Guest Lecturing Third Years

Dr Werkman, Grace and Ali after the lecture

I am an active board member of OnFile, an immigrant Writers and Journalists Association based in Amsterdam. We carry out several activities including mentoring, publishing a magazine, trainings and cafes among many other things. When the Windescheim School of Media contacted OnFile to provide a guest lecturer on Media Coverage in Africa specializing in South Africa, I was an automatic choice. Grace Akeba, an immigrant Cameroonian journalist was identified to talk about Ghana.

Mirjam Wulff, the project coordinator of Beyond Your World at Lokaal Mondiaal sent us an email with detailed information over the exercise. She explained that Lokaal mondiaal organizes an international exchange program called Beyond (y)our World. As part of this program Dutch students of Journalism participate in courses and workshops on international cooperation, intercultural communication, developing countries, environmental issues and journalism. Afterwards, they travel to a country to personally get to know its inhabitants, culture, environment and challenges. They will then write articles and weblogs and create TV and radio items based on their research and their experiences. Among others, their articles will be published in Join, a Dutch student magazine.

The next destination for this project will be Ghana and South Africa. In April a group of 12 students of journalism from the Hogeschool Windesheim in Zwolle will be travelling to Ghana, another group of 7 students will be travelling to South Africa.

On February the 1st the group started with their preparation program. It was for this that we were requested to give a guest lecture about ‘media coverage Africa ’. The lecture was organized on Wednesday March 3rd, in the morning in The Hague from 10 till 12 noon. The students are in their 3rd year of Journalism and have no experience with travelling in Africa or reporting about/ from Africa. Right now, they are following lectures about media about development countries and issues and receive lots of background information about the countries they are about to visit.

During the lecture we placed this information in a broader context and shared our experiences as journalists in Africa. We also brought to light issues of press freedoms and our response to way the Dutch media reports about Africa and what the students should keep in mind when reporting about Africa.

The lecture took place at the conference hall of Oxfam Novib at Mauritskade 9 in The Hague. Ismail Awil was our contact person at Oxfam Novib. Dr Paul E. Werkman, a lecturer at Windesheim School of Media accompanied the students.

The Students