UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa.— Thirty-three members of the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State are participating in or being recognized at the 102nd Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications conference Aug. 7-10 in Toronto.
The group from the Bellisaro College includes 17 faculty members and 16 graduate students, as well numerous alumni. Marie Hardin, dean of the Bellisario College, serves as AEJMC’s president.
Among the award winners at the annual conference is assistant teaching professor Michelle Baker, who was awarded the Baskett Mosse Award for Faculty Development. The award recognizes an “outstanding young or midcareer faculty member in journalism or mass communication.”
Patrick Plaisance, the Don W. Davis Professor of Ethics, earned a Teaching Excellence Award for the innovative curriculum he uses in his ethics courses. Associate professor Juliet Pinto won the AEJMC-Knudson Latin America Prize, for her recently published book on environmental media coverage in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Christofer Skurka, an incoming faculty member, was the lead author of the paper recognized as the ComSHER Article of the Year, presented by AEJMC’s Communication Science, Health, Environment and Risk Division.
Ashley Walter, a doctoral student in the Bellisario College, won the top student paper award in AEJMC’s Magazine Media Division.
In addition, Bellisario College faculty members, graduate students and alumni will be busy participating in sessions, leading panel discussions and running other events at the conference, which ends on Aug. 10. Penn State and the Bellisario College have a long history with and have been active members within AEJMC for many years. Next year’s conference will be held Aug. 6-9 in San Francisco, California.
AEJMC is a nonprofit organization of more than 3,700 educators, students and practitioners from around the globe. Founded in 1912 by Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, the first president (1912-13) of the American Association of Teachers of Journalism, as it was then known, AEJMC is the oldest and largest alliance of journalism and mass communication educators and administrators at the college level.
AEJMC’s mission is to promote the highest possible standards for journalism and mass communication education, to encourage the widest possible range of communication research, to encourage the implementation of a multi-cultural society in the classroom and curriculum, and to defend and maintain freedom of communication, in an effort to achieve better professional practice, a better informed public and wider human understanding.