Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching

Journalism’s Kitch mixes hard work, laughter in her classes

Kitch

Journalism associate professor Carolyn Kitch, a recipient of Temple’s Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, sticks to a simple blueprint in the classroom.

“We laugh a lot in my classes,” Kitch said.

Laughter, however, should not be confused with laxity. Kitch’s courses are demanding, yet remain popular year after year.

“Students know that they I expect them to be invested in their own education and the overall success of the class,” said Kitch, who came to Temple in 1999 after two years as an assistant journalism professor at Northwestern University.

“They know that I genuinely care about what happens to them,” she continued. “They understand that I’ve also made an investment and have high expectations of them.”

Though she hasn’t taught it recently, Kitch’s signature class is “Magazine Editing and Design,” the undergraduate capstone course of the magazine sequence in the School of Communications and Theater.

An editor and writer for 11 years with McCall’s and Good Housekeeping, Kitch is one of three professors in the magazine sequence who teach this course. It assembles a team of 32 students to produce Philadelphia People, an online and print magazine, and the success of the magazine rests in students’ hands.

“It has less to do with the instructors than it does with the students accepting that they have professional and moral responsibilities to each other,” Kitch said. “When you empower students and have them take responsibility for the outcome, they have a better learning experience. It’s a transition to the real world.”

The class often provides the mentoring opportunities that ultimately pushed Kitch into teaching. As an articles editor with Good Housekeeping, she frequently guided interns and new hires, a process she likens to teaching.

“There is no magic line between my time as an editor and my time as a professor,” Kitch said. “I learned early on that there is great value in mentoring and being mentored to. I want my students to sense that they are part of a larger string of people contributing to their profession.”

Mentoring is a gift that Kitch wants all her students — be they grad students, undergraduates or doctoral candidates — to pass on.

Kitch’s other hope is that her students become skilled writers.

“No matter what course they’re taking, I want students to be able to communicate what they’ve learned through writing and speaking and to be able to express their views of the world clearly,” Kitch said.

“Writing is a major part of all my classes,” she added. “It is a form of learning.”

Kitch herself has written two books, The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media and Pages from the Past: History and Memory in American Magazines, which is slated for publication in the fall.

With her latest book, she brought pieces of the research and writing process into her classes, including “History of Journalism&” and “Media and Social Memory,” to instruct students and gain their advice.

“I should be communicating to students what I’m learning and going through as a researcher because it is not unrelated to my role as a teacher,” Kitch said.

- By Ted Boscia