Alexandre Gonçalves

Understanding Social Dynamics Through Data-Driven Insights

It was once said that real communication only takes place when people are communicating not only concepts but also themselves. I believe education is a privileged space for real communication. I love seeing my students making use, in practical settings, of the knowledge that I shared with them. I decided to post on this page some learning materials that I developed over the years. Other educators might find them useful. They give a glimpse of my teaching strategies.

Data Science Applied to Social Web Research

Professor Anya Schiffrin at Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, invited me to co-teach two courses with her: a Spring course named Global Media: Innovation and Economic Development and a Fall one titled Media, Campaigning, and Social Change. I was responsible for the classes on the use of computational methods to assess the effectiveness of media campaigns and the social impact of journalistic coverage. In the Fall, Minky Worden, from Human Rights Watch, also joined us. I worked with them from 2015 to 2020.

I also taught at Columbia Journalism School’s Summer program for investigative reporters from 2017 to 2019. In my classes, I focused on extracting information from web pages and social platforms to inform news stories.

Those courses were among the most rewarding experiences I had at Columbia. The content was quite similar in all of them—basically, social media APIs, web scraping, and some natural language processing. Most students had no previous experience with programming. For that reason, I based my classes on a set of open-source tools with graphical interfaces.

Here are some materials that I created to help my students:

Public Speaking and Media Training

I also taught corporate communication at IESE’s Executive MBA in Brazil between 2017 and 2019. Most of my students were mid-career managers and directors who worked for Latin American companies and multinational subsidiaries.

These are some slide decks (in Portuguese) that I put together for my classes:

Those slide decks are arguably the least interesting part of my course. Classes were organized as workshops and practical exercises constituted their better part. I am convinced that public speaking is an eminently practical skill, just like riding a bicycle. There is only so much theoretical concepts can do for you.

I often recorded my students giving short speeches. Then, I would ask them to watch the recording and, from a third-person point of view, evaluate their own performance. Subsequently, their colleagues in the class could add suggestions. Finally, I would share my thoughts and advice.

I also focused on media training drawing from my five-year experience as a science reporter. I would conduct mock interviews and other practical exercises to help them understand the common dynamics of an encounter with the press.

Journalism Ethics in the Digital Age

From 2016 to 2019, I conducted a course on journalism ethics at a master’s program that has trained news editors and publishers from Latin America’s most prestigious newsrooms. I only stopped teaching that course in the aftermath of the pandemic and, lately, to focus on my PhD dissertation.

image-left It represented a great opportunity to discuss themes that I care about, such as the role of the press in liberal democracies, justice and tolerance, journalistic integrity, cognitive bias, intellectual humility, power in media relations, etc.

Again, the most interesting part of my classes were certainly the debates and not my slide decks, but I decided to make some of them available here anyway (in Portuguese):

Science Reporting

As a journalist for O Estado de S. Paulo (2008–2012), I used to teach a course on science reporting in the newspaper’s prestigious training program for aspiring journalists.

Among other things, I taught my students to read scientific articles, to cultivate sources in academia, to request early access to embargoed papers from scientific journals, and to use infographics to make complex concepts accessible to the public. I even wrote a handbook (in Portuguese) for novice science journalists.