Scholastic Journalism Workshops Can Evolve to Meet Current Conditions

Workshops for high school journalists should feature programming that can’t be delivered via online instruction and extend the learning cycle beyond workshop duration, according to a study supported by the Center for Scholastic Journalism.

High School Journalism Field Trips: Post-Pandemic Barriers and Opportunities was published in the journal Journalism & Mass Communication Educator in spring 2025. It was based on in-depth interviews with 29 high school journalism educators from across the United States.

Every year, college journalism programs, yearbook publishers and professional associations organize dozens of local, regional and national workshops for student journalists. Interviewed teachers acknowledged the educational benefits of such workshops but identified transportation availability and costs as barriers to attending them. Some also discussed student disengagement from workshop content that sometimes skews toward traditional news formats that students rarely use.

The researchers proposed that workshop programming capitalize on the social nature of in-person events to differentiate workshop content from instruction that can be delivered online, justifying the cost of travel and workshop attendance.  

Drawing on experiential learning literature, the researchers also argued that workshop programming can be better integrated into students’ learning processes by introducing learning activities prior to workshop sessions and continuing them after workshops conclude.

This study was co-authored by Monica Hill (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Sarah Cavanah (University of Kansas), Marina Hendricks (South Dakota State University), and Peter Bobkowski (Kent State University).