As journalism educators continued streaming in, a couple of people trudged steadily back and forth to other meeting rooms, stealing empty chairs to add row after row to the back of the growing crowd.

By the time the discussion began, people were packed in, wall to wall, and a cluster of faces peered in from the doorway.

It was the second day of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication's 1995 convention in Washington, D.C., and one thing was clear: Many people who teach journalism at America's universities and colleges wanted to know more about civic journalism.

Back then, the few who covered the subject in class usually just added articles about civic journalism to their reading lists, or had students study examples of news organizations' pioneering efforts.

With the publication of Art Charity's book "Doing Public Journalism" and Buzz Merritt's "Public Journalism and Public Life" in 1995, and Jay Rosen's "Getting the Connections Right" in 1996, professors had texts to add.

Usually, these materials were used in upper-level courses such as advanced reporting or media management.

These days, however, many more professors are covering the subject, in courses ranging from basic news writing to audience research. They're also exploring a much broader range of teaching techniques.

Here is just a sampling:

H Dave Boeyink at Indiana University had his students discuss five ways of thinking about journalists' relationship to their community: as entertainers, objective conduits, watchdogs, advocates, or civic journalists. The class was then divided into teams, and each team developed a news coverage plan that fit one of those philosophies, as a way of exploring how coverage is influenced by each of those roles.

"The aim of the exercise is not to demonstrate the superiority of civic journalism. Rather, it is to let people see how critical the relationship of media and society is to the development of news coverage," Boeyink says. "In that context, they get to see for themselves the values--and the problems--of civic journalism."

H Jill Swenson at Ithaca College had students in her "Issues and the News" class actively explore what happens when journalists "cross the line" between observation and involvement. Each student was required to choose an issue that he would monitor and report on throughout the semester. They were also required to get personally involved in making a difference with respect to that issue.

A student who chose to cover hunger, for instance, did a radio documentary about food stamp program reductions and ran a canned food drive. Her interaction with people who benefited from the food drive gave her both sources who trusted her because they felt she cared as well as insights into food stamp recipients' ideas for welfare reform. "The calls for reform by those inside the system have been completely missed by the public," Swenson says.

Students then wrote reflective essays about the consequences of crossing the line. These essays showed that getting involved had definite advantages--including redeeming journalism in the eyes of their sources--and posed challenges that required students to do lots of "internal grappling," Swenson says. "When you get close to those sources, it's not as clean and neat."

Students also found a line that lies beyond the one they crossed--the dividing line of motivation. "With business and government elites, the motivation for reporters crossing the line is to either help the source or to help themselves," Swenson said. "With the line-crossing that occurs in public journalism, the motivation is to help the public, and there is an enormous difference. The same kinds of conflicts just did not arise."

H Jackie Farnan's students at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y., did an extensive public listening project--including interviews, a forum and an e-mail exchange--in their first foray into civic journalism. The goal was to identify issues important to the student body.

The biggest challenge was for each student to explore new ways of interviewing five other students. "They felt that they should steer or shape the interview, and that meant asking focused and direct questions," Farnan says. "I said, 'Just back off a little bit. We are engaged in a different enterprise--let go of control and understand that listening is different than traditional interviewing.

"For a while they were at sea, and things seemed very nebulous and unconnected until we got enough information that they could see a pattern." The pattern was that some seemingly unrelated campus concerns--diversity, racism, vandalism, and the professionalism of campus security officers--were all part of what students saw as a larger issue: the erosion of mutual respect on campus. The students then wrote a cluster of stories about those concerns, tying each to the respect issue.

Several professors--including Barbara Zang at the University of Missouri, Mike Killenberg at the University of South Florida and Sharon Hartin Iorio at Wichita State University--have sent students out into the surrounding community to talk to citizens.

For years, Zang has had basic news writing students do "beat reports" in her beginning news writing course, then develop the material they gather into in-depth, issue-based feature stories. Before the recent presidential election, Killenberg had students interview citizens about whom they planned to vote for and what issues were important to them. Graduate student Eric Eyre then wrote an in-depth story for the St. Petersburg Times about their findings. Sharon Hartin Iorio had her students do in-depth interviews with citizens about election-related concerns this fall as part of a research course about the emerging field of interactive audience studies.

Cheryl Gibbs is one of those professors who sends students out into the community to talk to citizens. In the past, she has had students read the local daily newspaper throughout the term and write a final paper comparing the "conversation" in the paper with the "conversation" in the community. Earlham College is in Richmond, Ind.