Purpose and Goals of Project

The primary purpose of our project is to develop a reservoir of available materials and resources (including texts, films, Web sites, instructional videos, studies, etc.) that reflect a diversity of contributions, opinions, perspectives and experiences in mass communication, and to populate Belk Library with these materials.  A catalog of these resources, along with ideas for how they can be used, will be distributed to all COM professors.  While these materials will be particularly appropriate for COM 100, we anticipate that all professors will be able to utilize them throughout our curriculum.  Since the COM 100 course is a required course, infusing materials into this course alone will affect all of our student majors within the School (approximately 400 students take the COM 100 course each year). 

Our goal is to help instructors incorporate diverse voices into their coursework, without having to research or obtain materials on their own, which is currently how instructors incorporate diverse materials into their coursework.  While many of our professors are doing so, the time necessary to research and obtain resources is often prohibitive.  By securing and utilizing these materials in a pilot study of COM 100 courses, we hope to provide assessment measures that will help pave the way for how other professors can utilize these materials in the future.

It’s important to note that this project is not about “teaching diversity” per se, though many of the materials will cover that.  It is more about teaching mass communications from a broader, more representative multicultural perspective.  The goal is to provide students with a better representation of diverse voices in mass media history, development, theory and practice than is displayed in current texts.  By doing so, we will expose students to the contributions of people with diverse cultural, racial, gender, geographic, sexual orientation and socioeconomic backgrounds, while providing professors with resources that will help them engage students in dialogues about diverse audiences and perspectives.

The project is meant to be the catalyst for an ongoing database that will be added to and commented on by all COM professors; in essence, creating a “wiki” type database where professors can share how they used the materials and the outcome, and add new materials to the database.  Currently through Blackboard, COM 100 professors share with each other PowerPoint presentations that they utilize in the course.  We envision this catalog becoming part of that social sharing process, essentially creating a “best practices” resource guide among the School of Communications.