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Photo by Abby Tonsing

J501 Public Affairs Reporting graduate students waited for the action at the Indiana State House Thursday.

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J501 Public Affairs Reporting professor Carol Polsgrove is known for taking her students away from campus to conduct some firsthand reporting on the ground. She did, after all, take a former J501 class to cover Hurricane Katrina’s devastation along the Gulf Coast in late 2005.

And now, in her last semester of teaching, Polsgrove and her public affairs reporting class attempted to get some face time with Indiana state legislators. Thursday, Polsgrove and 10 graduate students traveled to the Indiana State House in Indianapolis. The trip to the State House was a first for Polsgrove and her J501 class.

Students wanted to meet with state senators and representatives to ask questions about various active bills in this year’s legislative session. Some managed to make face-to-face contacts with legislators, while others played the “hurry up and wait” game.  They waited to witness live legislative sessions but both political parties quickly moved to caucus.

“Well, I think we got a really accurate view of what goes on at the state legislature, which is a lot of things happen behind the scenes,” Polsgrove explained.

“It seems to me it’s important to do something like this even if nothing really big or dramatic happens,” she said. “It enables you to envision the legislature at work in a way that you can’t from just calling people or just looking at bills on a Web site, that you get a much better feel of the place where human drama is taking place, even if you don’t see a big debate or a major vote.”

Photo by Abby Tonsing

Professor Carol Polsgrove talked with graduate student Greg Ruhland while visiting the State House.

That’s not to say the day was a bust for the young reporters.

Polsgrove and her students did pick the brains of two guests during lunch at Government Center South. John Stieff, director of office of code revision at Legislative Services Agency, explained the complicated process of how a bill becomes law. Niki Kelly, Indianapolis bureau chief of the The Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, shared tales of her eight years of experience covering the Indiana legislature.

The trip was in conjunction with the class’ unit on reporting on legislation and lawmakers. All students will be producing reports this semester, and two already have done so: Charli Wyatt’s story, “Language minorities cut from cultural competency bill,” was published on The Bloomington Alternative’s Web site and Daniel Robison completed two stories for WFIU, the Bloomington NPR affiliate.