Global Journalism Education in the 21st Century: Challenges and Innovations – ‘an invaluable resource’
The World Journalism Education Council has just launched Global Journalism Education in the 21st Century: Challenges and Innovations.
By David Baines
Journalists are a competitive bunch, but when they meet colleagues from other countries, other cultures, they invariably share a common bond. When journalism educators meet – often former or still practising journalists themselves – they too share a common bond.
But in our different regions we face different challenges, where we face similar challenges we are developing different solutions and challenges that arise in one region soon emerge in others. The great benefit of meeting colleagues from around the world is the opportunity to learn from each other.
This volume has grown out of the series of three-yearly global gatherings, the World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC5 will be in Paris in July 2019). And Editors Robyn S Goodman and Elanie Steyn have distilled a fine blend of scholarship, expertise, insight and innovation from journalism educators in all corners of the globe. Journalism as a practice is at once global and local, and as educators it behoves us to reflect that complexity in our teaching and in our curricula, wherever our students hail from. This book – which is available now as a free download from The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas (hard copies are available on request).
The editors say – rightly – that it is a ‘practical/approachable reference book for educators, trainers, journalists, media activists, policymakers, foundations, non-government organizations, students, and others with a vested interest in quality journalism’.
I particularly commend the chapters by former AJE Chair Professor Chris Frost, who interrogates the tensions between training and education here in Britain; Mark Deuze in Holland, who asks how we can help our students to navigate a world of Martini media (available any time, any place, any how); Melissa Wall in the USA who presents a strategy to help students understand and practice journalism as a networked, yet liquid practice, and Mira K Desai who explores the challenges to journalism education in India, a country of enormous linguistic and cultural diversity.
https://knightcenter.utexas.edu/ebook/global-journalism-education-challenges-and-innovations