Kari A. Koshiol

Student-run scholastic journalism programs provide students with opportunities to choose their assignments, participate in feedback, and create for a real-world audience (Madison et al., 2019; Smagorinsky, 2002; Warrington et al., 2018). To understand the lived experience of high school students as they participated in an autonomy-supportive learning environment and understand if this experience changed overtime, this narrative case study gathered interview and questionnaire data from the students in a scholastic journalism course throughout the 2020 fall term. Thematic coding of the data suggests that students had an overall positive experience in the autonomy-supportive learning environment and that three key factors played a role in this experience: being afforded opportunities for choice, the connection students saw between journalism and the real world, and the classroom community. Furthermore, this study suggests that students in an autonomy-supportive course gain more comfort overtime with both the class structure and the class content.

Zoom Link:  https://buffalo.zoom.us/j/94899444594?pwd=NWl6NjNreDBCZEtRNjFranZNY1ZSZz09