Current News: Vanguard

Have you ever struggled to find interesting and relevant topics for students to discuss? Have you ever wanted to couple a work of fiction with non-fiction to illuminate deeper and closer relationships between the themes and motifs? Even if the answer is no, Current Vanguard Journalism probably has something useful for your classroom. Recently, Vanguard has gained some notoriety, particularly because of the arrest and detention of two of their journalists by the government of North Korea. However, long before Laura Ling and Euna Lee were taken by the dear leader, Vanguard was exposing issues and topics that are more often than not ignored by the mainstream media. For example, Ling presented the deplorable state of Haiti more than four years before a slew of cataclysmic earthquakes forced the world to stop turning their heads and see how bad the situation really is. Some of the topics presented by Vanguard are very mature, including pornography, the prison system, and narcotics to name but a few. Nevertheless, these are the issues that confront our society and to hide them from our students does nothing for our future. Furthermore, I believe it highly unlikely that our students remain ignorant to these issues regardless of our efforts to cover their eyes. Discussing and examining them in a scholastic environment with purpose and design is one way we can confront these problems and begin to work toward their solutions. With discretion and seriousness this source can be used to help our students open their eyes and hearts to their global communities.