Qing Wang is an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Hainan Normal University in Haikou, China (1196888106@qq.com). Doug Hamilton is a Professor in the School of Educational and Technology at Royal Roads University, Victoria BC Canada (doug.hamilton@royalroads.ca)

Rationale

This field trip activity featured a trip to a rural area outside of a large Chinese city to study the ways of living of a local Indigenous culture, the Dan’jia culture. Its purpose was to help graduate and undergraduate journalism students, via their voluntary participation in the Summer Countryside Practice program, learn about the applications of the key principles and methods of cultural anthropological field work to their journalism practice, especially those aspects relevant to conducting interviews for current and contemporary news stories. Another purpose was to increase awareness of the need for government-sponsored preservation efforts of the Indigenous culture through the preparation and publication of the students’ news reports and video representations. The students were studying journalism at Hainan Normal University in Haikou, China.

This hands-on activity was intended to help students develop a more open-minded, inquiry-oriented approach to field-based interviewing to counteract any unconscious biases formed in doing the preliminary research and preparatory information gathering that may lead to faulty assumptions, skewed evidence gathering, and manipulated conclusions. One of the challenges I^[1] faced was to help students become more aware of their own assumptions and to nudge them to construct a semi-structured interview design that followed a much more balanced data collection and analysis approach during the news interviewing, thus making their news production more impartial and less biased. Helping students become more aware of their own assumptions and biases is an important facet of learning to become a skilled researcher in the social sciences (Thomas, 2013).

The learning outcomes associated with the field-based research focused on helping students apply the cultural anthropological approach to field study, master more unbiased data gathering and analysis skills, and explore and present the current living conditions of the specific marginalized Indigenous cultures in an authentic and creative way. The tasks I provided to students in support of these learning outcomes differed by the level of study. The group of graduate students was required to make an in-depth news report and the group of undergraduate students was required to produce a mini television documentary.

The work of journalists and anthropologists can often be quite similar. Both anthropologists and reporters can view themselves as “observers of the human condition” and representatives of both professions often immerse themselves into the field setting as observers and interpreters using proven methods of data collection such as notebooks, tape recorders and cameras (Grindal and Rhodes, 1987, p.4). According to Carvalho and Evangelista (2018), “Literary journalists and anthropologists conduct their fieldwork with similar tools and goals. Both use listening and observation to establish contact with the Other—the group being studied—and therefore identify, understand, and interpret daily interactions and scenes” (p. 798).

Compared with anthropology, however, journalism has some limitations. As a reporter commented in a 1985 seminar funded by the Florida Endowment for the Humanities, “An anthropologist is a journalist with a two-year deadline.” (Grindal and Rhodes, 1987, p.11). However, other more profound differences between the two fields exist. For example, journalistic reporters usually work out the story details that are only relevant to a particular event or person. It is generally limited to an explanation and reporting of who did what, when, where and sometimes why. As a result of its limited and restrained perspective, journalism has been also often blamed as “fragmentary” and “incomplete” (Grindal and Rhodes, 1987) and suffering from a lack of in-depth and contextual interpretation, while anthropology is often dedicated to taking a more holistic, comparative, and pluralistic stance (Herzfeld, 2001). For this reason, journalism students can learn the methodology from anthropology to make their news production more complete, well-rounded, and less biased while taking into consideration the broader social context associated with the investigative topic.

Engaging in ethnographic research is a distinguishing feature of the anthropologist’s approach to understanding culture and its dynamics:

Ethnographers immerse themselves in a society to collect descriptive data via fieldwork concerning the culture of its member from the perspective of the meanings members of that society attach to their social world, and render the collected data intelligible and significant to fellow academics and other readers. (Bryman, 2001, p. 1)

Journalism students can learn a lot about fieldwork from anthropologists, especially regarding “questions of interpretation, representation, subjectivity and intersubjectivity” that are debated amongst ethnographic scholars (Melhuuis, 2002, p. 70).

Currently, field study forms part of the curriculum of university courses from a broad spectrum of sciences including geology, biology, archaeology, and history as well as from various social sciences (Vassala, 2006). Field study provides an opportunity for students to apply previous knowledge to real situations as well as to become familiar with the rigours of applying methods of practical and proven investigation to authentic situations in the field (Wilson, 2011). As such, it is a rich source of authentic learning that connects “what students are taught in school to real-world issues, problems, and applications” and the “learning experiences should mirror the complexities and ambiguities of real life” (Pearce, 2016, p. 1). Journalism is an applied discipline with a strong connection to professional practice. Therefore, field work is one of the crucial and common methods of learning about real issues in society that journalists address. It helps enculturate students into the discipline of study by exposing them to the dispositions, methodologies, complexities, and problem-solving strategies of the professionals that they aspire to become (Lombardi, 2007; Levy and Murnane, 2005; Lave & Wenger, 1991). Furthermore, because fieldwork helps shape the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of aspiring professionals (Rogers 1996, Knapp 2000), it is an effective way to affect and transform the mindsets of journalism students to support more open-minded inquiry and less biased reporting practice.

