SUMMARY
The IAMCR/AIERI Professional Education Section initiated in 1984 a project for the promotion of textbooks in journalism education and got assistance from Unesco/lPDC in 1986 to carry out as the first stage a survey in Anglophone Africa. All 35 relevant institutions in sub-Saharan Africa were su~veyed, 19 of them in Nigeria and the rest in seven countries in West, East and Southern Africa. Over 300 textbooks used in courses of journalism and mass communication were identified. More than nine out of 10 of these come from the West, 69 percent from the USA alone. Only 6 percent of the textbooks used have an African origin, while the rest of the Third World has a marginal position and the Eastern socialist countries are non-existent. A burning need for additional teaching materials was discovered and over 40 textbook titles were identified as being prepared by the teachers who were interviewed in the survey. The report includes comprehensive lists of textbooks actually used and those being prepared. A discussion at the end provides perspectives for further activities in the area.
Textbooks are crucial in any educational programme - beginning with the ABC book of the primary school and ending with the scientific treatise of the field at 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 of 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 readings for the students, in any case as main sources of orientation and inspiration for the teachers.
Journalism and mass communication is a relatively young field 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 there is an imbalance of textbook supply with an Anglo-American dominance. 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 on 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 - became more and more recognized in the beginning of the 1980s.
The first international forum which raised the issue of communication textbooks as outlined above was the IAMCR Professional Education Section at its meeting in Paris in September 1982. A Unesco meeting of experts in April 1983, among other things, draw attention to the same textbook question. And in August 1984 the IAMCR Professional Education Section organized with Unesco's assistance a workshop on the topic in Prague (its proceedings were published in 1985 by the International Organization of Journalists IOJ). These background developments are summarized in the first section of Annex 1.
The present project is a natural outcome of these developments. The proposal submitted to the IPDC (Annex 1) was favourably received at the 7th session of its Intergovernmental Council in January 1986, as shown by the transcript reproduced in Annex 2. The Council granted 20,000 US dollars to the first stage of the project for 1986.In accordance with the plan of activities laid down in the project proposal, a search of a project coordinator was launced among relevant African colleagues leading to the choice of Mr. Olufemi Adefela, former Editor-inChief of the Nigerian News Agency. However, just before formalizing his assignment he had to withdraw as he was invited to be a special assistant of the Minister of Information.
The Professional Education Section met in August 1986 in New Delhi at the IAMCR General Conference (with financial assistance from the IPDC project) The meeting decided to appoint, instead of a project coordinator, a team of three project leaders: Pr,ofessors Kaarle Nordenstreng (Finland), Alfred Opubor (Nigeria) and Frank Ugboajah (Nigeria). The team, assisted by Ms. Ullamaija Kivikuru (Finland), prepared in New Delhi a questionnaire for a field survey and recruited Dr. Luke Uka Uche of the Department of Mass Communication, University of Lagos (Nigeria), and Mr. Francis Kasoma of the Mass Communication Department, University of Zambia, to carry out the field work
A more detailed account of the project arrangements is provided in Annex 3 (prepared as a progress report for Unesco) The questionnaire used in the field survey is reproduced in Annex 4. The training institutions in West, East and Southern Africa in which the survey was conducted are listed in Annex 5.
The questionnaire was designed to gather information on the nature and number of teaching materials used in each subject relating to journalism and mass communication, how these materials are acquired, their geographical origins, year of publication and availability of required textbooks and other materials. The questionnaire also sought information on perceived needs for testbooks and other teaching materials, where teaching staff normally obtain information about and acquire new teaching materials and the institution's possible contribution to a textbook development project in the region. In addition, background data were collected on the institutions. To supplement the data collected through both the formal and informal interviewing techniques, the consultants collected from the institutions such documents as course outlines and syllabi, handbooks, lecture notes, curricula and copies of publications produced by the institutions.
