Teaching Philosophy

Gina Gayle – Doctoral Candidate

Throughout my educational career I have been every type of student, from being educated from the
age of ten at a very prestigious, private girl’s school in Shaker Heights, Ohio to working my way
through college at night in order to finish my bachelor’s degree. I relate to the underdog and the
privileged in addition to the first generation in the family to go to college and the international
students who are thousands of miles away from home studying in a foreign language.

When I was teaching in the Bible Belt of southern Mississippi, I had my Multimedia Production
class produce a story on the different religions that are practiced in the region. We visited a Jewish
synagogue, a Krishna temple, a Vietnamese Buddhist temple and a Black Muslim enclave. These
students took a chance on being unfamiliar and uncomfortable in order to complete their class
assignment. Their final multimedia piece, “Unbuckling The Bible Belt” was accepted into the Sun
and Sand Film Festival in 2012, which gave each student a tremendous sense of pride, while the
journey opened them up to new communities and different cultures.

During my first adjunct teaching opportunity at St. John’s University in New York, I had a class of
students with a variety of life experiences; some were from very privileged backgrounds, some
were working parents taking evening courses and some were traditional students on their way to a
degree in journalism. Two students from that class stand out to me to this day. One was a young
man who was quite privileged and the other was a working mother, finishing her degree at night.
The final project was one they had to pitch to me and then commit. Both wanted to change their
projects with the working mother letting everyone know her project was not doable in her limited
amount of time as if to get support from the other students to pressure me to feel sorry for her. The
privileged young man, emailed me and called with very strong cases of why he should be allowed
to change. Both students finished their projects. Neither project turned out to be what they wanted
on paper, however both had an enormous amount of pride in their work. The class was in awe of
what the working mother had done with her limited time to finish her project and in turn was
impressed with what the young, privileged man had been able to do with his access restrictions.
The working mother, overwhelmed with emotion, cried as her classmates gave their feedback and
the young, privileged student came up to me at the end of our last class to shake my hand, thanking
me while saying how no one had ever made me do something I didn’t want to do.

My most recent teaching as a Newhouse School Ph.D. student teaching the incoming New Media
Master’s students has been even more rewarding for me. The Issues in Media Management class is
the first class in their year-long program. As a student of the course last summer I found the class to
be enlightening as we had to constantly apply legal, financial and technological theories to new
media management. As the professor of record, I give the students snippets of what it was like to
work in legacy media, while constantly relating everything we read back to what is currently
happening in media environments. I enjoy seeing their expressions when they “get it” or when they
decipher how to apply a concept to their particular area of media management. In turn I get to learn
from them; they know newer technologies that I have not yet mastered, they explain what the media
culture is like in their home countries and we all give each other ways to see the opportunities in
spite of the many perceived obstacles presented in the industry.
Designing new courses is also of interest to me. I had to do this as I created the multimedia
curriculum at The University of Southern Mississippi’s School of Mass Communication and
Journalism from the ground up in 2008, so I had to discover which method was going to work best
for my students and finding the appropriate materials when very few books had been published
This spring I attended the inaugural class of the PhDigital Bootcamp at Texas State University.
This workshop was constructed to help Ph.D. students and recent graduates understand how to
incorporate digital methods and new technology into the classroom as well as into research. As an
educator, I cannot rely on theory alone as technology continues to increase. My goal is to attend as
many hands-on trainings and academic conferences as I can in order to stay current for myself and
for my students.

In my teaching, I combine the knowledge gained in my own work as well as that learned from other
successful journalists I have either worked with or trained with in workshops and seminars by
bringing in as many working professionals as I can, either in person or through virtual visits.
I have allowed students to work with me on personal projects so now as a researcher, I am looking
forward to the projects I can collaborate on with colleagues and students.