Tracy Miller, an instructor in the University’s School of Journalism and Communication, has stood in front of a 160-student classroom and lectured on grammar for several years, but she’s never let students do the lecturing — until now.
In her Grammar for Communicators class, a 100-level required course for all pre-journalism majors, she’s split the class into about 30 groups of four or five students for final multimedia projects that put complex grammatical concepts into real-world practice.
Giving students an opportunity to teach grammar themselves “gives them a chance to really unpack the grammar problems,” Miller said. “It really keys into the concept more
rather than me just talking to them.”
Miller said student groups made PowerPoint presentations, audio clips and videos using creative plots and themes to teach grammar concepts such as subject-verb agreement and parallelism. Plots include spoofs of “Reno 911!,” “Ghostbusters” and “The Dating Game.”Another was a three-dimensional cartoon on a PowerPoint presentation with voice-over narration.
“Some of the storylines are just great,” Miller said. “One of them is about this reappearing grammar man. This guy pops in and out of scenes when students are playing games like Jenga, or they’re watching television, and this guy shows up whenever someone makes a
grammar error.”
And in the “Reno 911!” spoof, an antecedent agreement error provided plot fodder for an
entire five minutes. An old woman made police think her son was lost in a grammatically confusing sentence, but in reality, she had lost her dog.
Students voted for the best projects on Blackboard Wednesday, and the six projects with the most votes will be finalists in a panel-judged competition.
“It’s somewhat like the Academy Awards,” said Tom Wheeler, a journalism professor who will be a panelist at the final competition.
He said the projects with the most votes would be screened in class so the students could watch, but the final decision rests with the “academy.”
“I think (Miller)’s thinking of fun and creative ways to get an important topic that is often overlooked to the forefront of students’ minds,” Wheeler said. “I think words are important, and I want to make sure we use them correctly.”
SOJC Dean Tim Gleason said this isn’t the first time journalism professors have embraced new forms of technology as a teaching tool. In Media and Society, another lower-division required course for journalism majors, professor Tiffany Gallicano conducted the entire class on Twitter in a collaboration with five other schools.
Gleason said the journalism school’s goal is to balance new media knowledge with the basics that every communicator should know.
“Our commitment is to making sure students that graduate from the school are well-prepared communicators who are visually literate and information-literate as well,” Gleason said. “Rather than simply have the grammar course be some place where you sit through lectures, it’s letting students use the technical skills and the technology to explore the subject in a different way.”
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