocate who also teaches at Kent State University. The commission also hopes to take out advertisements in magazines targeted to high school administrators touting research released this spring by Indiana University’s 26 Quill DECEMBER 2008
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