The survey was administrated personally by the two consultants who visited altogether 35 training institutions - all relevant schools in the region - in October and November 1986. Uche visited the 23 institutions in West Africa and Kasoma went to the 12 institutions in East and Southern Africa. Members of the teaching staff in each institution who were present when it was visited were requested to coplete copies of the questionnaire. In all, 79 faculty members, representing about 36 percent of the 220 full-time teaching staff in all 35 institutions were interviewed .
After the consultants delivered their reports and the original questionnaires, the project leaders team met in Paris in January 1987 and prepared the first draft of the present report. It was submitted to Unesco to formally complete the contract made against the 20,000 dollars. However, the primary data gathered with the questionnaires needed to be further elaborated and complemented, in particular for West Africa. Hence the team agreed that its member Ugboajah will continue the analysis, whereby another meeting was envisaged in Nairobi in March 1987. While taking these steps to prepare a final report of the first stage of the project, the team also outlined follow-up action in order to meet the remaining objectives set in the project proposal (see Annex 1 under Immediate objectives) .
The plan, as set out in January 1987, was to organize in Nairobi in March a one-day workshop with leading African communication educators, in connection with a meeting of the African Council on Communication Education (ACCE), to review the findings of the field survey and to identify the priority areas and subjects for textbooks from a list prepared as a result of the field survey. Another workshop was planned for June in Tampere (in connection with a Symposium on the Mass Media Declaration of Unesco) in order to benefit from relevant educators in Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America by soliciting their views on the identified priority areas and subjects as well as by identifying suitable materials from these other regions for eventual translation or adaptation for the African region. A further meeting of the project leaders with one or two consultants was foreseen during the second half of the year in order to produce a detailed operational plan, with budget breakdown, for the rest of the project over 2-3 years. Since the IPDC assistance of 20,000 dollars was practically exhausted with the survey (as originally foreseen), an additional contribution of 9,000 dollars from the IPDC was sought for these follow-up activities in 1987.
This plan could not materialize due to changing circumstances. First, the tragic death of Frank Ugboajah (on his way from the USA to the meeting in Nairobi) caused a delay of the completion of the field survey report. Secondly, the ACCE became interested in taking over the rest of the project as far as the African region is concerned, and this approach was met with sympathy both at Unesco and the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), with a prospect for an IPDC project for the ACCE financed by SIDA. Third, the interregional meeting in Tampere did not come on because the Symposium was postponed. Moreover, Opubor was unable to continue as an active member of the team after January 1987 due to his other commitments.
Under these circumstances Nordenstreng remained as the only active project leader, and he met with the representatives of the ACCE and Unesco in Nairobi in March 1987. It was agreed that Dr. Kwame Boafo of the School of Communication Studies, University of Ghana (IAMCR International Council member and ACCE Executive Committee member) would carry out the remaining analysis of the questionnaires Ghana from West Africa and that he and Francis Kasoma (who in October 1986 was elected the ACCE President) would meet in Tampere in June among others to assist in completing and assessing the project. Moreover, it was agreed that the IAMC R wou Id not continue the implementation of its original project plan but would leave the rest of the activities after the survey to the separate IPDC project of the ACCE in cooperation with SIDA. The future role of the IAMCR was foreseen as that of an interregional forum which would facilitating the contacts and cooperation among various regions of the world in the field of textbook promotion.
Consequently, Boafo became a coauthor working on the analysis of the original data as well as further material provided by the respondents by mail (as response to a circular letter sent out in September 1987). On the basis of Boafo's work a new draft report was prepared, and it was discussed at a special workshop convened by Nordenstreng in Tampere in March 1988. On this occasion also present were the ACCE President Kasoma (as a visiting scholar at the University of Tampere), Professor K. E. Eapen from India (also as a visiting lecturer) and Professor Yassen Zassoursky from the Soviet Union (Chairman of the IAMCR Professional Education Section). The present report was finalized in light of the comments and proposals gathered at this workshop.
As indicated above, although the present report is issued under the names of Nordenstreng and Boafo, the project is much indebted, first and foremost, to Frank Ugboajah, as well as to Alfred Opubor, the two field consultants Francis Kasoma and Luke Uka Uche, and ultimately to the 79 African colleagues who served as respondents in the field survey.