Journalism

Yesterday I went up to Middlebury College to sit in on a class taught by Sierra, the journalist I met at Emma in November. The class is called “Writing What You Don’t Know: Craft and Ethics in Narrative Journalism.” In it, students write two long form journalistic pieces, read and discuss magazine journalism, and learn about the ethics of journalism while grappling with it in their own projects. In the class I sat in on, the students started off in three-person consultancy groups in which they discussed an ethical problem each student was having regarding the article they were working on. Each person in the group had a certain amount of time to explain the problem, and then the other two members had time to ask questions and discuss a possible solution—inasmuch as a concrete solution to an ethical problem in journalism is realistic! In the group I watched, I was so impressed at how thoughtful and invested every student was in discussing the problems that arose, which included one ...

During my visits to RISSE this month, I met a couple kids who are really interesting. Not only are they amazingly voluble about their emigration to the U.S., but they are also fun, interesting people who I have quickly become exceedingly fond of. One of them is a good friend of another girl at RISSE who I’ve known for a while; the two of them are in different grades, but they go to the same school and have been close friends “forever.” The biggest change in my project for this semester is something I’m hoping to start doing soon, which is to spend Tuesday mornings at school with some of my subjects. I would just follow them around, recording and observing them in order to collect more scenes and details for my profiles of them. I’ve already talked to the two girls I mentioned earlier about this possibility and they are both up for it. I’m also planning on spending more time researching background information about the places these kids are from, like Thailand, Iraq and the Con...

Happy New Year! This post is briefly recapping my progress through my project for the past semester. It won't be filled with a lot of checked boxes because of the slightly amorphous nature of the undertaking at this point.   My biggest accomplishment thus far, I think, has been to settle on my purpose and focus in writing about RISSE. Other than that, I have been able to start everything I was hoping to have started by this point except for writing, which was an ambitious goal anyway. I’ve visited RISSE several times since the semester started, handed out consent forms—sometimes twice, because children had lost them—and even started some disastrous interviewing. I say “disastrous” because I was asking questions of eleven-year-olds like they were politicians, ready with sound bites and pithy remarks about something—their experience coming to America—that, in reality, they barely have words for. What these children do have words for is that annoying...