Textbooks are crucial in any educational programme - beginning with the ABC book of the primary school and ending with the scientific treatise of the university. The training of journalists, or in general terms the education of communicators, is naturally based on a number of elements, including the personal experience of the teachers and the practical work of the students. But textbooks constitute a cornerstone in the training and learning process in this field as well. Their central role is well known in academic programmes, which typically have their courses built around certain textbooks. But their role is vital also in pre-university vocational or professional programmes - if not as direct reading for the students, then as main sources of orientation and inspiration for the teachers.

Journalism and mass communication are relatively young fields of study with a rapidly evolving body of knowledge. The literature of the field is far from established, especially in languages other than English. The predominance of English language literature reflects the fact that the field was first introduced and is quantitatively most developed in the United States of America. Accordingly, in light of the general state of the art in this field, it is obvious that Anglo-Saxon textbooks dominate. Likewise, it is obvious that part and parcel of the promotion of this field in any country is to bring about textbooks which are rooted in the national and regional realities.

In this respect the question of textbooks in communication education can be seen as an issue of cultural emancipation as understood in the debate around the new international information and communication order. At the same time the textbook problem represents another element of this new order: the need for a better awareness of the cultural and socio-political diversity of the world, whereby communicators should be educated not only to share a national perspective but to pay due attention also to other peoples and ultimately to the international community at large. Thus national and universal interests complement each other.

The idea of the new information order also contains the need to render material assistance to the developing countries so that they can set up necessary media infrastructures - including training facilities. Unesco's International Programme for the Development of Communication (IPDC) was established in 1980 to implement this particular aspect of the new information order. It was natural, then, that the problems of communication education - including the textbook problem - came to be more and more recognized at the beginning of the 1980s.

The first international forum which raised the issue of communication textbooks as outlined above was the IAMCR/AIERI Section on Professional Education which at its meeting in Paris in September 1982 drew attention "to the lack of adequate textbooks for journalism education in Africa and other parts of the developing world", as stated in the Section's report to the IAMCR/AIERI General Assembly. The report added that the problem "was recognized by the meeting as a challenge for the Section which provides a unique framework of collaboration between communication educators throughout the world with a view to reviewing various traditions and doctrines of professionalism and promoting textbook materials in line with the principles and aspirations of the new international information order".

The proposed activities are also to be seen as following up the recommendations of the meeting of experts on co-operation among regional communication training institutions (Paris, April 1983). This meeting recommended that textbooks relevant to regional and national needs be produced and published. The specific point was made that "where such textbooks and manuals are already in existence, efforts should be made to disseminate them to other regions with a view to adapting these publications to suit local needs".

On the occasion of its next regular meeting after Paris, the IAMCR/AIERI Professional Education Section organized in August 1984 in Prague, with Unesco's assistance, a two day workshop on educational materials used in the training of journalists and communicators in various regions of the world. This workshop initiated a proposal for a regional project intended for the training of journalists in Anglophone Africa, with extension to the Caribbean and Asia. The proposal was approved by the IPDC Intergovernmental Council at its 7th session in January 1986 and was granted 20,000 US dollars from the IPDC Special Account.

The project was launched by the Section during the IAMCR/AIERI conference in New Delhi in August 1986, leading to a survey of all the 35 institutions involved in regular training of journalists in sub-Saharan Anglophone Africa. Its final report by Kaarle Nordenstreng and Kwame Boafo was issued in the IAMCR Occasional Papers series (No. 5/1988).

After completion of the regional survey, in Spring 1987, it became clear that the African Council for Communication Education (ACCE) was prepared to take over a part of the project, notably to meet the immediate aim "to prepare and evaluate, in the regional context, a number of trial adaptations and new materials". Hence the ACCE submitted its own regional project on the development of communication teaching materials to the IPDC, and this project was approved in March 1988 and granted funding under a funds-in-trust arrangement with the Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA). A progress report of that parallel project by Kwame Boafo is included in the present report.

By the late 1980s there was a growing recognition of the need for more systematic interregional contact and co-operation - in communication education in general and textbook promotion in particular. The IAMCR/AIERI Professional Education Section, at a workshop in the University of Tampere (Finland) in March 1988 and at its main session during the Barcelona conference in August 1988, came to the conclusion that such an interregional approach is highly desirable and that the most appropriate form would be an interregional project under the IPDC.

Those involved in the deliberations about the new project were relevant regional organizations in Africa (ACCE), Asia (AMIC) and Latin America (FELAFACS), as well as the European-based world organizations IOJ and WACC. Thus, the project was to be seen as a joint venture between several non-governmental organizations and institutions, with the IAMCR/AIERI playing the role of catalyst and co-ordinator.

