University of Nebraska–Lincoln College of Journalism & Mass Communications associate professor Sue Bullard was chosen as one of 15 finalists in the 2016 AEJMC Great Ideas for Teachers (GIFT) competition.
Bullard’s entry was a joint entry with professor Andy Bechtel of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They will be poster presenters at the AEJMC Conference in Minneapolis this August.
Their entry involves creating newsletters. Many news outlets, as well as nonprofits, universities and corporations, send out regular email newsletters. The idea was to create a lesson plan around giving students a real-world opportunity to practice creating an email newsletter in an editing or reporting class.
“Students said curating a newsletter was challenging but rewarding,” Bullard said. “It forced them to write concisely, exercise news judgment and craft enticing headlines. And because the newsletters were published on NewsNetNebraska, it gave them a work sample to show prospective employers.”
GIFT is a refereed panel presentation of the top teaching tips and techniques, held each year at the annual AEJMC conference. Any member of AEJMC is eligible to submit a GIFT idea. The competition is sponsored by the Small Projects Interest Group and Community College Journalism Association.
Bullard teaches editing, reporting, ethics and multimedia classes at the CoJMC. She has been honored time and again for her achievements in both journalism and teaching. In 2014, she received the Society of Professional Journalists Distinguished Teaching in Journalism Award. She’s won numerous other teaching awards in various AEJMC competitions. This is the third time she’s been a finalist in the GIFT competition. In 2010, she won the Promising Professor Award from the Mass Communication and Society division of AEJMC.
In 2008, she received a lifetime achievement award from the SPJ Detroit chapter. She was inducted into the Michigan State News Hall of Fame in 2009. And she the Michigan State University College of Communication Arts and Sciences named her an outstanding alumna in 2007.
She earned her bachelor's degree in journalism from Michigan State University in 1974 and a master's degree in administration from Central Michigan University in 2000.
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) is a nonprofit organization of more than 3,700 educators, students and practitioners from around the globe. Founded in 1912, by Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, the first president (1912-13) of the American Association of Teachers of Journalism, as it was then known, AEJMC is the oldest and largest alliance of journalism and mass communication educators and administrators at the college level.
AEJMC’s mission is to promote the highest possible standards for journalism and mass communication education, to encourage the widest possible range of communication research, to encourage the implementation of a multi-cultural society in the classroom and curriculum, and to defend and maintain freedom of communication in an effort to achieve better professional practice, a better informed public, and wider human understanding.
