Background – the GEJI project

This is the long version of the GEJI project – taken mostly from the original project document as supported by the EU and the Australian Government:

Rationale
Objectives
What will be done
Structure of Collaboration
Benefits and challenges
Evaluation
Language
Supporting Organisations
Students

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Rationale

Environmental sustainability is an increasingly urgent issue confronting humankind. If the considered scientific predictions about climate change, global warming and species extinction are valid, then humankind has decades at most, and more likely years, to take far-reaching steps in economic and social policy to avert disaster. This will involve profound social and political ramifications for governments and citizens, and is already controversial in many countries. Both the environmental challenges and the socio-political responses to them involve inter-linked factors ranging in scale from the global to the local.

Meeting these challenges will involve well-informed populations interacting with governments and industry to devise and implement adequate policy responses. Journalists and the media will have a crucial role in mediating these interactions, in providing critical information and analyses to the public and representing public opinion and perspectives to governments. Journalists will need a well-rounded, international grasp of the environmental and social factors at work, and to understand the national differences and nuances in approach to these issues.

This situation requires an appropriate response in the education of future journalists. It will require an internationalisation of the curriculum with special reference to the environment, the development of networks of professional collaboration in research and reporting across national borders, and a sensitivity to cultural differences in responding to these challenges. This project addresses these challenges in journalism education.

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Objectives

Environmental Journalism is by its very nature both global and local, involves issues of social and cultural difference between populations, and in the current period possesses an urgency that focuses the mind of governments and societies on the international accountabilities of their attitudes and actions. Specifically, it is not possible for journalists to research and report stories on the environmental challenges without considering the international dimension in all its bio-physical, political, economic and cultural dimensions, and therefore it is an urgent challenge for journalism educators to develop curricula and pedagogies that foreground this factor for students. We know of no other collaboration of this scale or intensity: this is the first of its kind and the consortium therefore believe this project will make a significant contribution to journalism education internationally, specifically in the field of environmental reporting but more broadly to any field of journalism with international dimension, such as economics, war and conflict, religious difference, human rights and international law to name a few.

GEJI will give participating students and teachers, through their teaching and learning activities and their journalism, a direct experience and appreciation of European and Australian societies and institutions, cultures and environments, and they will use this in their journalism to better inform the wider populations on these issues. The outcomes – wiki database, published journalism by students and staff, and associated scholarly research by staff – will be published and therefore available for educators in this and other fields to adapt and develop for their own purposes, as well as to the general public. This amounts to a wider social multiplier effect for the benefits of the project beyond the staff and students involved, addressing the urgency of environmental sustainability in the face of climate change.

Our objectives are:

• to help promote a transnational journalistic examination of environmental issues ranging from global through national to local and personal activities
• to build a strong Australian/European transnational partnership with both higher education journalism institutions and leading media to develop and implement a new international educational program in journalism including courses in environmental issues, with a view to developing joint degrees out of this project
• to develop a mutually reflexive approach to both journalistic practice and academic teaching practice of journalistic methods in order to identify and adopt best practice among the partner media and universities in our developing journalistic and academic practice
• to develop and implement transnational courses as an exemplar for journalism education which may lead to a qualitative improvement of the journalistic profession as a whole
• to identify and resource appropriate topics and themes in environmental sustainability for journalism teaching, research and reporting
• to devise and implement international collaboration in student learning and assessment tasks, using online educational technologies
• to develop an online database (in the form of a wiki) to compile and continually update and archive relevant information for reporting the environment
• to develop a scholarly research program in media coverage of environmental issues to complement the teaching and learning program, and provide a critical reflexivity to both the journalism and the scholarship
• to launch sustainable transnational student and staff exchanges among journalism education institutions in Australia and the EU (and elsewhere) in order to intensify cross-cultural familiarity
• to give journalism students a unique professional and social experience they may use in their future professional lives as journalists

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What will be done

The four Australian and four EU higher education institutions each offer journalism education to undergraduates for entry into the journalism profession. Each institution in the partnership is recognised as a national and/or regional leader in journalism education, with long-term and close relations with media organizations for internship, publication and graduate employment. Each institution already offers a curriculum in Environmental Journalism, either as a discrete unit or as an option in units such as Investigative Journalism or Specialist Reporting.

The institutions share a common approach to journalism education, founded on practice-based learning where students’ assessment tasks require the production of real journalism for publication/broadcast. Teaching materials include background research archives, contemporary generic examples of published reports, scholarly literature related to the content focus (eg national politics, industrial relations, the environment) and to media studies. The pedagogy involves intensive engagement by students with teachers and other students in the development of story ideas in the context of contemporary news coverage, field research, the structuring of reporting narratives, review for accuracy and legal compliance, and support for publication in mainstream and specialist media outlets.

In this project, a common curriculum in environmental journalism will be developed, to be delivered by each institution with its own particular style and approach, but in collaboration with the other partners and utilising feedback from the media organizations and participating organisations and ministries. That collaboration will involve shared activities and resources, including teacher seminars, podcasts of lectures, documentary materials, online tutorial discussions, collaborative research and reporting, and common assessment tasks to be performed by students in collaboration with their international colleagues. Assessable outcomes of these collaborative tasks will include

contributions to a cumulative online database (in the form of a wiki) of reports and resources relevant to environmental reporting
published investigative journalism into environmental issues with local and global dimensions
an interactive reflection by the students on their experience and interpretation of the international collaboration.
Student/staff mobility will add depth and breadth to the project by facilitating direct student experience of national similarities and differences in reporting the environment, and for teachers in facilitating more direct and more intense interaction in developing global collaboration in environmental journalism, its curriculum and pedagogy, and associated scholarly research.

