Thirty-five high school teachers are spending two weeks in Franklin Hall for a journalism boot camp.

The Reynolds High School Journalism Institute is an intensive two week workshop for high school teachers who want to renew their education in journalism or who don’t have much journalism background said Professor Candace Perkins Bowen, director of The Center for Scholastic Journalism in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication (JMC) and the director of the workshop.

JMC has been hosting the workshop since 2001, and was chosen as a host for he program because it is an accredited journalism school that had a good idea for a curriculum said Bowen. The workshop started on July 7 and will end on July 19.

The teachers apply from all over the country to attend one of the five workshops administered by the American Society of News Editors and funded by the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, according to the workshop’s website, www.hsj.org.

The students in the course will be instructed on a wide range of subjects such as ethics, the basics of writing, reporting, multimedia, and various issues high school journalism advisors and teachers might face. Students also get a tour of The Akron Beacon Journal and a trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

Bowen said the students divide into smaller groups to work on a multimedia project together. At the end of the two weeks the students must turn in a portfolio including various writing assignments along with the multimedia project.

Nicole Hoffman from Milwaukee, Wis. is a student in the workshop. She said she is taking the workshop because she recently became a high school newspaper advisor and has no journalism background.

“I think I’ll take everything in, and start to write a curriculum that revolves around my knowledge of journalism,” Hoffman said about how she will use the information she’s learning in the course. “Hopefully this will give me the basics so I can think about how I can best relate this information to students.”

Contact Jacqueline DeMate at [email protected].