Using GMG's news game as a pedagogical tool: exploring journalism students’ framing practices

ABSTRACT

Journalism education faces a challenge on how to balance practice-related skills education, required for students to procure employment, and the more theoretical and contextual knowledge required by modern higher education. This study will illustrate one such pedagogical practice that attempts to bridge the gap between these two positions, that is, using the students practical work to better illustrate the theoretical knowledge they also need to acquire. This will be done by re-assessing the ‘News Game’ research method, often deployed in research by the Glasgow Media Group and examining its pedagogical implications. In this research, participants are given photographs of events and asked to write news stories, examining how participants understand and frame events and how this is affected by their news consumption. As a pedagogical tool, it can be used to simultaneously analyze the framing practices of news texts produced by journalism students and to inform a discussion with the students of their framing practices in conjunction with lectures and seminars exploring framing theory. Examples will be given from activities performed with Chinese undergraduate journalism students.

KEYWORDS:

• Framing
• journalism students
• China
• News Game
• in-class activities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Jesse Owen Hearns-Branaman http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1758-2855

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jesse Owen Hearns-Branaman

Jesse Owen Hearns-Branaman (PhD, University of Leeds) is an Assistant Professor of International Journalism at United International College in China. His research interests include post-structuralism, ideology, critical linguistics, political economy of news, comparative journalism, tourism studies, and epistemological theory. He has published two books, Journalism and the Philosophy of Truth: Beyond Objectivity and Balance (Routledge: 2016), and The Political Economy of News in China: Manufacturing Harmony (Lexington: 2015), and has published articles in Journalism Studies, Journalism, and the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies.