Improving Journalism Courses at Afghan Universities

IWPR’s Afghanistan office is running a series of events and training courses in preparation for a groundbreaking conference that will design a framework for a standardised journalism curriculum for universities across the country. 

The first pre-conference discussions, to be followed by two more sessions, took place at a meeting in Kabul from April 29 to May 1, which brought deans and lecturers from journalism schools at five state universities and the deputy minister for higher education, Mohammad Usman Babury.

“Meetings like this are like the water of life,” said Master Wahedi, dean of journalism at Shaikh Zayed University in the southeastern Khost region. “It was an opportunity for us to meet each other and exchange views, and to recognise our own shortcomings.”

The institutions concerned, in Kabul, Herat, Balkh, Nangarhar, and Khost provinces, are collaborating with four American universities under the Afghanistan Journalism Education Enhancement Programme, funded by the United States embassy in Kabul, and they used this first meeting to share information on current teaching methodologies and the new resources they have developed jointly with their partners.

The dean of journalism at Balkh University, Mohammad Nazari, said the discussion was a “response to long-held expectations on our part”.

“I can say with certainty that this meeting will bring a new ray of hope for journalism practitioners in Afghanistan,” he said.

IWPR’s country director in Afghanistan, Noorrahman Rahmani, said it was clear that many journalists felt dissatisfied with the way the subject was taught at the moment.

“During this meeting, I sensed a gulf between working journalists and Afghan journalism schools. Journalists we’ve worked with complain that the schools lack study resources and teach from obsolete course materials, and that this is a hindrance when they enter the job market,” he said. “For their part, journalism schools express unhappiness that many media outlets in Afghanistan are run by people who aren’t professionals and don’t have degrees in journalism. I’m hoping that these discussions and the Kabul Journalism Conference… will close that gap.”

At present, Afghan journalism schools use curricula that differ substantially from each other. One outcome of the meeting was a pledge that they would compile summaries of what they teach, how it differs from institution to institution, and why that it is. IWPR will collate these descriptions as a basis for the next set of discussions. At present, Afghan journalism schools use curricula that differ substantially from each other.

“In three days of exchanging views, we came to understand the challenges facing the profession,” Babrak Miakhel, dean of journalism at Nangarhar University, said. “We discovered just how different the curricula that faculties use are, and we considered mechanisms for bringing them closer together.”

In his keynote address, Deputy Minister Babury said there were two ways to go – either the participating journalism schools all agree on a common curriculum, or they opt for a more diversified approach. He called for a needs assessment that would look at which option was best for individual universities and for wider society.

In remarks at the end of the meeting, he suggested widening the scope of the debate to bring in privately-run universities as well. Faisal Karimi, who teaches journalism in the western city of Herat, also suggested expanding the number of participating academics.

The Kabul Journalism Conference which IWPR will run this summer in conjunction with the higher education ministry, Afghan state universities, the US embassy and select American universities is expected to draw around 25 lecturers in journalism from Afghanistan, up to five of their American counterparts, and 20 professionals working in print, radio, TV, and social media, as well as government and US embassy representatives.

IWPR will host two more discussion sessions ahead of the conference, and will also run a series of journalism training workshops for the five participating universities over the course of this project, which is being funded by the US embassy in Afghanistan. To ensure that the workshops met actual needs, each university chose three topics off a menu of eight offered by IWPR, covering basic news writing, safety and security awareness, TV debates, investigative journalism, photojournalism, communications and public relations, codes of conduct, and news writing for television.