Two West Virginia University Reed College of Media professors have received praise from their peers at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Associate Professor Joel Beeson and Visiting Assistant Professor Julia Fraustino each received awards earlier this month at the 2015 AEJMC conference in San Francisco, California.

Beeson’s online project, War Poems, received an honorable mention at this year’s AEJMC “Best of the Web/Best of Digital” competition in the Individual/Team/Single Class website category. The interactive website is based on a book by the same name published in 1919 by Ada and Ethel Peters, two sisters who were students at the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, now West Virginia State University. Unlike conventional history texts, War Poems provides the perspective of two young African American females in southern West Virginia and their views on the nation’s race issues, the war and the world at large.

The “Best of the Web/Best of Digital” competition is an annual web and app design contest for AEJMC members. There are four categories to accommodate submissions from individuals and small groups to department- and institution-wide projects. Judging is done by web and app design professionals and academics with a background in web and app design and technology.

Fraustino received the Promising Professors Award from the Mass Communication and Society Division of AEJMC. The Promising Professors Award honors new faculty and graduate students who demonstrate excellence and innovation in teaching. In addition, Fraustino received third place in the Public Relations Division’s Wilcox Teaching Research Competition for her co-authored paper, “Teaching, Tweeting, and Telecommuting: Cross-Institutional Collaboration and Experiential Learning in the Social Media Classroom.” Her prior research on a similar topic, “Can Every Class Be a Twitter Chat? Cross-Institutional Collaboration and Experiential Learning through Social Media,” was recently published in the inaugural edition of AEJMC’s Journal of Public Relations Education.

“This level of recognition for our faculty reinforces the excellent work they are doing and the contributions they are making to their fields and the academic institution as well,” said Reed College of Media Acting Dean Diana Martinelli. “It is well-deserved praise for their work both in the classroom and beyond.”

AEJMC is a nonprofit educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students and media professionals. The Association’s mission is to promote highest possible standards for journalism and mass communication education, to cultivate the widest possible range of communication research, to encourage the implementation of a multi-cultural society in the classroom curriculum and to defend and maintain freedom of communications in an effort to achieve better professional practice and a better informed public.

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CONTACT: Kimberly Walker, Reed College of Media
304.293.5726, Kimberly.Walker@mail.wvu.edu

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