UC Professor Nancy Jennings Earns Prestigious Award from Ohio Communication Association

Instead of bringing the world into the classroom, Nancy Jennings has helped shape the way her students learn by bringing the classroom into the world. 

Jennings, associate professor in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Communication, recently was awarded the Innovative teacher Award from the Ohio Communication Association. The award, which recognizes outstanding inventiveness in a professor’s field of study, not only shows that Jennings is on the frontier of innovative learning and research in the communication discipline, but emphasizes the positive effect her instructing has had on students across many different departments. 

Jennings, one of the foremost children’s media scholars in the country, is the author of Tween Girls and their Mediated Friends (2014), which navigates the implications media has on children and the relationships they make with characters. She is also the director of the Children’s Education & Entertainment Research Lab (CHEER), which is dedicated to improving and understanding children’s media. 

“Over the past few years, Nancy has been a pioneer, both in our department and the larger university, in developing study abroad opportunities for students,” wrote Steve DePoe, head of communication, in his nomination.

Describing her teaching method, Jennings summed it up in one word: “Open.” She said her classroom focuses on interactiveness and dialogue, encouraging students to question the world and explore different cultures. 

In 2012, Jennings developed the only program in the country that studies children’s media through a study abroad approach. Bringing together students from communication, psychology, nursing, e-media and other departments, her curriculum considers child development, culture and media production through experiencing children’s television models firsthand. 

For the first three years, students traveled to Ireland, where they studied the Sesame Street model of producing educational media by visiting Sesame Tree, the Irish branch of Sesame Street produced by Sixteen South. Students next spring will travel to Munich for 13 days to attend the biannual Prix Jeunesse Festival, which showcases children’s television from all over the world — the “Cannes for children’s media,” according to Jennings. Her students will also collaborate with undergraduates at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, developing international academic relationships that will help place their ideas within diverse cultural contexts.   

“It really expands students’ horizons, challenging them to learn something new and different and to learn cultural competency,” Jennings said about the program. “It teaches them to be curious.” 

To learn more about CHEER or Jennings’ study abroad program, visit the program’s webpage.