New journalism curriculum to improve competency of practitioners - Njuguna

The University of Rwanda is working on a policy to reduce the duration of courses in certain schools. Among these is the School of Journalism and Communication, where officials want to shorten the four-year bachelors degree programme to three years. The Education Times’ Solomon Asaba caught up with Joseph Njuguna, the acting dean of the School of Journalism and Communication, for a brief on the new plans. Below is what he had to say. Briefly tell us about your plans to revamp the curriculum for the School of Journalism and Communication The review is a priority because the last time the curriculum was reviewed was about seven years ago and we have not been quite satisfied with the way the current one has been serving the needs of our students in the industry. We have been able to identify several loopholes in it and it is high time we changed things and some of the pedagogical practices. This was the right time and it is actually a policy of the university that after about every five years we review the curriculum and align it with the industry needs. One of the highlights regarding the old curriculum is that it was far more theoretical than practical. It put more emphasis on theoretical course units than practice. We all know that journalism is majorly a practical course, yet the programme left our students with few areas of hands-on experience. I think this has reflected on the kind of products that we release onto the market. How many students and staff do you have and why are there plans to reduce duration of the course to three years? Overall, we have 250 students for the four years. The staff are about 10, although some of them are currently abroad on PhD studies. Changing the duration of the course is a policy by the university where some selected colleges will change to three years to match their counterparts in the region. Your target is to improve competency but how does this relate to the ever-changing requirements of the job market? As a school we have been able to interact with the market in several fora, for instance, during conferences, workshops, trainings and capacity building activities. We have also met face-to-face with a number of editors and media managers. I can say that they have always pointed to us that the kind of students that come out of the school do not often meet expectations. That is as far as our practical ability for writing stories or other media productions are concerned. We mainly exist because of the industry; then why not align ourselves to the industry. It is our duty to be more responsive to the industry needs and to this effect we have been able to do a lot of stakeholder engagements that allowed us to move towards the review of the curriculum. There are many private institutions involved in training journalists, do they provide the kind of training you want to achieve? I have made a lot of research on what private institutions produce but all products end up in the same industry. When comments come from the industry regarding the quality of what we are producing, they do not necessarily specify the type of students, meaning they talk about journalism in its entirety. Students in a ‘smart classroom’ at Ecole Secondare Technique de Gisenyi. The new journalism curriculum hopes to equip students with more hands-on skills required in today’s job market. / Solomon Asaba. My view is that probably even private schools also have issues to do with quality although our concern as the journalism school at the University of Rwanda is to set the pace. It would have been very much in order for us to do that alongside our colleagues in the private sector, but I think they might want to look at the curriculum if all of us need to serve the media industry in a standard way. Will this come with acquisition of more manpower? Yes, once the draft is approved we hope that the next phase will be the implementation which also comes with a lot of challenges, like you have cited about manpower. However, we shall need adequate staff, who are hands-on and well-tuned to the practical demands of the new curriculum and this will require people who go beyond the theory. Secondly, we have modules that might require investment such as labs, studios, computers and materials for learning and reading in the library. I think we have tried on that front already as we have a radio studio, a TV studio and a moderately stocked library. Also, we want to improve ICT and internet services and I think after the launch, we can improve on these facilities. After this fine-tuning, you eventually have to roll out the curriculum. How do you plan to do that? The new curriculum will be rolled out in phases because the first group to get involved will be the first-year students from the next academic year. That is after the curriculum has been approved. Continuing students will proceed with the current learning modules as they are gradually phased out. So we are hoping that in the next three to four years the new curriculum should be fully operational. We have engaged consultants on pedagogical practices on how to fine-tune the training and some of the ideas could even be implemented for the continuing students. Basing on your experience, is it true that journalism is a craft not a profession since competence matters most? I think there is some truth in that. A craft does not necessarily have to define the standards or procedures or limits of professionalism. Of course we cannot compare journalism for the moment with professions like engineering, medicine and the rest because those are well-established traditions in academia. Journalism is threatened at the moment with the introduction of new media technologies. Almost everyone who has a gadget wants to consider themselves as a journalist. You may want to agree with me that sometimes they do better than journalists in the media houses because some of their stories are more researched and more objective than what some journalists come up with. But having said that, going through a journalism school also has so many advantages. Just like any other degree programme, trainees are taken through all the professional aspects of producing stories which may be lacking in citizen journalism. As far as being a profession is concerned, the one thing that can distinguish us from people in citizen journalism is how we do our stories and the context. Those other people land on anything and call it news without necessarily considering all the elements of a news story. There is a shift in the way media runs in the 21st century. You realise that journalists will be on Twitter, among other social media; isn’t social media a serious threat to traditional media as we know it? Engaging in social media is very good for journalists because this media supplements everything else. You know that news comes from people, sometimes the social networking sites have a lot more and we benefit by digging it out. It is upon us to take the best out of the social media and contextualise it to be more palatable to the readers. It is a revolution that we cannot stop but make the most of it. We need to show the difference between what is offered out there and what we are offering. If we don’t show the difference, they will always be ahead of us. Are there any specific challenges you face in training journalists? The challenges are many; trainers or the experts are not many, especially those who are qualified. Some of the trainers in our schools have received degrees from other areas then joined journalism later, so they may not be the best to deal with both worlds – the field and the classroom. Journalism is a very practical course that requires a lot of facilities such as studios, laboratories and libraries, among others. If you look back at our situation, we are lacking on that front. How, for example, can you teach a class writing with a small studio and computer laboratory yet you want to give each of them an individual feel of the experience. The facilities need to be strengthened to accommodate the increasing number of students enrolling. How are you dealing with the issue of gender participation? In regard to our school, the ratio of men to women is quite appalling. You are talking about two-thirds being men. This is beyond our control because we only receive students who qualified and are admitted to the school. Of course, this shows that either there is no interest in journalism among females or the pass mark is too high for them. If there was an affirmative action that supports a lower cut-off mark for women, that would help. In the future we are trying to see if we can administer interviews before admission so that the school participates in the process and looks out for the best among both males and females. In that case we should be able to strike a balance. We have procedures that allow that.