Recruitment
Journalists – help students see the world more clearly.
Support media literacy in schools with The Student View and the European Media and Information Fund.
Are you passionate about protecting integrity in journalism? Do you have the skills to empower teachers and help their students develop critical media literacy skills? Join us at The Student View as an expert volunteer.
At The Student View, it’s our mission to create a newsroom in every school, supporting schools to counter misinformation by empowering their students with vital media literacy skills.
Over the past 5 years, we trained 3499 students to become media literacy ‘reporters’, with the support of the skilled journalists who helped us to set up pop-up newsrooms in 167 UK schools.
Now, we are looking for journalistic talent to volunteer on our first ever ‘train-the-trainer’ programme, funded by the European Media and Information Fund (EMIF) and delivered in partnership with subject matter experts from investigative journalism group Bellingcat, UK think tank Demos, and education specialists the PSHE Association.
As a volunteer journalist, you will play a key role in helping students understand news as both consumers and creators. We’ll ask for two hours of your time supporting teachers at a participating school.
Mostly, support will be online (through emails and virtual meetings) but if you’d like to be set up with a school that’s local to you, we’ll do our best to make it happen.
Throughout the programme, you will be supported by the Student View’s EMIF Project Manager who’ll advise on everything from training to in-school delivery.
Here's how it works:
- You apply to be a volunteer journalist. We’ll ask you a few questions about your background and interests, and run a basic DBS check.
- We select 100 teachers from across the UK to become ‘Media Literacy Champions’. These teachers receive training from Oscar-winning investigative journalism group, Bellingcat, equipping them with the skills to support media literacy in their school.
- After their training, teachers will be matched with a volunteer journalist (that’s you) who’ll support them to apply their learnings in the classroom, by setting up a ‘pop-up newsroom’ where students can tell their own news stories.
- You will help support and build the students’ communication skills, through storytelling, confidence-building, and fact-checking exercises in order to empower them to communicate the stories that matter to them.
- You walk away feeling warm and fuzzy. The students walk away with the power to discern fact from fiction and to fight misinformation.
To get started, follow these simple steps:
Step 1:
Fill in and submit the application form. Provide us with basic information such as name and contact details, a summary of your experience and skills, and some detail on why you want to support our media literacy initiative. We’ll also ask if you are happy to travel and how far, and ask you to provide information on any accessibility needs.
Step 2:
We get matching. We will review your application and work out which school and teacher will best suit your skills, interest, location and experience. We will then contact you with a potential match, which you need to review. If you are happy to proceed, we will introduce you to the school to get you started.
Step 3:
Extra! Extra! We want to hear all about it. Once you are up and running with your school, we will send you the occasional survey so you can provide feedback on your experience. We want to hear about your success stories, so please send the news our way so we can impress our funders (and shout about it on our social media).
Step 4:
Tell your network. We want to expand our network of journalist volunteers to promote media literacy and put a newsroom in every UK school. Please share this opportunity with your workplace and network.
If you have any questions, please get in touch with us at emif@thestudentview.org.
Join us in our mission to support media literacy education and put a newsroom in every school!