Crucial need for a rethink of journalism training in Kenya

Parliamentary journalists follow proceedings Parliament on Thursday 18/12/14 during the Security Amendment bill. [PHOTO.BONIFACE OKENDO/STANDARD]

About six years ago, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger suspended the search for a new dean of the school of journalism on grounds that the school needed to rethink its mission.

“To teach craft of journalism is a worthy goal but it is clearly insufficient in this new world…while there is a role for university skill’s training, it should not be the dominant position,” he argued.

He encouraged the school to be intellectually more grounded and establish a functional knowledge with the liberal arts disciplines. There was a furore from the academic and industry fraternity. But Bollinger spoke to a common dilemma in the field. While there is a formalisation and standardisation of universities’ journalism training today, there is still a large number of journalists and academics who believe a journalism degree is not really a prerequisite to excelling in the profession.

Academic rigor

Some scholars believe journalism programmes need to justify their academic rigor. Columbia’s journalism crises point to local dilemmas.

In Kenya, journalism was never taught as a stand-alone degree programme until only recently. For East Africans studying in the 80s, the nearest one could get to a BA degree in journalism and media studies was St Augustine’s University of Tanzania. At Moi University, a major in media studies existed as part of the integrated Information Sciences programme.

The University of Nairobi offered a post graduate diploma in journalism. The present crop of senior journalists went through these schools. Many more learnt through apprenticeship, getting socialised into newsrooms with tons of passion and unrelated qualifications. Today, there are more than 40 different programmes in different universities offering studies under the rubrics of media and journalism studies. But problems in training and curricula are legion. Upon my return from Germany after completing my PhD, I was thrust into a team developing and revising a new programme. Our first challenge was related to Bollinger’s charge to Columbia’s Journalism School. At what rate do we balance critical journalistic skills with a quality programme that will produce critical-reflexive thinkers?

We read the landmark Oregon report and the UNESCO model curricula, both which suggest a grounding in liberal arts education so as to avoid ‘too much industry oriented-trade schools’ and recommending a deliberate tilt toward a more generic model. We reached out to the department of political science and history, both the department of languages and literatures and the department of religion and philosophy for minors to the journalism programme.

We rightly felt that journalism training in the university can only acquire respectability if its students have an acquaintance with their history, their national literatures and can develop analytical skills through studying logic.

Looking back, I realise the trouble with journalism curricula in Kenya is its ‘inward’ look, where an entire programme is supposedly delivered from a singular media department with a handful of academics. I cannot comprehend how, for instance, journalists can be sufficiently trained in a university without understanding critical aspect of their country’s history.

Second, there is a problem of fusing theory and practice, with either too much pseudo practical courses, or too little theoretical based courses. Sometimes what is listed as practical is taught as theory and vice versa. A clear praxis approach where practical skills are informed by sound theoretical knowledge lacks in most of our journalism training. Most are under equipped and have poor or non-existent demarcation between making the most of their technical capabilities and their research orientation. While it is easy to run a radio station for journalism schools, putting up live TV stations can be both time consuming and downright resource wasteful.

Meanwhile, as we deliberately sought to ‘Africanise’ the curriculum and infuse it with a philosophy that would de-westernise its poise, we were faced with an unforeseen challenge. There was little research from which we could mount a specific journalism module.

Apart from Philip Ochieng’s masterful tirade against the press written in the early 80s, and a couple of biographies on actual newsrooms cultures and the Kenyan media field, there is pretty much nothing else. Most of our noted journalists prefer to write biographies of politicians except their own. They hence deny journalism schools a peak into Kenya’s media cultures. Research in the field is poor with scholars resorting to writing text-books reproducing western canons.

Matters are not helped with a paucity of PhDs. However all is not lost. Kenyan universities can deliberately make amends by pursuing an ‘African journalism’ normative based on her own philosophies of black cosmopolitanisms and a deliberate interest to speak to the material conditions of Africa’s subaltern masses.

Common challenge

Another common challenge with most journalism departments is the qualifications of academic staff. The journalism field has benefited greatly from trainers from a diverse a background as the social and the natural science. Prof Abdalla Uba Adamu, the current VC of Nigeria’s National Open University, is a natural scientist by training, but his research on Nigeria’s media has few peers. I am however concerned more by those whose training and actual research is at variance with their vocation of teaching journalism. In this regard journalism training has now become a ‘safe house’ and a ‘rehabilitation ground’ for survival academics despairing for a disciplinary identity.

But the greatest problem facing journalism training in Kenya is duplication and over-admissions. There is not a field with pointless specialisms as journalism and media studies. Kenya, unlike other developed countries cannot afford the indulgence of teaching allied modules like graphics, public relations, broadcast or advertising separate from a generalist media programme. 

Classes with over 50 students must be discouraged. Some schools in Kenya have up to five media related programmes. This signals a poverty of academic vision and a surplus of mediocrity. Worse, previous stand-alone liberal arts programmes like languages or literature have abandoned their rich traditions and vocationalised their orientations to obtain a bleach of media gloss. The result is a comical, potpourri of an express ticket to unemployment. But above all, journalism education is rather like teaching of acting and dancing. There is a basic unborn talent. Unlike other regular academic subjects, talent and pure intelligence are sometimes unrelated. This takes us back to Bollinger’s concerns of trying to fit ‘craft’ into an academic template. It calls for humility.

- Dr Omanga is a British Academy Fellow-University of Cambridge and a lecturer at Moi University