Message from the RSJ Chair - Welcome Back

It isn’t just how time seems elastic and distorted right now that makes a ‘Back-to-School’ message feel odd. It’s also that for so many of us - students, faculty and staff – we’ve been here all along.

The RSJ has been running hard and fast this summer, as if it was a ‘normal’ fall or winter semester; for the first time ever, we offered a section of a mandatory course (law and ethics) during the summer, which quickly filled up; and, staff and faculty have been immersed in curriculum adjustments to manage the current circumstances. While the winter semester felt like a crash course in teaching online, this summer has given us time to design the best remote journalism education and community we can.

We are all working to create forward momentum and to do what is necessary and safe through physical distancing without creating social distance at the same time. Social proximity is so critical to the learning process. Understanding that most of us are craving more engagement, our school community has been bustling – online, of course. Throughout the summer, we’ve organized events to connect students with alumni working in public relations or podcasting or in freelance careers. Students have spent informative 20-minute chunks with alumni volunteers, who circulate not necessarily with drinks in hand but through the invisible hand of our staff moderators, who pop them in and out of Zoom breakout rooms for up-close conversations about their careers.

“There are so many small interactions that would normally happen during the school year at events, pub talks or fundraisers,” said Jaclyn Mika, the RSJ’s departmental assistant, who spearheaded the initiative and produced the events. “We didn’t want students to miss out on those valuable moments to forge connections with people in the industry.”

This could be one of those silver linings of being forced to do things differently: when we’ve hosted speaker panels in the past in the Venn, we’d crowd 100 people or more into one large room, making it a challenge to have one-on-one conversations and awkward to make random approaches. And there was always the threat one of those drinks would spill!

Meanwhile, our staff and faculty have chalked up weeks of learning about teaching and supporting our students, who will be tuning in from their homes across Canada and outside the country. In an effort to streamline the student experience, production staff, including Lindsay Hanna and Daniela Olariu (both RSJ alumni), sourced new software and dove more deeply into what we’re already using to provide us with access to standardized course platforms.

Our 40 full-time faculty and part-time instructors spent the summer studying themselves, taking RSJ-created workshops and course from Ryerson’s suddenly-expanded Centre for Learning and Teaching and enrolled in programs themselves, sometimes for fun, to experience what it’s like to be a student on the other side of a screen.

At the same time as navigating this move to remote classrooms, we’ve also been responding to calls for action led by four of our graduating students following the anti-Black violence sparked by George Floyd’s death. Educating the next generation of journalists means examining and practicing journalism through an anti-bias lens. Our first action is creating a new course this fall, Reporting on Race: The Black community in the Media and hiring one of wonderful grads, Eternity Martis (external link)  (MJ’16), to develop and teach the course. Faculty met throughout the summer to examine how we can strive to bring an anti-bias lens to all of our curriculum.

As instructors prepare their course plans for classes next week, and our staff run our virtual Orientations and support students, we are feeling a lot to weight to do what we can to always put the student experience first, regardless of the pandemic that weighs on all of us. Getting it right entails a renewed openness to innovate, fail, innovate again – and to shower one another with patience, kindness and grace. Welcome to a new way of doing things, embedded in a 72-years of always being ready to do what it takes to graduate the best.