The terminology about teaching and study materials is not used uniformly in the various sections of this report, reflecting regional preferences and traditions. Textbook is the most frequently used word, normally indicating that a book is prescribed or recommended for a certain course. But this report, as its title indicates, deals with a broad range of educational materials for communication studies, though the emphasis is on the textbook.

Different terms are also used for the study process. Some call it simply communication education. Others speak of journalism and mass communication education, while still others prefer education for communicators or professional training, stressing the practical aspects of such education. Once again, the editors made no attempt to streamline terminology, because the regional contexts and the scope of different types of communication education are given in each section.

OBJECTIVES

The project was designed to introduce a system which is supposed to be institutionalized as a permanent form of interregional co-operation. In this context, the immediate objectives of the initial three-year period were as follows:

ORGANIZATION

The project was approved by the IPDC Intergovernmental Council at its 10th session in March 1989, with a grant of 50,000 US dollars from the Special Account for Phase I (one year). The transfer of the first instalment of this grant from Unesco to IAMCR was delayed until March 1990 - more than six months beyond what was originally foreseen. Nevertheless, the project was started according to the original plans in August 1989, relying on temporary financial arrangements through the IAMCR President's office and the project's base at the University of Tampere. The completion of Phase I with the present report was extended by three months beyond the original target of December 1990, but without exceeding the original budget.

A work plan and budget for the project were approved by the IAMCR International Council at its session in Budapest in August 1989. This body also confirmed the terms of reference for the implementation of the project through the University of Tampere (office of the President of the Professional Education Section) and appointed three of its members as a Monitoring Committee entrusted to review the project reports independently.

Immediately after this administrative launching of the project, the Professional Education Section held a meeting of its Steering Committee in Berlin (25-27 August 1989), attended by 10 Steering Committee members and three other experts which together constituted a panel for professional and academic leadership of the project (for details, see report of the meeting). The Berlin meeting specified in greater detail the work plan, budget and organization of the project. On this occasion it was agreed that the project would include also the Arab world as an additional region, in the form of a preliminary survey volunteered by colleagues from the Cairo University. (Another preliminary survey on Indo-China region was offered by the Berlin Institute but could not be carried out.) Thus the overall subdivision of the project was as follows:

ASIA

The fieldwork for the surveys and bibliographies was carried out by the regional teams according to commonly established criteria between October 1989 and June 1990. In the middle of this period, in March 1990, the Project Steering Committee held a second meeting in Berlin to hear progress reports from each team, to specify the composition of the regional reports, to determine the structure of the final report and to prepare an outline for the proposal of Phase II of the project. In mid-August 1990 a workshop was organized in Gödöllö (Hungary) for the representatives of all the teams concerned to prepare the first draft for the final report of the project. This was then presented to the IAMCR conference in Bled (Yugoslavia) in late August, where the Professional Education Section hosted a session devoted to the project. The discussions in Bled were followed by an agreement among the Project Steering Committee concerning complementary work to be done by the regional teams and the preparation of the final report. Finally the two coordinators (the present authors) met in Berlin in early March 1991 to put together this report.

The data base of the present survey can be summarized as follows:

Region	Total of		Surveyed		Textbooks considered
	countries	institutions	countries	institutions
SAARC	7	65	4	21	952
ASEAN	6	66	3	11	2285
LATIN AMERICA	20	244	10	90	130
ARAB	18	30	6	6	179
ANGL. AFRICA	8	37	8	35	316*

*Original IAMCR/IPDC survey (Nordenstreng and Boafo, 1988). Later the ACCE/IPDC project produced another inventory of 173 region-relevant textbooks (bibliography available as separate document).

METHODOLOGY

The textbooks surveyed were divided into 10 subject areas according to the following definitions which were agreed upon by the Project Steering Committee:

1.Print media
2.Electronic media
3.Advertising and public relations
4.Media management and economics
5.Media history
6.Media law, ethics and policies
7.Communication theory and research
8.Communication for development
9.Communication and society, international communication etc.
10.General readers and others

PRINT MEDIA include communication through books, posters, newspapers, magazines and other periodicals.

ELECTRONIC MEDIA refer to communication production through television, radio, cinema, musical cassettes and records as well as computers.

ADVERTISING and PUBLIC RELATIONS, respectively, refer to the promotion of goods, services and ideas as well as communication processes within different types of entities and with the general public.

MEDIA HISTORY means not only looking at how the various types of media started and developed over the years but also how the outlook on the role of the media on society and communication processes has changed over the years.

MEDIA MANAGEMENT AND ECONOMICS refer to the administration of mass media organizations including personnel and machinery on a self-sustaining basis.

