By Hannah Hanson
Four years ago the Communication Studies faculty began the process of revising the curriculum requirements for the major. The development of the new curriculum all began with some of the original professors from the department: Dr. Pam Tracy, Dr. Naomi Johnson, Professor Jeff Halliday and the late Dr. Bill Stewart. Since then, the faculty has expanded and the project has continued to advance.
The work began with Dr. Johnson and Professor Halliday going to the Richmond and Lynchburg markets and asking leaders in public relations, journalism, radio, social media, and marketing what knowledge and qualities they were looking for in interns and recent graduates. Over a year’s worth of research took place to gather as much information as possible in order to start the process. Research included giving out surveys and conducting focus groups with the Longwood Communication Studies alumni, as well as, environmental surveys of other colleges programs.
Within the public relations concentration, courses like Public Relations Research, Public Relations Writing, and Public Relations Campaigns were added and some classes were eliminated from the curriculum. These decisions were based off of faculty research as well as what the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) recommends undergraduate programs teach. When it comes to digital media, production based classes, like Digital Storytelling and Digital Editing were added. Giving students more experience using the technology that the French studio has to offer. In addition to the courses changing within each concentration, the title of them changed as well: from organizational communication and public relations to public relations and mass media to digital media.
After the new curriculum was implemented, the next step was to do curricular mapping. According to Dr. Tracy the start of this process is to ask the question, “What do we want our students to know at the end?” The answer to that question is learning outcomes, which is what specifically needs to be taught for each concentration within the major. In order to make sure these learning outcomes were fulfilled within the curriculum a subgroup of professors, including Dr. Tracy, Dr. Ryan Stouffer, and Dr. Laura Farrell, all came together to represent both of the concentrations. From there the team developed a strategy to make sure material within the courses were bridging theory and practice. They made sure all of the courses fit into one of the three distinct levels: introduce, reinforce, and master.
All of these new changes will benefit students because they will now be able to recognize how all the courses work together. The strategic planning done by the faculty was thought out meticulously so that connections between different level courses would stand out to the students. Not only will students benefit from this, but the professors will be able to recognize skill improvements between the different levels of courses and make modifications to their teachings, if needed.
Hundreds of hours of work went into mapping out the curriculum for the department. However, Dr. Stouffer knows that for the long term, the whole process was very beneficial: “Things are slow moving in academia because we are committed to making sure students graduate in four years, when we change the curriculum we still have to make sure everyone else that came in with a different expectation graduates as well… It is very slow and that is frustrating, but that is the nature of the beast and it is worth it. It’s like cooking a big dinner, the process of making it has lots of steps, but the end result tastes very good.”
The new curriculum began in the 2015 academic year and has been implemented for new students within the major. By 2019 every student within the major will be going through the program with the updated curriculum.