Overview

The following steps were taken to implement the activity:

1. Participating students conducted online research to obtain related literature and references to news articles.
2. Groups of students performed collective brainstorming to determine several possible research topics related to Dan’jia culture and to assist in preparing a semi-structured interview protocol.
3. I arranged administrative and ethical approval (with the relevant local government authorities) for the students to conduct the interviews.
4. I contacted potential respondents to arrange interviews in advance.
5. I arranged for the three-hour trip from the city to the host community, including the booking of transportation, catering, accommodation, and acquiring a small first-aid kit. I made adjustments at the last minute to the mode of transportation (from a train to a private vehicle) to permit more flexibility in carrying out the field visits.
6. The students were split into the undergraduate and graduate groups to undertake their respective interview tasks along with the gathering of supporting documentation (i.e. photographic, video, and audio records) during the field visits.
7. I organized a mid-visit meeting during the evening of the first day to assess, review, and debrief the groups’ experiences and to modify the plans for the second day’s visits and interviews. This enabled interview protocols and questions to be modified to better fit the actual circumstances as they emerged.
8. I held a final meeting at the end of the second day to review the two-day experience and to clarify each group’s assignment: (1) an in-depth report for the graduate students and (2) a 3- to 5-minute video for the undergraduate group. The assignments were a tangible and measurable way to assess student performance. Also, they were designed to provide students of each group with a concrete outcome of their activity which helped to maintain a realistic focus for the activity.
9. I reviewed each group’s product and provided feedback to assist in the revision process.
10. The two groups published their work on social media such as WeChat and TikTok.
11. The groups’ products, as well as a my summary report of the project were provided to the related department of the sponsoring school.

One of my key roles during the visit was to accompany each group on its interviews to observe and record the students’ interactions with the community members, respond to their inquiries, provide them with timely support, engage them in ongoing problem-solving and decision making, and to provide an example of how to interview informants on site. At the after-dinner debriefing meeting, my role was to listen to each group’s report of their first day’s work, encourage students to share their experiences, ask them clarifying questions, formatively assess their achievements, assist them in their problem solving, and help the groups plan the next day’s field visit activities.

A key addition to the fieldwork project that I did not use in earlier versions of this activity was the end-of-day debriefing session in the evening of the first day. The groups of students were able to debrief their day’s work each evening and improve or adjust their working schedule for the second day. This gave me the opportunity to provide coaching and advice to the students in situ before the end of the activity. As well, this addition mirrored the kind of session that teams of journalists might organize to adjust their interview schedules and approaches to better suit the actual context in the field.

Reflection

Many lessons were learned in designing, organizing, and carrying out this activity that help in assessing its value as an active learning strategy and in making subsequent revisions to the activity for future use.

First, the students had rarely experienced an active learning process in their university studies prior to this field trip so they were not accustomed to taking more ownership over the learning process. They were more accustomed to a more traditional, lecture-based style of learning focused on listening to their professors and passively consuming the required knowledge. This became problematic and uncomfortable for them when they were given more autonomy and freedom to make decisions “on the fly” in this activity. At first, they were waiting for my directions and not taking active steps to manage the activities required in the field setting. From observing students on the field trip, it was obvious that a significant degree of dissonance emerged between the students’ comfort with a more passive approach to learning and the active learning methodology required for success in attaining the desired outcomes. Initially, it was difficult for me to stimulate their interest and confidence in using the active learning model in the field to replace the former passive one. It took time for the students to adjust to a more student-centered rather than teacher-driven learning style, but the resulting observations and reports suggest the students were able to make the necessary psychological and cognitive shifts to a new mode of learning and were excited about the benefits of this new orientation.

The mid-trip debriefing helped students to make the transition to a more active role in the learning process. However, I could have provided more preparatory activities in advance that would support the autonomous learning required in the field setting and could help students make the necessary psychological and cognitive adjustments to a more active learning approach.

This activity is also significant because it points to a need for more institutional support for student field work and the training of faculty members to support this kind of authentic learning experience for students. The financial and resource support from institutions and government are critical to implement this kind of field work (Academica Group, 2015; Cooper et al. 2010; Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, 2016). Currently in China, however, the institutional and governmental support infrastructure for these kinds of field-based learning experiences is quite immature and undeveloped (Yang et al., 2016). There are no full-time tutors for guiding student practice or an institutional office to manage student off-site learning activities. Thus, the teacher must be prepared to shoulder all the responsibilities of organizing, coordinating, and carrying out the required field work.

Furthermore, from a logistical perspective, it can be difficult to obtain the proper permissions to engage in these kinds of activities without considerable advanced preparation. Through the emergent design of the field study interview process, it became apparent that an interview with a representative of the local municipal office would contribute significantly to the student’s experience. When invited to participate in the interviews, however, the local municipal representatives refused because I did not have a recommendation letter from a higher authority. This ended up being an important learning opportunity for the students that is highly transferable to their future professional contexts, but it is helpful to be mindful of the need to seek these kinds of approvals in advance.

Finally, the challenges of conducting this kind of authentic learning activity in a reasonably discrete and isolated context reinforces the need to expand these kinds of activities to more courses and programs to better prepare students for applied learning that is relevant to their future careers. Imbedding this kind of approach more systematically, consistently, and comprehensively across the national education system would help build teacher capacity to guide students in transitioning to this insightful mode of learning. Furthermore, it would facilitate offering these kinds of field-based learning experiences in a cross-course, interdisciplinary milieu which can help students acquire more well-rounded expertise and professional competence.

For journalism students, this kind of field study is invaluable not only for the development of transferable and highly marketable skills but also for enabling a more caring, sensitive, and appreciative disposition towards the individuals, groups, and cultures that are under investigation.

References

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge Shao Jiawen, a postgraduate student from School of Journalism and Communication, Hainan Normal University of China for her assistance in data sorting and preliminary analysis.

This article is one of the publications of the research project of Reformation on Teaching Methodology for Local Undergraduates Majoring in Communication in Digital Media Era funded by Hainan Provincial Education Department.