The Pulitzer Center — Relevant Learning, Authentic Engagement Ecology of Education:
"Where do you point your students for news?
Fox? NBC? NPR? NY Times? CNN?
When you want something a bit different, something less corporate, where do you look?
Media Matters? The Daily Show? Indy Media? Rush? Huffington? Crooks and Liars?"
What if you want ground-breaking, objective, mixed media journalism with a global perspective, that creates connections and collaborations between professional journalists and students, and embodies the integrity of one of the most respected awards in writing? Uh . . . Um . . .
Enter, The Pulitzer Center and the student-friendly Pulitzer Gateway, stage right, providing students (of all ages) with access to stories out of the mainstream, but apposite to challenges both home and abroad.
This is no small feat. Consider that in today’s media there is often a compartmentalization between the subject, the writer, and the reader (at times even by design). Unfortunately, as a result, stories about Darfur, China, or polar bears, come across as distant, abstract, and personally irrelevant to students. Without personal connections to the material there is little for them to engage with, intellectually or emotionally.
Claude Levi-Strauss, the legendary French Anthropologist, studied primitive cultures around the world through the lens of structuralism, seeking to find universal patterns of thought. His overall contribution to the collective knowledge of the world is not just that he chronicled indigenous peoples, but that he made that knowledge relevant and connectible to the everyman by examining approaches to shared needs (even if his rendering of such knowledge was far too abstract for the casual reader). He’s remembered now as the father of modern anthropology because of how he looked at food gathering/preparations, rituals, and dwellings — basic needs we can all relate to.
"Where do you point your students for news?
Fox? NBC? NPR? NY Times? CNN?
When you want something a bit different, something less corporate, where do you look?
Media Matters? The Daily Show? Indy Media? Rush? Huffington? Crooks and Liars?"
What if you want ground-breaking, objective, mixed media journalism with a global perspective, that creates connections and collaborations between professional journalists and students, and embodies the integrity of one of the most respected awards in writing? Uh . . . Um . . .
Enter, The Pulitzer Center and the student-friendly Pulitzer Gateway, stage right, providing students (of all ages) with access to stories out of the mainstream, but apposite to challenges both home and abroad.
This is no small feat. Consider that in today’s media there is often a compartmentalization between the subject, the writer, and the reader (at times even by design). Unfortunately, as a result, stories about Darfur, China, or polar bears, come across as distant, abstract, and personally irrelevant to students. Without personal connections to the material there is little for them to engage with, intellectually or emotionally.
Claude Levi-Strauss, the legendary French Anthropologist, studied primitive cultures around the world through the lens of structuralism, seeking to find universal patterns of thought. His overall contribution to the collective knowledge of the world is not just that he chronicled indigenous peoples, but that he made that knowledge relevant and connectible to the everyman by examining approaches to shared needs (even if his rendering of such knowledge was far too abstract for the casual reader). He’s remembered now as the father of modern anthropology because of how he looked at food gathering/preparations, rituals, and dwellings — basic needs we can all relate to.
