An Active Learning Approach to Understanding Gender, Sexuality, and Sport Journalism

Most of the students I teach in my sport sociology courses can easily identify the problematic ways in which women’s athletic events and bodies are covered within the sports sections of newspapers, magazines, Web sites, and television shows. These students are less able to understand how the heterosexual male sporting experience becomes the model from which most journalistic tropes and storylines emerge. Therefore, I devised the following activity to help students consider gender, sexuality, and sport journalism in light of journalistic silences and omissions.

For this activity, students are asked to pretend that they are sportswriters who are assigned to cover an important women’s basketball game for a local newspaper. I give them some general information including the final score of the game, some of the key players and plays, and a hint at a familiar storyline that they might find useful. A member of the “visiting” team played her high school basketball locally, and her team’s victory proved to be especially meaningful for her considering the connections she has within the local community. As the instructor, I perform the role of the basketball player they will interview in the post-game press conference. I am the “player” mentioned above, the member of the visiting team who played high school basketball locally but traveled away to play in college.

At this point, I give the students five minutes to generate and write down questions that they would like to ask during the mock post-game press conference. (I even set up a desk in the front of the class to give the feel of a press conference.) I then divide the class into two groups and send one group to the hallway (or another room) to continue to work on their questions. Though both groups are expected to produce the same thing in the end, I will give the two groups slightly different information. With the first group, I sit in front of the class and begin to answer their questions. The actual responses I provide to these questions are of minimal importance. (As an aside, it is instructive to see what kinds of questions the students deem important to ask during this portion of the activity.) Ultimately, my only aim is to find out how they will synthesize two important pieces of information. One, I find a way to let the “reporters” know that my performance was especially important to me because my boyfriend/male partner came to watch the game. I also find a way to inform them that a bad stomach flu before the game almost prevented me from playing.

After I conclude my interview with this group, I ask them to begin to work on their one-to-two paragraph articles for the “newspaper” while I meet with the other group of “reporters.” I travel to the hallway or next room and answer the questions they pose in the same way, save for the two important pieces of information I noted above. In this case, I inform the group that my performance was especially important because my girlfriend/female partner was in attendance at this particular game. I also let them know that painful menstrual cramps before the game almost prevented me from playing. Once I have responded to all the questions posed, I have this group return to our original meeting space so that they can work on their articles. I allow ten to fifteen minutes for the groups to complete their articles.

Once both groups complete their articles, I ask each student to share their articles with two other people, one from their own group and one from another group. I ask them to respond to the following questions:

• • What was your theme/main idea?

• • What information did you decide to leave out? What did you include?

• • How did you come to this decision?

After the students have shared their work with two others, I ask a few students to read their articles aloud for the class. I try to get a few students from each group to share, and it is usually at...