Message from the department chair

Welcome to the web site for the University of St. Thomas Department of Journalism & Mass Communication.  I’d like to tell you a bit about what we value:  Good teaching and active learning.

Good teaching is the essence of our department.  It’s who we are as a faculty:  We want to be good teachers because that’s how we best help students become ethical practitioners of advertising, journalism and public relations. 

Good teaching goes on every day in this department.  Our full- and part-time faculty bring excellence and energy to their classrooms.  They devise thoughtful, real-world assignments that help our students learn and practice the skills needed to succeed in media-related professions.  That means our students in skill-related courses such as News Reporting, Broadcast Reporting, Design Concepts of Communication, Editing, and Graphic Design Studio are designing and editing web pages, interviewing and observing people in local communities to tell their stories in newspaper, magazine and broadcast formats, or conducting focus groups and administering surveys to understand the audiences they’re trying to reach with an advertising and public relations campaign.  During these assignments, students also focus on the ethical issues raised by the messages they’re creating and the skills they’re developing.

In our more theoretical courses, such as Mass Communication and Society or Visual Communication, students may find themselves preparing a “soundtrack of your life” assignment in which they pick music representing periods of their lives and then write a paper explaining what their choices reveal about power of mass media to shape attitudes and behaviors.  Or they may spend a semester collecting examples of ads and layouts that demonstrate visual principles such as perspective for a Visual Communication journal.  Mass Communication and Society students may be asked to give up as many forms of mass media and mediated communication as they can for four consecutive days, then to write about how their experiences illustrate theories of media effects.  All these assignments are typical of the hands-on, project-based assignments we use to help our students actively and critically connect the content of the media around them with the principles we’re teaching in class. 

Of course, we devote much effort to teaching our hallmark senior seminar in Media Ethics, too.  The course has been around since the 1950s, and its long history makes our department nationally distinctive.  We think the way we teach it makes us educationally rigorous as well.  We use an active learning philosophy that asks students to “do” ethics rather than just learn about ethics.  For instance, we use discussion and debate in such assignments as the Media Ethics Bowl, a department-wide event that puts all our seniors into teams to debate media ethics cases in competition before alumni judges.  We also foster active learning about ethical issues in media by directing our students’ work on an individual primary research project.  The project typically involves content analysis of newspapers, magazines, broadcast reports and web sites, or focus groups, interviews and surveys of professionals working in advertising, journalism and public relations.  It ends with application of ethical theory.

But our learning doesn’t just occur in our classes.  Our students learn significant lessons about the ethical practice of advertising, journalism and public relations when they work as reporters and editors on The Aquin, our award-winning student newspaper, or when they prepare a complete advertising campaign for the National Student Advertising Competition, or when they complete internships in local television newsrooms, at regional magazines and newspapers, at advertising and public relations agencies, and at non-profit organizations.

We think active learning that probes the ethical responsibilities of advertising, journalism and public relations is what we do best.  I hope you’ll join us.

Kris Bunton, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair
Department of Journalism & Mass Communication