Abstract
Since the launch of the first Arabic-speaking journalism education program in Egypt in the late 1930s, this academic sector has made slow, yet significant headways into supporting the development of professional journalistic practices in the Arab world. While some Arab world journalism programs have managed to secure international accreditation, others have earnestly enhanced learning outcomes through stronger engagement with the media industry and the accommodation of digital features into their curricula. But an online survey of Arab world journalism education programs carried out by the author in 2019 suggests that this academic sector remains hugely underdeveloped in both curricular contents and professional methodologies. The author argues that for journalism education to successfully serve as an agent of positive change across the Arab region, it has to embrace four key standards: integral interdisciplinary knowledge, balanced theory and practice, strong engagement with the media industry, and socially and culturally relevant ethical and professional values.
TopIntroduction
Since the introduction of the Arab World’s first Arabic-speaking journalism program in the late 1930s at Cairo University1, journalism has remained a rather contested subject of study in the region’s higher education, especially at state universities. In the post-colonial era, higher education in the Arab region was conceived as a key driver of national socio-economic and cultural development in which the state played a leading role. To a large extent, that resulted in a good part of the post-colonial journalism curricula being substantially informed by varied state conceptions of media as vehicles of political mobilization, cultural fulfillment, and socio-economic development. According to the ‘developmental communication’ model that grew out of the Western ‘modernization paradigm,’ journalists were expected to serve more as advocates of state achievements than as independent voices of their communities. During the Cold War (1950s to the late 1980s), journalism curricula in socialist-oriented Arab countries promoted a view of media as tools of resisting colonial dominance and preserving cultural identity. But as globalization dawned on the Arab region in the early 1990s, some journalism programs at Arab universities came to be modeled after their Western-style counterparts, embracing significant knowledge about freedom of speech, objectivity, watchdog media functions, commercialization, and democratic governance. In the second decade of the 21st Century, the proliferation of digital technologies has created a shift in the scope and content of journalism education, becoming more increasingly informed by visions of online media empowerment for both users and journalists.
The transformative socio-political and military developments experienced by the Arabic-speaking region in the past six decades have only served to assert the role of journalism education in promoting socio-cultural and economic development and in supporting an emerging media industry. Some of those programs embraced key features of American-style liberal arts education, enabling journalism students to engage with interdisciplinary knowledge from diverse humanities and social sciences fields. Some have also sought and received accreditation from the U.S.-based Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (ACEJMC). Furthermore, Arab journalism educators seem to have shown strong interest in bridging the gap between the classroom and the newsroom by promoting collaboration with the industry and updating their professional standards in sync with market transitions in print, broadcast, and online news. All in all, most journalism programs have maintained on-campus studio and lab facilities to enable students to practice their journalistic skills in a semi-professional academic environment. Across the region, this feature has been designed to support the deployment of digital and online content creation techniques and research methods in journalism curricula. Ethical standards with significant universal relevance have also been integrated into journalism curricula to enable graduates to properly cope with local and global journalistic work situations.
But as much as Arab World universities have provided opportunities for journalism education to thrive and contribute to the region’s socio-economic and political development, journalism programs continue to grapple with a range of challenges relevant to the programs and to their broader external environments. Program-specific challenges include interdisciplinary knowledge, theory-practice balance, engagement with the industry, and ethical and professional standards. Challenges exterior to the journalism programs include lacking academic freedom, state censorship, and digital technological disruptions. The author argues that for journalism education to successfully serve as an agent of positive change across the Arab region, it must embrace four key standards: Integral interdisciplinary knowledge; balanced theory and practice; strong alignment with the media industry; and socially and culturally relevant ethical and professional values.
Key Terms in this Chapter
UNESCO: The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization was established in the immediate post-World War II era with a mission to promote world peace and understanding through international cooperation in education, sciences, culture, communication, and information.
Curriculum: A collection of lessons and assessments used in teaching subjects in schools or colleges to enable students to practice and achieve proficiency in content and applied learning skills.
Interdisciplinarity: The combination of two or more academic disciplines or fields of study. Interdisciplinarity is a key component of liberal arts education programs at universities around the world.
Ethics: A branch of philosophy that is concerned with the behavior of individuals in society. Ethics examines the rational justification for our moral judgments to determine what is morally right or wrong.
State Censorship: The suppression of speech, public communication, or other information by the state as based on claims of safeguarding national security or social peace.
Academic Freedom: The freedom of teachers and students to teach, study, and pursue knowledge and research without unreasonable interference from the institution and beyond. Academic freedom derives from the idea that the free exchange of ideas on campus is essential to good education.
Journalism: The profession of gathering, assessing, creating, and presenting news and current affairs on numerous platforms that include print, broadcast, or online media. Journalism operates according to well-defined ethical and professional standards that, among other things, include objectivity, responsibility, and fairness.
Digital: Refers to electronic technology that uses binary digits (bits), zeros and ones, to generate, store and process data. These bits are grouped together to represent data such as numbers, letters, images, or sounds.
Internship: A professional learning experience that offers meaningful, practical work related to a student's field of study or career interest. Internships range in duration from one month to six months.
ACEJMC: The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication is a U.S.-based body entrusted with the evaluation of professional journalism and mass communications programs in colleges and universities inside the United States and abroad.
Technological Disruptions: Innovations that significantly alter the way consumers, industries, or businesses operate. Twenty First Century disruptive technologies include e-commerce, online news sites, ride-sharing apps, electric vehicles, and GPS systems.
Arab World: Includes a geographical area extending from Morocco on the Atlantic Ocean to Bahrain in the Arabian Gulf. Politically, this region consists of 22 states with a population exceeding 400 million, the overwhelming majority of them subscribe to the Muslim faith.