In BMU’s SNHU (Southern New Hampshire University) College Composition class, a big assignment named the Campaign for a Cause has two different classes coming together; the Broadcast Journalism class will be recording the student’s speeches and publishing them and the following op-eds through BNN.
High school English teacher, Leah Gawel, is having students select an issue and find an organization that raises money for their respective causes. These topics cover anything from music education to therapy animals. Gawel brought this project from the previous schools she has taught at and from a conversation with High School Principal Emilie Knisley.
“We were chatting about goals for the school year, and one of the comments that she made was that she’d love to see the kids really integrate into their communities in terms of social action and volunteerism. After looking at the requirements for the SNHU College Composition course: Research, Annotated Bibliography, Persuasive Writing, Speeches, I realized that we could marry the goal of social action with the curricular course requirements,” says Gawel.
After this project was brought up, she changed it to the needs of her BMU students. “One of the primary changes that I made MID UNIT was to swap out the persuasive paper with an Op-Ed. By studying and writing Op-Eds, the students are exercising and honing all of the skills used in persuasive writing, but in a more real-world application. It also gives them experience navigating newspapers and looking at important issues that we otherwise might not have looked at,” said Gawel.
The collaboration between the classes comes with recording and posting their work since BNN has the equipment necessary to record people’s speeches. The broadcast journalism class will be recording each of the student’s pre-written speeches. After the speeches have been recorded, the BNN staff will be putting the student’s 750-word written op-eds in the BNN’s opinion section. The hope is that these different pieces will bring awareness to the issues that address them, and grab the attention of BNN’s usual audience as well. See the collaborative work throughout December posted in the opinion section of BNN’s website.
