My preferred strategy is to think of myself as the journalism coach, and to allow myself the same involvement as, say, a football coach. Can you imagine members of a football team claiming that they are a student-run team? That they will decide everything? Look, I won't push the analogy so far as to say it's okay for me to call all the plays, but the coach analogy is worth thinking about.
Perhaps I'm just old-fashioned, but our editors are still in high school, right? It seems possible that they are not yet professional journalists, and that an experienced, caring and creative adviser might just have a few good ideas, practices and techniques to share.
Football coaches critique the play of the team (game films are exhaustively graded), and often changes are made in personnel and strategy based on those critiques. Football coaches are in charge of practice. So should advisers be heavily involved in training and planning.
There are many possible approaches to advising a publication, but the approach that some take in which the adviser practices a form of "benign neglect" -- rarely even speaking to the class (the editors do that), shrugging her shoulders when things go horribly wrong (claiming it's the students' publication, so what could I do?) -- seems to ignore what we all innately understand about education. To take their position to a perhaps illogical conclusion: there is no need for a trained adviser at all. Someone to unlock the door, perhaps? Or maybe the students want the keys, as well?
Advisers should inspire, should push, should suggest, should critique, should evaluate. They should get over being the "super editor" of the publication, correcting all grammar errors, etc. They should sometimes ignore some silliness or lack of sophistication. They should come to grips with the fact that the publication will not ever be perfect.
Deciding how you will balance your multiple roles will be key to your satisfaction as an adviser. How would you describe your adviser philosophy?
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