Alicia Merrifield, MJE has just finished her 26th year as a teacher at The Village, a private pre-K through 12 grade school in Houston, Texas. As well as teaching, she advises The Viking Press and Viking Yearbook, part of her venture in revitalizing the yearbook club into the now-award winning Viking Media. Merrifeld originally began teaching English, but moved to her interest in journalism. She teaches multiple media related courses, including standard journalism, graphic design, photography, and digital marketing.
In addition to her teaching, Merrifield holds multiple advising and committee roles in journalism groups. She is the Texas Association for Journalism Educators (TAJE) Private School Liaison, as well as the Mentoring Committee Chair and Critique Judge for the Journalism Education Association (JEA). She also is the creator and overseer of The Adviser’s Flock, a message board-styled online version of a teachers lounge for JEA mentoring members. Merrifield has two children, aged 29 and 22, as well as two Doberman dogs.

Q&A

How do you balance your multiple roles as a teacher, adviser, and national committee leader?

I feel I’m pretty organized. I do a lot of notes.  If you ask my admin, I don’t ever get my grades turned in on time because I don’t want to grade.  But I think as far as a committee leader, I’ve really made sure that my committee has the people on it.  I made sure that everybody that’s on my committee is gonna do something to help the group and then to help me.  I’ve never delegated well, and now I’m learning in that there’s a lot of trial and error.  Kids are resilient, if you’re honest with them at the beginning, I think
they buy into that. You have to let the kids know who you are.

What strategies did you use to transform a small struggling yearbook club into the successful Viking Media program?

I was still teaching full-time English and it was a club. I went to my principal and I said, I spend more time on this yearbook.  I truly found where I loved to be in that yearbook class and loved working with those kids.  I kept saying I needed this to be a full-time, so they put it on the schedule, and I had enough kids that first year. We went to other schools and found out what they were doing.  Our first newspaper article was challenged, and I realized, I had no idea, I had never been a journalist. I had never done any of this in school when I was a kid, and I didn’t know what I was doing.

So I went back to school, where I got my master’s in journalism from Kent State. We stopped all production in newspaper right then and there, and we wrote a policy and a handbook for the kids. The kids are the ones that actually did all the research and writing and put it up in front of our leadership board because I figured it’d be more of a punch. And it got approved. And so they’ve just been fighting ever since.

What inspired you to create The Advisers’ Flock, and how was it developed?

It was really back when Facebook was just getting started, I was at Kent State at the time. We used message boards, and it was a community for us to build and grow on. When I started teaching yearbook, like I said, I was making mistakes. I went to Facebook, and there’s all these journalism groups for that. And then JEA has a message board for itself.

I’m the only journalism advisor on campus, so I don’t have a community. So I was trying to figure out how that the social media can help keep that community together. So that’s what kind of started it. I wanted to blend Facebook, the JEA ‘listserv’ and my nerdy scrapbooking groups.  And so if you got into it, that’s what that website is, a bunch of message boards. You can go in and just ask a yearbook question. I defended it, I passed, graduated, and then it sat there for a long time.  When I became the mentoring chair and to get my MJEI had to come up with another project. Shari Chumley, who is on my mentoring committee, helped me repurpose the website,  and we now have it specifically for mentors and mentees.

How do you approach managing creativity and technical skills across subjects like journalism, photography, and digital marketing?

I think this goes back to a book I read in school called Good to Great by Jim Collins. It had an analogy of ‘getting people on the bus at the right time’  My yearbook in journalism is an application class, so students have to apply for it. We’re trying to get those good kids in there, and know what their strengths are.  They come to me already knowing something for the most part, and we want to make them leaders.  My job as an advisor is to take my hand off that mouse. If they come up to me and ask, how do I do
this? I walk them through it or teach them how to do it, but they need to be the one to learn how and make those mistakes. So much of it is building relationships, because those are everything.

As the Adviser in Residence, Merrifield will lead and facilitate sessions and discussions at the Overby Adviser Institute on June 17-19, on the campus of the University of Mississippi.