Category Archives: Publications and Presentations

Professor Cai trains Afghanistan workers in gender communication

Professor Deborah Cai, STRC, spent five days in Rome this spring in an effort to help a group of government workers from Afghanistan improve their gender communication and leadership skills.

From May 23 to 27, she and a team from Women’s Campaign International trained 25 Afghanistan government employees as part of a seven-week program organized by the Italian Foreign Ministry that covered topics such as public policy and project management. The participants – both men and women – were from government departments such as Justice, Agriculture, Women Affairs and more.

“My primary role was to cover gender and intercultural communication — talk about being a competent communicator, how to build trust, types of personal power we can have and how to develop them — and then to work with the students on public speaking — how to project, how to organize a speech, and how to deliver it,” Cai says.

Other WCI trainers covered leadership and managing the media, while Marjorie Margolies, president of WCI, and Valerie Biden Owen, who creates political campaign ads for radio and television, talked about crisis management in the workplace and delivering messages effectively through the media.

The training sessions helped the civil servants create five-year plans and develop speeches about their personal visions for their work in Afghanistan. They shared their speeches and critiqued one another on their delivery.

“The Italian Foreign Ministry see this training as one way to bring about long term change within Afghanistan, by working with those that work in the government to help them learn how to do what they do better and to gain a vision for the future,” Cai said. In December, she and her WCI colleagues trained diplomats from Afghanistan on similar topics.

Cai noted that the women in the class were particularly interested in learning more about the trainers and their abilities to balance their personal and professional lives to achieve success.

 

Paper by Associate Professor Darling-Wolf earns award

Associate Professor Fabienne Darling-Wolf, JOUR, received the Top Faculty Paper Award from the Global Communication and Social Change division at the International Communication Association’s annual conference in Boston in May.

The paper was titled, “Disjuncture and difference from the banlieue to the ganba: Global hip hop and the politics of representation.”

Professor Fernback earns Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching

Broadcasting, Telecommunications and Mass Media Professor Jan Fernback’s class sessions might best be described as journeys of interactive discovery.

Students in her “Law and Ethics of Digital Media” course, for example, have robust discussions on issues ranging from file sharing, to copyright law, to fair use. They contribute first-hand examples, drawing from their own experiences as consumers and creators of digital media in its many forms.

The exchange is far-reaching at times, but Fernback thoughtfully moves the conversation forward, highlighting relevant points (“Check it out.”), prodding (“What do I mean by that?”), confirming understanding (“Does this make sense to everyone?”) and always encouraging (“That’s a great example.”).

These classroom interactions directly reflect Fernback’s teaching philosophy, which is founded on openness and the inherent value of a learning process that values questions as much as answers.

“Seeking and asking and questioning are where true desire for lifelong learning comes from,” said Fernback. “It’s the best way to encourage a love of learning among students. Answers are only satisfying for a certain amount of time. If you learn facts, they’re in your head — great. But new questions are what keep us learning, and the desire to know is at the heart of what we’re trying to do.”

It’s an approach that has led to Fernback’s selection for a 2011 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, and one that has garnered glowing reviews from her students, who consistently rate her at or near the highest score in numerical course evaluations and praise her in their open-ended survey responses.

“She’s awesome,” said Nadine Schneider, a BTMM graduate. “Beyond the fact that she’s very clearly competent and a smart person, she’s good at explaining theoretical concepts and facilitating a good discussion in class. It makes it a more dynamic process.”

That process is essential to learning, says Fernback, who believes that her role is not simply to convey course material, but to create engaged citizens of the world.

“I like to learn from students,” said Fernback. “I’m not as interested in replicating myself as I am in having interesting and enlightening conversations with groups of people who are about to make their mark on the world.”

But Fernback’s commitment to teaching doesn’t stop at the classroom door. She has shared her approach with other Temple faculty by developing and conducting pedagogy workshops through the university’s Teaching and Learning Center. And, as professor for the “Communication Pedagogy” course she developed, she is helping to give the next generation of communication scholars the tools necessary to be outstanding professors.

“She is a visible presence for ushering doctoral students through the process of pursuing an academic career,” said fourth-year doctoral student Byron Lee, who says the pedagogy course helped set the tone for the entire Ph.D. program. “The way she designed the class was very practical, in terms of directing strategies, but also theoretical in terms of how to engage learning. Jan was really good about making connections to concrete strategies.”

At a time when digital technology is changing the world around us, Fernback takes a broad view of the importance of studying mass media and technology, focusing on how critical it is to an effective democratic society.

“What a great time to be teaching media,” she said. “We experience so much of the world through media — they are our cultural touchstones.  I’m interested in that process.”

– by Vaughn Shinkus, University Communications
vaughn.shinkus@temple.edu

Professor Hobbs on federal efforts to cut ads targeting kids — WHYY-FM

Food marketers are under mounting pressure to either change their advertising tactics aimed at kids, or the foods they promote to young people. Professor Renee Hobbs, BTMM/MMC of Temple’s Media Education Lab said she expects the Federal Trade Commission and health advocates to pressure companies such as McDonald’s and Kellogg’s to adopt the recommendations. At this point, they are voluntary. “The government wants them to not use Toucan Sam and all the other slick and compelling cartoon images that attract kids’ attention and try to sell them things,” she said.

Click here to read the full story.

 
 
 

 

Verizon Chair, MMC student co-author chapter on deliberative democracy

A book chapter co-authored by Jarice Hanson, SCT’s Verizon Chair in Telecommunications, and Alina Hogea, MMC, titled “The Internet as The Public Sphere: Deliberative Democracy and Civic Engagement,” will appear in E-Governance and Civic Engagement: Factors and Determinants of E-Democracy, published by IGI-Global and scheduled to be released in 2011.

Associate Professor Pompper publishes research

Associate Professor Donnalyn Pompper, STRC and MMC, has published “Masculinities, the Metrosexual, and Media Images: Across Dimensions of Age and Ethnicity,” in the special issue, “Fiction, Fashion, and Function: Gendered Experiences of Women’s and Men’s Body Image,” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research.

Click here to read the study.

Professor Pompper has article published in Journal of Research Practice

An article by Professor Donnalyn Pompper, STRC and MMC, has been published in the open access online Journal of Research Practice. The article is titled “Researcher-Researched Difference: Adapting an Autoethnogrpahic Approach for Addressing the Racial Matching Issue” and appears in a special issue dedicated to Autoethnography as Research Practice; it can be accessed here.

Alumna, Professor Lombard have article published

An article by Melissa E. Markaridian Selverian, BTMM ’99, MMC ’05, and Professor Matthew Lombard titled “Telepresence: A ‘Real’ Component in a Model to Make Human-Computer Interface Factors Meaningful in the Virtual Learning Environment” has been published in the journal Themes in Science and Technology Education. The article appears in a special issue (volume 2, number 1-2) on Virtual Reality in Education.

SCT dean, MMC student, visiting scholar have book chapter published

A paper by Interim Dean Tom Jacobson; Lingling Pan, MMC; and Li Meng, a visiting scholar from China, has been accepted for publication. “Universals and Particulars in Modernization: A Chinese Analysis Using the Theory of Communicative Action,” will appear in the book Intercultural Turn of Journalism and Communication, edited by Shan Bo and published by Shanghai Jiaotong University Press. The paper was originally presented at the 5th International Conference on Intercultural Communication in Wuhan, China, Dec. 9-10, 2009.