Shifting Spaces: How Journalism Students Perceive their Training through the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

This study explores how journalism students in one Canadian post-secondary programme perceived their training through the pandemic. We draw on journalism pedagogy literature, Bourdieu’s field theory, and Zelizer’s conceptualisation of interpretive communities to interrogate how remote learning disrupted opportunities for socialisation in the journalistic field. Through surveys of and interviews with students, we identify shared narratives of loss and perceptions of precarity in journalism careers. We argue emerging journalists’ perceptions of the pandemic period contribute to mapping the field and its practices. We conclude by considering how shared pandemic narratives of disruption add to conversations that interrupt the reproduction of spaces that foster burnout or overwork, as students and educators seize opportunities to reframe how journalism operates and how it is taught.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalism education
• COVID-19
• precarity
• journalism practice
• pandemic

Acknowledgments and Ethics Clearance

This research project received ethics clearance from the Carleton University Research Ethics Board-A (No. 115379). The authors wish to thank Carleton University’s Teaching and Learning Services, the School of Journalism and Communication and Prof. Allan Thompson for providing funding and support for this project between 2020 and 2022.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We had launched a survey in 2021 to understand how core reporting and seminar courses could be refined for future online delivery based on students’ experiences. Approximately one quarter of the undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the programme took part in this survey, and their responses informed the focus of our 2022 survey and this study.

2 It is not a new or pandemic-specific phenomenon for journalism students to choose not to pursue careers in the field. For example, Hanusch et al. (2015) surveyed more than 4,000 journalism students in eight countries about why they wanted to study journalism and what they expected to come of their studies. Among their findings, they observed in most countries “students are less likely to want to work in journalism the longer they have been enrolled in their degree” (154).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Carleton University Teaching and Learning Services; Carleton University School of Journalism and Communication.