Update: Report is ready for download
Holding WJEC in an African country will go a long way towards exposing visitors from abroad to the issues in a neglected and marginalised continent. Too often, Africa is assumed to be a single thing, with Africans homogenised into humans untarnished by modernisation or alternatively people prone to acting dangerously. The “noble savage” stereotype.
Of course, Africa’s 53 (or depending on how you count, 54) countries are 1001 things – good, bad and mixed. But how the complexity gets reported both internally and internationally is an important issue in global media.
Journalism education can make a difference here. To that end, Prof Fackson Banda, SAB UNESCO Chair of Media and Democracy is leading a consultation process for a course on “Reporting Africa”. The process, supported by UNESCO, should result in a CD we can distribute at the WJEC.
If you have opinions or ideas, and/or can point to good resource materials, join in!
Formal Executive Summary
This project aims to research, develop and disseminate a possible syllabus on reporting Africa based on the UNESCO model curricula for journalism education for developing countries and emerging democracies.
The syllabus is an attempt at addressing the paucity of teaching and learning materials on reporting Africa. The curriculum is meant to provide a conceptually relevant and practically sophisticated basis for reporting a culturally diverse continent in continual flux. The syllabus, once researched and developed, will be subject to wide-ranging consultation and validation – not least through the WJEC-inspired panel on reporting Africa – before it is finally published and disseminated throughout the world. As such, an important element of this intellectual process is for African journalism and media experts and scholars to reclaim the epistemological and ontological ground in articulating a vision of journalistic practice that is rooted in their lived experiences.
You can access the full project documents and the consultation for the development of the model curriculum will be carried on at http://journalismschools.unesco-ci.org.