UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — With presidential primaries in full swing across the nation and the Pennsylvania primary election set for April 26, a Penn State faculty member and some journalism students in a 400-level reporting methods class recently worked with a valuable resource — longtime voters — as they tried to better understand the election.
Senior lecturer Russ Eshleman, head of the Department of Journalism and an award-winning journalist who spent a decade and a half with The Philadelphia Inquirer before joining the faculty in the College of Communications, paired students in his class with residents of Foxdale Village in State College.
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Residents of the local retirement community visited the University Park campus and worked with students in the class — an activity, Eshleman said, that gave students a chance to work on their interviewing skills at the same time they were getting lessons in politics and history.
“It was so cool watching students in their 20s hanging on every word of people in their 80s and 90s as they talked about everything from FDR and the New Deal to Donald Trump and political civility,” said Eshleman, who served as Harrisburg bureau chief and state political writer for the Inquirer. Along with the Inquirer, he also worked as managing editor of capitolwire.com and as an editor and reporter at the Lancaster New Era and Gettysburg Times.
During their classroom visit, the Foxdale Village residents were paired with students, who had spent a previous class preparing questions for their interviews. For their assignment, the students then produced individual articles — in a question-and-answer format — focusing on each of the veteran voters. Students asked about the residents’ memories of previous elections, political participation and related topics.