Middle schoolers get taste of Missouri Method at Stars and Stripes journalism bootcamp
![Middle-school students with Sheila Porter [center], the museum's education director.](https://journalism.missouri.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/middleschoolers25111001-1024x576.jpg)
Middle-school students with Sheila Porter [center], the museum’s education director.
COLUMBIA, Mo. (Nov. 10, 2025) — The story goes like this: In the early days of the Civil War, Union soldiers set up camp in rural Bloomfield, Missouri, after clearing rebel forces from the area. Some of the soldiers found their way to the abandoned offices of the local newspaper, the Bloomfield Herald, and decided to print their own newspaper. The result was the first issue of Stars and Stripes, now a daily newspaper producing editorially independent reporting on the U.S. military.
More than 160 years later, the Missouri School of Journalism is helping middle school-aged children in New Bloomfield add their own chapters to that story with a “journalism bootcamp” hosted by the Stars and Stripes National Museum and Library in Bloomfield.
“They’re young kids, and what’s really charming about it is we don’t bring computers down for them — they write their stories longhand,” said Kathy Kiely, Lee Hills Chair in Free-Press Studies at the School of Journalism. “It’s great, because they get accustomed to the idea of what journalism is and they learn critical thinking skills. We start by having them interview each other, and then they graduate to interviewing adults.”
The bootcamp evolved from a living history program the museum debuted in the summer of 2023, which was designed to give children a tangible and interactive way to learn about Stars and Stripes and the periods of history it has covered. “Living historians” and re-enactors representing historical figures from both sides of the Civil War presented their stories, and the children also worked with codes like the ones women helped deliver and decode during the Revolutionary War. That first year, the program culminated with the young participants putting together a newspaper documenting what they had experienced.
Kiely, however, saw the potential to build an even stronger link between the museum and youth journalism education. For each of the last two summers, she has brought along cameras and recording equipment, guiding participants through the process of interviewing the historical characters, writing stories, crafting radio-style audio postcards and even creating editorial cartoons of the sort that appeared in Stars and Stripes’ early issues.
“We try to give them a lot of leeway to shape stories that appeal to their interests — they did a toy review that talked about whether toys of this era are better than toys of the past, and we actually showed them toys that kids would have had in the 1860s,” Kiely said. “But at the same time, they’re learning history and they’re learning about the First Amendment.”
The opportunity to get hands-on with the tools of the trade allows children who might have never picked up a professional camera or a microphone to discover a passion for different methods of storytelling.
“You never know who’s going to have that innate aptitude and that eye or that ear,” Kiely added. “And what’s interesting is when you watch these students write, when you watch them pick up this equipment and start to use it or ask questions, you can really see the native talent that’s there. And you realize if you can just nurture that, you’re going to have a lot of people who might not ever have thought about this as a career but could really contribute to it.”
The program also adds another connection between the School of Journalism and Stars and Stripes. Professor Emeritus Brian Brooks, a fixture on campus for nearly 40 years, served as editor of the publication’s European edition. And in the research realm, Associate Professor Keith Greenwood has studied Stars and Stripes’ archive to see how its photojournalists covered the military during wartime.
Living history
The structure of opposing figures from Civil War history telling their stories presents the perfect setup for lessons about bias and ethics in journalism, according to museum director Laura Dumey, who said Kiely added that dimension to the program.
“Living historians came down from Ste. Genevieve and talked about the Union side, and then a group from Donovan came over and presented the Confederate story,” Dumey said. “So the kids got both sides of the story from the same battle, and we talked to them about how you cover bias in media.”
But while there are actors involved, there is plenty of real history to offer the kind of hands-on experience that the School of Journalism is known for. On display in the museum, for example, is Stars and Stripes’ first issue from 1861, one of only four known surviving copies. And this year, Kiely was joined by Jim Van Nostrand, a former editor at the Columbia Daily Tribune — now a standards and policy editor at Nexstar Media — and a military veteran who volunteered his time to speak with the children. In a prior year, the students interviewed both a Vietnam veteran and a local musician who had protested the war.
Local reporters also showed up to cover the event this year, adding an additional layer of reality to the experience. Always quick to recognize an opportunity, Kiely convinced them to stick around and give some insight into their work.
According to Dumey, the end result was a class of students who were enthralled by both the stories they got to tell and by the methods and tools of journalism they used in the process. But most of all, perhaps, they were enthralled by their teacher — not a surprise, given that Dumey estimates 90% of this year’s participants were returning students.
“They would ask, ‘Is Kathy coming back?’” Dumey said. “They loved her — they loved the equipment she brought down, the cameras they used to interview people, the questions she taught them to ask. They loved her and want her to come back.”
Updated: November 10, 2025