Teaching Undergraduate Journalism Students Foreign Correspondence: Can It Be Done?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The University of Queensland has conducted five international field reporting courses in India and Vietnam since 2012, 1 as well as three more courses based on similar work integrated learning principles (i.e., intensive, immersive and experiential) on campus at St Lucia in Brisbane during the same period. Previous research has found them to be valuable pedagogical innovations that have led to solid academic outcomes. The students themselves have also reported enjoying greater self-confidence, better reporting and technical skills, and increased employment prospects as a direct result of taking part in these courses. Some of that research is re-examined in this article but in a new light, given that the main focus here is on whether these courses in fact deliver on another important promise: to teach the core skills required of a foreign correspondent. To discover what those core skills might be, the researcher explored the extensive literature written by former and current correspondents about their experiences and their lessons learned. He also approached 12 former colleagues at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), all of whom have been high profile international reporters, correspondents and producers, and invited them to offer their unstructured reflections on this question. These insights have then been filtered and assessed through the researcher’s own reflections of working as a foreign correspondent for the ABC in London between 1984 and 1987. The results are both encouraging and challenging. They suggest that while the students and their teachers are largely satisfied with the reporting, technical and personal skills that have been taught and learned, many correspondents consider that their core attributes include extensive experience in senior reporting roles prior to heading overseas, where the basic skills have been honed to the highest degree. That, of course, is something that no undergraduate could ever claim to have achieved.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".