Make your own media

A student remarks: "During our time at school we write so much, during classes and in homework. A lot of what we write is about our own views on the world around us. Most of what we write remains hidden between the covers of copybooks, unread. There's something wrong with that. A school magazine is one way for students to make their voices heard."

Numerous writers, journalists and others will tell you, usually with pride, that their first published words appeared between the covers of a school newspaper or magazine. The experience boosted their self-confidence. It encouraged them towards further achievements.

Devising, putting together and then publishing a school magazine can be a very worthwhile educational enterprise. It can also be good fun. Anyone with experience of trying to get a school publication together will usually add that it involves lots of hard work.

Of course, not everything runs smoothly. Rising tension, frayed tempers, and the occasional rows which can punctuate the runup to deadlines can teach valuable lessons in teamwork!

Despite all this, schools across the country produce regular news-sheets, newsletters, newspapers, magazines and even glossy yearbooks. Typically they are co-operative ventures between teachers and students. Increasingly, Transition Year - with its cross-curricular emphasis - is seen as an ideal stage for students to get actively involved in compiling and producing such publications.

According to a survey of 10 European countries conducted by the Paris-based Jeune Presse, youth press in Ireland "is not a very developed phenomenon". Even so, a rich mixture of publications is emerging from Irish schools. They come in different shapes and sizes as well as frequency.

Content can vary widely. Many of these publications communicate an energy which suggest vibrant, active schools. Sometimes, the emphasis is on PR for the school with little apparent student self-expression. It's a varied picture across the State, as can be glimpsed from a few selected examples.

The north-east, for example, produces a wide variety of student publications. "We've built the production of an issue of TY Times into the Transition Year programme,' explains Fred Boss, Transition Year co-ordinator at De La Salle College, Dundalk, Co Louth. Students write reports on different aspects of the programme; they can also contribute funny captions for photographs.

The eight-page magazine appears once each term, a good example of how the skills of report-writing can be promoted. TY Times also informs parents, junior-cycle students and others about the school's distinctive Transition Year programme. Nearby, Dundalk Grammar School also publishes an informative Transition Year newsletter three times during the year. In St Vincent's Secondary School, also in Dundalk, Transition Year students compile and publish the originally titled Caught Red Handed with reports and interviews.

In Castleblaney College, Co Monaghan, Transition Year students have responsibility for the production of a regular newsletter, School Times. They also put together an impressive 84-page school magazine, Nexus. Four teams of students - one for editorial, one for reporting , one for advertising and one for finance - work under the guidance of deputy principal Gerry Hand. Nexus contains a lively mixture of reports, photographs, interviews, poems and is well supported by local advertisers.

Students at Dunmore Community School, Co Galway produce Eclipse, a lively, easy-to-read 52-page production. There are reports, film reviews, interviews, poetry, creative writing and lots of humour. Eclipse also carries the results of a survey of students' opinions on topics such as school uniforms and smoking.

In Presentation Convent Secondary School, Thurles, Co Tipperary, last year's Transition Year students put together an impressive Transition Year-Book '98-'99. This 82-page magazine is well supported with advertisements by local businesses. The magazine is strong on class photographs and reports, particularly of sporting achievements. There is also an interesting account of a visit to Thurles by students from Finland as well as interviews with the Finnish teachers.

Inkwell is a 16-page tabloid newspaper produced by Transition Year students in St Colman's College, Fermoy, Co Cork. The successful ingredients include reports, poems, quizzes, results of a school survey and lots of humour.

`I wanted the Transition Year students to produce a magazine which would sit comfortably on any newsagent's shelf," says teacher Joe Connell of St Benildus College, Kilmacud, in Dublin. Pue's Occurrences, which appears twice each year, has attractive, glossy covers. It is also an engaging and readable publication.

Sharply focused interviews with prominent public figures, all conducted by the students, are distinctive features of this magazine. Gay Byrne, David Norris, Brian Kerr, Ronnie Flanagan, Eamon Dunphy and Roddy Doyle are just some of those who faced have microphone-carrying Transition Year students from St Benildus. There are commercial publications which could learn from Pue's Occurrences.

According to teachers and students who are actively involved in producing school newspapers and magazines, it is worth the effort. Teachers talk about the skills which can be developed - reporting, editing, interviewing, illustrating, layout and design, desktop publishing; then there are seeking advertisements, marketing, distributing and selling, media analysis, teamwork, balancing the books and so on.

Students value the opportunities to see their work in print. They enjoy the buzz of being able to show off a finished product.

Transition Year co-ordinators point to the benefits of producing a newspaper or magazine as a way of integrating subjects such as English, other languages, media studies, social studies, art, religious education and information technology. They also talk about its use for learning about CSPE (civic, social and political education) topics.

For example, when students are directly involved in "youth press", issues of free speech, censorship, people's rights, libel, what can or can't be published, who can say what, ethical advertising, the responsibilities of contributors, editors and publishers and so on tend to become immediate and urgent.

Essentially, school newspapers and magazines can give students a space where they can voice their opinions. I remember the first time the student quoted at the start of this piece wrote for the school magazine, which was a modest collection of pages run off on a duplicator and stapled together. He had stopped me in the corridor and handed me a roughly folded piece of paper.

"You might like that for the next issue of the school magazine," he said and headed off to class. I was surprised as, at that time, he had a poor attendance record and could have been described as on the margins of the school community. It was encouraging that he wanted to exercise his right to contribute to the student publication.

What he had written was a poem that was a powerful statement about how he saw the conflict in Northern Ireland. When published, it generated spontaneous discussion among students, both inside and outside classrooms. I know that various teachers used that poem subsequently in formal classes as a practical learning aid.

I suspect that it also encouraged other "unlikely" students to contribute to the school magazine, voicing their opinions on a variety of topics, personal, local, national and international.

Such contributions, in turn, added to the magazine's credibility among the student body, so that each publication became an important feature in the life of the school.

Gerry Jeffers is the national co-ordinator of the Transition Year Curriculum Support Service.