Resources for Adding Diversity to your Mass Comm Classrooms

We’re calling mass communication professors to make big changes this fall. Not just in how they teach, but what they teach & whose voices they bring in the classroom.

Taking a page from our own manifesto of how to turn ally into action, we spent the summer creating two tools to make it easy to add diversity to mass comm syllabi.

Black Mass Comm Scholarship

This database lists work from more than 50 Black mass communication scholars, with more constantly being added. We’re calling on professors to scrub their syllabus and swap out old readings to replace them with work by Black mass comm scholars.

For now you can search by scholar name, and we’ll keep plugging away to add functionality to potentially search by theory as well.

We crowdsourced this listing, and you can still suggest scholarship when you see it missing. You can also view the listing in spreadsheet form.

Broom Speakers Bureau

Research suggests that one of the first steps in creating a diverse workforce is having communities of color represented. If students can’t see something that looks like them, then they might think there is not a place for them in the mass communication industry. We want our students from communities of color to not only know that there is a place for them, but that we need them.

Break that cycle White only representation by bringing in diverse guest speakers.

The Broom Speakers Bureau is a collaborative project with Professor Rev. David Brown of Temple University.

We’ll continue to play with functionality on this too—but find a guest speaker on the Broom Speakers Bureau site and then reach out to the professional to invite that practitioner to be a guest lecturer in your class.

We’re still accepting speaker volunteers, and you can get listed in the Broom Speakers Bureau by submitting your details.

Let’s make sure all of our students can see themselves represented in their future profession.

Inspired? You can get involved in improving the practice of PR by supporting the Broom Center.