Tusculum students take part in leadership event in Georgia

Tusculum College students Rhiannon Hartman, Ryan Tolman, Jennifer Webb and Tusculum professor Zachary Jack traveled to Kennesaw State University's Center for Leadership for a civic journalism presentation and collaboration held recently in Kennesaw, Ga.

The trip to Kennesaw and Atlanta marked an ongoing effort in Jack's specialized journalism course to introduce students to the practice of civic journalism. Earlier in the term, Jack and his class collaborated with Robin Fife's service-learning students to participate in and write about uplifting projects undertaken by Johnson City's Homeless Coalition. Fife is director of the Service Learning Center and assistant professor of social science.

"We are a civic arts and learning college, so this event fit right in with our college’s mission," said Jack, an assistant professor of English. "Our aim is to get students out of the classroom into the lives of at-risk or underserved populations. The benefit was two or three fold. I thought that it would be great to come down to Kennesaw State since they really inherited the mission of the Pew Center for Public Journalism. It was important to me to participate in that tradition."

Students Hartman, Tolman, and Webb, all from Greeneville, were among an estimated 45 participants on hand to discuss journalism's responsibility to democracy and public life. Len Witt, distinguished chair in communication and the coordinator of the Kennesaw Summit, an international center for civic journalism, headlined the event. Dr. Keisha Hoerrner, assistant professor of communication at KSU, and Mike King, public editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, joined Witt in fielding participant questions.

Hartman, a sophomore mass media major and journalism minor, Tolman, a senior psychology major, and Webb, a senior with an independent major in business and media, also joined Witt's senior-level feature writing class, where they presented travel writing inspired by Tusculum College and East Tennessee.

Jack's class also visited the Martin Luther King Center and Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Atlanta as part of an ongoing discussion on social change.