|
Steven Pasternack, Professor, Department of Journalism
and Mass Communications, New Mexico State University, Las
Cruces, New Mexico
Lecturing and Research: Curriculum Development in
Communications
Host: National University of Rwanda, School of Journalism
and Communication, Butare
Rwanda
July 2000-December 2000
|
|
In
1994, nearly a million Rwandans were murdered in 90 days. It was
a genocide perpetrated by Hutu extremists against the Tutsis,
but it was fueled, in part, by newspapers that stirred up the
age-old hatred. Today, as this tiny East African nation is inching
its way to recovery, the editors of some of those newspapers are
awaiting trial before a UN criminal tribunal, and Rwanda's new
president is looking to the press as a force for reconciliation.
Trouble is, there are hardly any trained journalists to be found.
Enter Steven Pasternack. A professor of journalism at New Mexico
State University, Pasternack, on his fourth visit to Rwanda in
three years, helped to set up a brand new journalism program at
the National University of Rwanda in the city of Butare. He arrived
in Rwanda as a Fulbright Lecturer in July 2000, to find 30 journalism
students eager to get started. "We established the School
of Communication from scratch," he explains. "We started
the school, created the curriculum, obtained equipment for a fully
networked lab, and started a pretty good collection of books for
the students."
Pasternack taught two courses -- one on media and ethics and
another on interview techniques -- where one of the biggest challenges
was encouraging students to put aside their cultural reluctance
to question authority.
"This was not so much a case of teaching 'Ten Things You
Need to Know If Thrown Out of a Public Meeting ' like we do here,"
he recalls. "Instead, I concentrated more on Article 19 of
the UN's Declaration of Human Rights, which states that everyone
has the right to an opinion."
Now one of the first Fulbright Senior Specialists, Pasternack
is back in Rwanda teaching, conducting assessments, and working
with journalists -- and looking ahead to returning yet again in
2002. "It's been a lot of progress, but there's a long way
to go in just about every area. In Rwanda, you measure progress
in centimeters, and we've already advanced
several of them."
Please contact us
if you would like to submit your own story and/or photographs.
|
