Historical readings, blogs and gender issues are tools that can be put to use in teaching sports journalism, according to Friday’s journalism panel.

Susan Keith, an assistant professor at Rutgers University, had her students find coverage of a major event in sports history and compare the old stories with the coverage of current sports events.

“It was an enlightening experience for the students,” Keith said. “It helped them see how journalism as a whole has changed over time and made them more critical consumers of the sports media they are consuming.”

Keith was one panelist who discussed the issue as part of a session called “It’s About More than Scores: Teaching Courses About Sports, Communication and Society.” The panel was sponsored by the Mass Communication and Society and Radio-Television Journalism divisions.

John Curley, former chief executive officer of the Gannett Company and professional-in-residence at Penn State University, moderated the panel.

Other panelists were Bill Knowles, professor emeritus at the University of Montana; Marie Hardin, assistant professor at Penn State; and Brad Schultz, assistant professor at the University of Mississippi.

Panelists described their respective courses, teaching techniques, class assignments and teaching aids.

Keith’s course is designed to illustrate the dichotomy between sports as journalism and sports as entertainment. She achieves this by talking with her students about sports books. Students learn to distinguish between serious texts containing useful information and literature written for commercial purposes, she said.

Knowles’ upper-division course for undergraduates brings to life the historical union between sports and media by showing real media footage and inviting the school’s head coaches to answer questions before the class.

“[The students] stumble on some remarkable history in the process sometimes,” Knowles said. “Coaches do have a historical perspective.”

Knowles replaces his midterm with 75- and 125-word blogs on reading, class material and guest speakers. After Knowles reads the blogs, he posts them for the class to read.

Hardin described how she runs her upper division communication course called Sports, Media and Society. It is designed to help students critically view the role of sports media in American culture – specifically issues of race, gender, sexuality, violence and civil life.

Hardin hopes students will develop oral and written communication skills through weekly exercises.

Students also complete a series of three learning activities. They can choose from assignments such as interviewing a coach, watching the Super Bowl in a new light and comparing mediated presentations of male and female sporting events.

Similar to Hardin’s course, Schultz’s Sports Journalism and American Culture class examines the relationship between sports and media using a sociological approach.

Topics include how sports media treat important cultural issues such as race, crime and ethics.

“We look at sports journalism as it was practiced,” Schultz said. “By reading sports literature and sports media sources, students get a better understanding of the times during which they were written.”

He focuses on how sports media are important in a larger cultural context by evaluating defining periods in 20th Century America.

“In any culture, sports and society are like this,” Schultz said, as he linked his fingers together. “It’s very hand and glove. You’ve got to know something about culture and students are often woefully unprepared when they walk into the classroom.”