Ten years ago, Bethel University’s only journalism professor, Scott Winter, drove the student editor of the campus newspaper he advises, , to a job interview with a local magazine editor at an off-campus coffee shop.
“She was just rock solid, really good,” he said of his student.
But the reason Winter drove was because his student was nervous; she’d never driven beyond campus.
“She just had never been pushed outside of there,” he said, “so we kind of adopted that and made it our mantra, getting off campus and doing stories.”
Winter nurtured that philosophy over the past decade. His students at the private, Christian university, which enrolls just over 2,000 undergraduates, have interned at professional outlets, edited students at nearby elementary schools and woven tails of social justice in biennial trips to Guatemala and India.
The school’s has funded internships, campus workshops, media equipment and other resources for student journalists.
Winter has more than just the one mantra. He thinks the quicker a professor turns the classroom into a newsroom, the better student journalists are off.
“We’re a classroom until we don’t need to be anymore,” he said.
Most of the classes Winter’s taught seem to function that way. Since adopting his original philosophy, he’s found a way to publish student work outside the shelter of the university.
This past year, Winter taught a social justice reporting course for the first time. Students wrote a series of profiles on indigenous women with , and also wrote articles for the and the .
“It just raises the stakes when the work is going to be published — when they’re not doing it for a grade,” he said.
Winter has partnered with local schools for a course called Principles of Editing, where he taught AP Style, ethics and leadership in the newsroom. Students in the course worked with fourth and fifth graders at and with middle schoolers at to prop up newspapers at the schools.
He also partnered with , a nonprofit community news outlet, for a feature writing course where his students worked with high schoolers in North Minneapolis to cover housing issues.
Sometimes the stakes get raised internationally. Winter brings a team of students to Guatemala or India every other year during the school’s shorter, January term, to write about social justice issues for their university magazine, .
In 2022, he brought Soraya Keiser, a junior at the time, with him. But during the trip, a bulk of the group got COVID-19, Keiser said. They still finished the magazine and , but they left the country dissatisfied — knowing there was a bigger story to tell.
“We felt like we didn't really do their story fully justice with that written piece,” she said. She and Winter decided to apply for a grant to come back and tell the full story — this time with a video camera.
Winter and Keiser won the grant and returned in summer 2022. They worked with director Nataly Basterrechea to produce , a documentary which received a series of accolades, including being selected for the Antigua film festival, the Montreal film festival and being chosen as a semifinalist at the Dublin Movie Awards.
The filmmakers told the story of two migrant families who tried to cross into the U.S. One family made it; the other did not.
Keiser said she wanted to “humanize the concept of immigration.”
Keiser studied abroad in Lithuania in college and freelanced for the in Kosovo. She graduated in May as a journalism and international studies double major.
She just won a Fulbright Scholarship to teach English in Bulgaria for the next 10 months. She hopes to freelance while she’s there, too.
“I really love Textura, and it was a big part of why I decided to go to Bethel,” she said. “And it paid off.
