Projects from Exploring Teaching Fellows

The Exploring Teaching Fellowship is designed to support journalism on critical topics in K-12 teaching. This prestigious Fellowship supports journalists working in all media in Wisconsin, Illinois and Ohio, as well as journalists based elsewhere who reach a national audience. Fellows pursued in-depth projects of their own devising on a broad range of relevant topics: teacher training, effectiveness, distribution, compensation and retention.

Emily Alpert, a Fellow who covers education for VoiceofSanDiego.org, explored how district policies and union contracts limit the ability of principals to hire the teachers they want. She interviewed several principals for her three-part series, which describes how schools suffer in this nationwide phenomenon, and how some principals find ways around it.  

Fellow Erin Richards, who covers education for the Milwaukee (Wisc.) Journal Sentinel, spent 10 months researching teaching and parent involvement issues, including what works around the country, for a series of four articles. The first story reviews what is known about parental engagement programs, and has links to the next three stories.

Andy Gammill, a Fellow writing for The Indianapolis Star, explored the alternative training programs that bring teachers to the classroom. Programs like teach for America and The New Teacher Project now train the majority of Indiana’s teachers.

Michael Alison Chandler, a Fellow who reports for The Washington Post, examined teacher training programs that take less time than a graduate degree and are drawing more participants in the slow economy.

Fellow John Higgins, writing for the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, completed a five-part series explaining new ways of engaging middle-schoolers in a city where no student had ever reached 75 percent proficiency on a state science test and few have passed the math test. The school he is spending time in is attempting “learning by doing.’’ Here is part one, and part two.

Past America, Covering Community Colleges Fellows

The "Covering America, Covering Community Colleges,'' Fellowship promotes quality coverage of community colleges by selecting a small group of journalists each year to travel to the Teachers College campus. During the Residency they study these important institutions that struggle with high expectations in their communities and states, and yet receive little media attention.  

The current cohort of Fellows and Associates will spend a week on the Teachers College campus in September 2009 attending workshops, visiting community colleges and listening to panels of experts. This cohort, the third in the Fellowship,was selected last May.

Projects from the 2009 Cohort

Projects from the 2008 Cohort

Camille Esch, a Fellow based in Sacramento CA, wrote a feature for Washington Monthly magazine that explores how so many community college students start on the path to a degree but lose their way in remedial classes.

The National Radio Project aired Fellow Aaron Glantz's radio documentary on Iraqi war veterans and their struggle to adjust to civilian life. The broadcast also looks at the roles community colleges, and other educational institutions, can play in that adjustment. KALW-FM in San Francisco also has Aaron's reporting. He also wrote an op-ed on the same topic syndicated by McClatchy-Tribune.

Fellow Lygia Navarro, a reporter and producer for the Latino USA program carried nationally on NPR stations, produced a report on students at North Carolina community colleges who are undocumented, and how they were affected by a recent change in how the state’s communiity collgees treat immagrants. Here’s the audio file.

Fellow Encarnacion Pyle of The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch published a project that looks at how Ohio's largest community college is handling the state's economic development mandate and growing enrollment. She includes profiles former auto workers training for new careers, and examines how the college is struggling to reach working adults who are undereducated or need retraining.

Larry Gordon, an Associate Fellow and staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, published his article on a learning community at Pasadena Community College and the students struggle to make it through remedial coursework.

Fellow Kathleen Carroll of The (Hackensack, N.J.) Record looks at how community colleges in New Jersey have banded together to secure training contracts with the state's powerful employers and unions. Her coverage examines this new role for community colleges, helping the state's newly unemployed, and those who want to switch careers, to gain the skills and tools they need.

Associate Fellow Colby Sledge of the (Nashville) Tennessean published his multimedia package, "The Cost of Learning," that looks at the competition community colleges face from for-profit schools.

Tom Marshall, a Fellow who writes for The St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, published an extensive series that looks at the role of community colleges in helping to re-train foreign-trained doctors who come to the U.S. legally and have to settle for jobs that require little or no education.

Rob Chaney, a Fellow who covers education for The Missoulian (Mont.), investigated how Montana's tribal community colleges are fulfilling a constitutional mandate to preserve American Indian history. In his series of reports he describes how collecting those histories uncovered answers to current questions.