Pixel International Conferences

Higher education in South Africa is currently beset by calls to transform, decolonise and re-Africanise curriculums. However, while university management across most institutions are attempting to heed this demand and request that staff decolonise and re-Africanise, there have yet to be any clear instructions as to how this should occur, or what, in fact, is meant by these terms. While some argue that a decolonised and Africanised curriculum would include building “a foundation of faith that differing African men and women can develop their own styles of […] education” (Hochheimer, 2001: 97), others in South Africa have called for the complete eradication of any material or teaching method that derives from the West (Wingfield, 2017).  In addition to such demands, these directives become even more challenging when teaching journalism and media studies because South African newsrooms are shaped by Western liberal pluralist values, ethics and practices. As argued by Botma (2016: 106), such a “context presents a substantial ethical challenge” as journalism programmes are expected to train and prepare students for a career which adheres to such a paradigm, but simultaneously conform to non-descript definitions of decolonisation and re-Africanisation that often contradict the ethos of South Africa’s newsrooms. Therefore, this paper, in its discussion of these challenges and what they mean for the development of journalism curriculums in South Africa, uses the journalism programme at the University KwaZulu-Natal as a case study to highlight how such strategies can be incorporated into a South African curriculum in order to remain relevant to the needs of South Africa’s journalism industry and heed the call for decolonisation and re-Africanisation.   

Keywords: Journalism education, decolonisation, re-Africanisation, South Africa, teaching practice.

References:

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