A Taste of Gullah

Dr. Janice Marie Collins is a multiple Emmy, Associated Press, Best of Gannett, NABJ, AABJ award winning journalist with more than 20 years of experience in the journalism industry and an award-winning professor with 14 years of teaching experience on the university level. She was selected as one of the Top 50 Journalism Professors in the nation of 2012 by Journalismdegree.org and was recently inducted into the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) Legends 2015 Hall of Fame representing Wake Forest University Women’s Basketball. Collins has received recognition for her teaching and service, including a Faculty of Excellence award by the Department of Minority Affairs at Eastern Illinois University and an Excellence Award for Teaching and Service at Hampton University. Over the past 4 years, she has consistently made the list of Teachers of Excellence at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Presently, Dr. Collins is working on a textbook for educators and newsroom leaders on her innovative style of teaching within a collective, called Active Centralized Empowerment. This pedagogy addresses issues of self-esteem, marginalization, diversity, inclusion, leadership development, and issues of power. Her latest publications include a Critical Cultural perspective book on race relations from a social-psychological platform called 250 Years and Still a Slave: Breaking Free with Active Centralized Empowerment, a web-series and television broadcast program called A Taste of Gullah that aired on PBS and was awarded "Best Documentary" at the Garifuna Indigenous International Film Festival in Venice, California. She is also completing an academic research book chapter on marginalization through image portrayals within prime time commercials and has published an article on leadership development titled, “Leadership Development in College Newsroom Labs: It’s Transactional,” in Journalism & Mass Communication Educator. She has also completed an ethnographic documentary series that chronicles her trip back to her maternal ancestral land, Sierra Leone, West Africa and the Mende tribe called Journey to My Mother’s Land: Extending the Gate’s Effect into Africa.

Dr. Collins’ research focuses on leadership development and issues of self-empowerment, gender and race in media, journalism, and college classrooms/newsrooms. For 2 consecutive years, Collins has won first place in the Open Paper Competition at the National Broadcast Educators Association Conference as, both, coauthor, and sole author, for her research on leadership development, gender, and issues of race coverage in the media. Her research adds to the literature on pedagogical approaches, designs and strategies and professional practices that lead efforts towards De-Marginalization.

Collins earned a Ph.D. in Communications from the Scripps College of Communications at Ohio University-Specializing in Media Management and Critical Cultural Theory and an Associate Certification in Women’s Studies. She earned a Masters of Science and Women’s Studies Certification at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Speech Communications and Theatre Arts with a concentration in Communication/Rhetoric