Claude Cookman
Currently teaching:
Recent News
- Showcase features Cookman's technology in teaching work
- Cookman contributes chapter to 'Just in Time Teaching'
- Seven faculty to lead Mini U sessions
Past academic positions
Assistant Instructor, Princeton University Art and Archaeology Department, 1988-89; Adjunct Instructor, Barry University, Miami, Florida, 1984; Visiting Lecturer, University of Iowa, 1981; Adjunct Instructor, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky, 1979, 1980.
Professional positions
Copy Editor, The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky.), 1984-86; Graphics Editor, The Miami Herald (Fla.), 1981-84; Picture Editor, The Louisville Times (Ky.), 1974-81; Copy Editor, The Herald-Journal (Syracuse, N.Y.), 1973-74; Picture Editor, The Associated Press, (New York City) 1971-73; Reporter, The Anderson Herald (Ind.), 1965, 1968-70; Executive Officer and Assistant Adjutant, U.S. Army, 1965-68.
Professional organizations
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Society of News Design; National Press Photographers Association; Society for Photographic Education.
Publications
"Marc Riboud in North Vietnam: Seeing the war from the other side;" Visual Communications Quarterly, Winter 2000. "Students' cognitive skills in a Computer-Based Graphics Course," Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, Fall 1998. "Compelled to Witness: the Social Realism of Henry Cartier-Bresson," Journalism History, Spring 1998. "Gandhi's funeral by Margaret Bourke-White and Henry Cartier-Bresson," History of Photography, Summer 1998. "Edward Steichen's Self-portraits," History of Photography, Spring 1998. The People's America: Farm Security Administration Photographs (1935-1943), catalog for an exhibition he curated for Indiana University's Art Museum, April 1997. A Voice Is Born: The Founding and Early Years of the National Press Photographers Association Under the Leadership of Joseph Costa, 1985.
Awards
IU President's Distinguished Teaching Award, 1999. Robin F. Garland Educator Award from the National Press Photographers Association, 1999. IU Teaching Excellence Recognition Award, 1998, 1999, 2000. Indiana University Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching, 1996. IU Student Choice Award for distinguished teaching, 1994. Gretchen Kemp Teaching Fellowship, School of Journalism, 1993. Shared in the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography awarded to The Courier-Journal and Times photography staff.
Teaching and research areas
Visual communications, photojournalism editing, history of photography, graphic communication, computer design, informational graphics and mass communications pedagogy.
Research summary
Professor Cookman's recent and current projects include:
- "Students' cognitive skills in a Computer-Based Graphics Course," Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, Fall 1998. Quantitative research in journalism pedagogy has been sharply divided over the proper role and the efficacy of computers in journalism and mass communications courses. This article attempts to move beyond the divide by drawing on three pedagogical theories: Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives, Chickering and Gamson's seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education, and Collins' cognitive apprenticeship. Positioning the computer as a tool for learning, the article argues that a complete integration of carefully designed computer experiences into a course can engage students in the course content at the level of the higher cognitive skills.
- "Compelled to Witness: the Social Realism of Henri Cartier-Bresson," Journalism History, Spring 1998. Twenty-five years after he stopped actively photographing as his body of work is absorbed into the art world and art market, Cartier-Bresson's career as a photojournalist is in danger of being overshadowed. This article intends to reclaim him as a magazine and book photojournalist. It argues that his style was realism and his approach was, on occasion, social realism. That is, that he used his camera to expose the contradictions of class and race with the hope that the resulting photographs might improve social conditions.
- "1940-1960." Catalog essay in Photography at Princeton: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of Collecting and Teaching the History of Photography. Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1998. This essay situates the images of 19 major art photographers into the historical context of the 1940s and 1950s. Photographers include Helen Levitt, Aaron Siskind, Weegee (Arthur H. Fellig), Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Edward Weston, Harry Callahan, Josef Sudek, Minor White, Ruth Bernhard, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Jean-Pierre Sudre, William Klein, Bill Brandt, and Paul Caponigro.
- "Gandhi's funeral by Margaret Bourke-White and Henri Cartier-Bresson," History of Photography, (Vol 22, No 2) Summer 1998. This comparison of how two major Twentieth Century photojournalists covered the funeral of Mohandas K. Gandhi shows how two distinct camera technologies and two different personal approaches produced very different results.
- "Edward Steichen's Self-portraits," History of Photography, (Vol 22, No. 1) Spring 1998. Examines how Steichen, a leader in the turn-of-the-century Pictorialist movement who went on to become a major fashion photographer for Conde Nast publications, used a highly malleable photographic process to construct a romantic persona of himself as a heroic artist analogous to Beethoven.
- Work in progress. "The Face of North Vietnam: How Marc Riboud's 1968 photographic reportage argued the war was unwinnable." Conference paper for the Society for Photographic Education's midwest regional conference, Oct. 24, 1998, and a research presentation at the School of Journalism, Dec. 4. To be submitted as a journal article to Visual Communications Quarterly. While several iconic combat photographs presented American involvement in the Vietnam War as morally wrong, this article maintains that Riboud's photographs from Hanoi and North Vietnam argued that the war could not be won by the U.S.
On faculty since 1990.