Context: I began my university career as an aspiring journalism student at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. I took a radio class in my second semester, and instantly fell in love. In teams, we put together six-minute newscasts for our campus radio station, airing at noon and 4 p.m. Although I have long left journalism behind, I still hold a keen interest in it, and always dreamed of creating a Radio course in Spanish.
The class: After several weeks spent learning the fundamentals of journalism, students divided into two teams and produced weekly six-minute newscasts covering the university and local communities. Every week, in a rotating capacity, one student would serve as producer (deciding on stories and putting the newscast together), two were newsreaders, and two were reporters (going out and getting the story). On the class day that they didn’t record, we would cover a journalism topic, and students would give “updates” about the happenings in the Hispanosphere nation they had been assigned.
Goals: I wanted students to:
- Engage critically with the news, both locally, nationally, and internationally
- Learn the fundamentals of journalism
- Focus on useful communication in Spanish. You can’t write what you can’t say, and what you say must be comprehensible for your audience
- Gain experience with recording equipment and software (Audacity)
- Do something different. In language departments we tend to be so focused on literature/language/culture that we forget that language is used in many different contexts
Reflection: The class was very experimental – I had a clear idea of what I wanted to accomplish, but didn’t know exactly how I’d get there. There were rough patches and the roles didn’t quite evolve the way I wanted them to (I wanted them to record live-to-tape, but most recorded pieces individually and edited them together). Nevertheless, I was happy with the result and will do the course again with the experience of the pitfalls.