When I first started teaching university classes in media and journalism studies in the early 2000s, I tended to make certain assumptions about the beliefs students would bring to the topic.
These assumptions were reductive. Framed in a clueless way, they could be very condescending. Yet they nonetheless seemed like a plausible way of anticipating the perspective of many in the classroom.
I saw my task as one of encouraging students to critique common sense assumptions they may have already internalized about media and journalism.
