Reflections on Teaching Data Storytelling at the Journalism School

TL;DR

This paper reflects on teaching data storytelling in journalism education, highlighting challenges like limited quantitative skills and balancing humanism with technology, and shares practical teaching approaches for non-technical students.

Contribution

It offers insights and strategies for teaching data visualization and storytelling to journalism students with diverse backgrounds, emphasizing contextual and interdisciplinary methods.

Findings

Students often lack quantitative literacy

Integrating visualization requires contextual storytelling approaches

Bridging humanism and technocentrism enhances learning

Abstract

The integration of data visualization in journalism has catalyzed the growth of data storytelling in recent years. Today, it is increasingly common for journalism schools to incorporate data visualization into their curricula. However, the approach to teaching data visualization in journalism schools can diverge significantly from that in computer science or design schools, influenced by the varied backgrounds of students and the distinct value systems inherent to these disciplines. This paper reviews my experience and reflections on teaching data-driven storytelling in a journalism school in Shanghai, China. To begin with, I discuss three prominent characteristics of journalism education (i.e., students' lack of quantitative literacy, the tension between humanism and technocentrism, and the high requirements for content professionalism) that pose challenges for course design and teaching. Then, for each challenge, I share firsthand teaching experiences and discuss corresponding approaches for teaching, such as trying to put visualization into a news context and finding commonality between data-driven storytelling and traditional storytelling. Overall, this paper aims to provide reference and inspiration for instructors who are teaching data visualization and data-driven storytelling to students with non-technical backgrounds.