MEDIA LAW, ETHICS AND POLICIES are three terms which are related but do not mean the same thing. In law, precepts and regulations that affect the performance of the media are considered in one way or another. Media ethics, on the other hand, looks at journalistic practices. It is concerned with the rightness or wrongness, goodness or badness of actions of journalists or media. Media policies - in fact communication policies - refer to the overall objectives and goals of communication and how to achieve them.

COMMUNICATION THEORY AND RESEARCH refers to conclusions and hypotheses based on empirical findings or on conceptual analyses regarding the characteristics and performance of the mass media in society as well as the general understanding of the phenomenon of human communication. It also considers research processes and methodologies in social sciences.

COMMUNICATION FOR DEVELOPMENT is sometimes known as development or developmental communication or development support communication or simply development journalism. It refers to the deliberate use of media to enhance developmental efforts.

The area of COMMUNICATION AND SOCIETY, INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION, etc. refers to an elaboration of the role of the media in society locally or globally. It can also be taken in the general sense of the relationship between communication and culture.

The last category of GENERAL READERS AND OTHERS was an attempt to lump together textbooks which did not fall under any of the above categories but which dealt with communication in one way or another. General readers are compilations from various authors.

Although these thematic categories have a wider scope, they do not reflect the curricula approaches of schools in some regions such as those of South American countries. In those countries, the topics were adjusted with some changes which were required in order to respond to the objectives of the investigations. In some cases these were taken as course areas, while in other cases they refer to general thematic guidelines.

Moreover, the concept of TEXTBOOK means a prescribed or recommended book, parts of which students are required to study and not necessarily a work which students are meant to study from cover to cover. The difference between a prescribed and a recommended book is thin. A prescribed book contains material which is directly relevant to a course whereas a recommended book contains material that is generally related to a course.

A big problem in the project turned out to be the criteria used in determining the number of textbooks from region to region and from country to country. Some regions included all works, even those rarely or never used. In some cases even books of a general nature which were not for communication were cited. Some surveys also included titles which were merely listed in syllabi but were rarely or never used. One or two regions used titles which did not represent books 'per se' but were papers or pamphlets. The Arab region preliminary report included unpublished materials such as theses and other mimeographed literature. This reflected another difficulty, namely that of leaving out articles and general documents which many teachers said they found very useful for teaching.

The category of translated books was not clear with regard to which language the translations were made from. All translations, regardless of which language, were therefore included in the data on the presumption that they were translated from one language to another to be made useful in a particular region.

Regarding place of publication, it was not always clear whether what was meant was the place of first publication or the place of subsequent publication. For instance, can a book first published in Spain but later republished in Colombia be considered to be published locally in Colombia? Many of the South American books were said to be published locally in this sense. In some cases, such as SAARC and African countries, books reprinted in these countries by multinationals were not considered as being locally published. On the other hand, if a person went to India and while teaching there wrote a book which was published locally, that book should be regarded as a local publication. But if that person returned home and wrote a book which was published in his home country, book would not be considered as being locally published in India.

The categorization of books according to period published was useful because it suggested to what extent the books were outdated. In some cases, the year of publication of a particular book a teacher is using matters. For instance, one cannot teach newspaper editing today using a book published 20 years ago because techniques have changed a great deal. In many cases the date used refers to the edition used, not to the original publication date which in fact is the information required. However, there are some topics that are ageless. For instance sociology of communication, semiotics and history of communication are areas where one can use old as well as new books. Unfortunately it was not possible to trace the year of publication in all cases.

The enormous difference among countries, even within the same regions, made generalizations very difficult. In Central America, for example, there are ten countries but 70 percent of the schools belong to Mexico. In South America, Brazil alone has 48 percent of the schools. Some countries like Cuba and Nicaragua, due to their very special political development, use bibliographic material that is rarely shared by others.

* * *

In conclusion, it should be emphasized again that this research is essentially a survey which provides some quantitative base-line data on resource materials for communication education. It should also be noted that no such survey has been conducted before.

The big question arising now is what should be done next. It is not for the authors of this introduction to answer this question. But in the course of gathering data and discussing them at various meetings, participants have already realised that the absence or availability of textbooks is only one problem. Another equally important problem is how textbooks and other educational resources can and should be used in the whole process of learning. Fortunately they have also come to know the strategies which Latin America (FELAFACS) and Africa (ACCE) have adopted to plan and increase the production and improve the dissemination of culturally relevant educational materials. Much more attention must be given to the technical-pedagogical questions of how to produce a good textbook, and who are the likely persons able to do the job. Similarly, distribution problems have to be solved as a matter of urgency, for what is the use of such educational materials if they cannot be marketed among those they were intended to serve? Which are the publishers in developing countries who are willing to go an extra mile with the communication institutions? Finally, it is the conviction of all participants that the process should be continued. So far it has led to a fruitful interaction between organizations and individuals in the developing world. Yet it is only a beginning.