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Structure of Collaboration

The consortium has eight partners, four each across Europe (one joint – University of Helsinki and Same University College) and Australia, and with one institution nominated as the leader for each region (DSJ and UTS respectively). All information for student and staff needs relating to the project will be available on this GEJI website. UTS will host the central site handling the GEJI project teaching and learning interactions, which will take place behind a firewall. The journalism and the wiki (after it has been developed and trialled) will be published on the web.

There will be a staff-only section of the project site hosted by UTS, which will have sections for discussion and communication on administrative, pedagogical and research components of the project. These folders will allow for multi-lateral sharing of experiences and planning among the project managers, so that both academic and administrative project managers will be in regular contact with their colleagues.

Staff mobility will be reciprocal over the period of the scheme, to ensure that all institutions and localities receive equitable and maximum input from their partners, and opportunities to contribute their specific perspectives on the project. Participants will be the teachers teaching GEJI modules of the semester programs offered within the GEJI project and staff organising the GEJI project. There will be an annual conference for teachers, which will include both academic and administrative matters. The second conference is planned to take place in connection with the Copenhagen Climate Conference December 2009. The concluding staff conference in Europe in 2011 will be titled ‘Reporting the Global Environment – the challenge for journalism’, and will include research papers from GEJI participants and invited speakers, and be open to interested academic and media participants beyond the GEJI partners.

Each institution will send no more than two, and typically one student each year to each of the partner universities in the corresponding region. These students will be selected on a competitive basis following a call for Expressions of Interest, and the partners will exchange shortlists through their regional co-ordinator to ensure balance, diversity and complementarity in the student characteristics. Once the students have been selected, their travel and induction arrangements will be handled by the international student office at the host institution, which will take responsibility for the logistics of the mobility. Monash University will co-ordinate a pre-departure familiarization program for all mobile students using the GEJI site, with structured weekly online discussion topics, participation by returned students to share experiences, and the option of confidential mentoring and counselling using Skype software. This program will deal with cultural acclimatisation issues, variations in academic terminology and practices, etc. Several of the universities have active journalism student associations, and all have extensive networks for integrating new students into student publications and social activities. GEJI will operate a buddy system where the mobile students will be met on arrival by local students to secure a smooth start and social integration. All the universities have a senior academic in the Faculty who assists international students, and at each university there will be a journalism academic appointed as mentor/counsellor for the GEJI student cohort.

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Benefits and Challenges

For future journalists:
greater familiarity with the international dimensions in reporting environmental issues
improved cross-cultural sensitivity to international perspectives on environmental issues
access to a cumulative database of information and analysis on local and global factors in environmental reporting, and capacity to contribute to development of this database
access to international sources of information to complement local sources
experience in international and cross-cultural online collaborations in research and reporting
For journalism educators:
experience in international collaboration in curriculum design and delivery
access to international resources and experience in curriculum design and delivery
access to international resources in journalistic research and reporting
experience of cross-cultural factors in journalism education
international research collaborations in media coverage of environmental issues
Anticipated challenges
responding appropriately to different legal and policy environments regarding role of the press, eg defamation laws, freedom of information legislation, etc
impact of ignorance and insensitivity in dealing with cross-cultural factors in communication
controversy at local and national level over role of the media in reporting international perspectives in conflict with local and national interests

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Evaluation

Because the nature of the collaboration exercise involves constant participation and initiative/response among the GEJI participants, there will be extensive, continuous interactive communication at all stages of the project, which in itself will be an informal component of the formative evaluation.  Formally, at the end of each semester each partner institution will conduct a formative evaluation of the semester’s achievement using their institution’s Teaching and Learning Centre. All institutions use anonymous subject feedback questionnaires which provide a quantitative measure of student evaluation of teaching quality, achievement of subject goals, appropriateness of assessment items, overall learning experience and acquisition of generic and specific skills.  Similar questionnaires will be used to assess overall overall course experience, including internships, teaching and language support and cultural exchange. We will consol the results of this evaluation process and co-ordinate its interpretation.

Formative evaluation will also include qualitative tools such as student focus groups, student contributions to an evaluation and feedback discussion board on the project website, staff reflections on the journalism output and interactive discussion using an online  e-Portfolio facility. Using e-Portfolio software, students’ reflective journals provide an innovative way of allowing them to evaluate their own learning experiences, while sharing their reflections with others and providing staff with continual feedback. Assessment criteria for such journals direct students to evaluate specifically their substantive learning of reporting and research skills, ethical issues, cross-cultural issues as well as the learning experience itself.

There will also be interviews and feedback sessions with the industry partners who will be hosting internships for international students, and who take part in the teaching of the program.  Each year at the annual international faculty meeting the formative evaluations from the previous two semesters will be reviewed and the resulting analysis fed into the planning stage for the coming semesters.  In this way a continuous cycle of collaborative, inter-institutional evaluation and development for both curriculum and pedagogy will be progressed throughout the duration of the project. A summative evaluation using the same techniques of focus groups, e-journals and e-portfolios and conference will occur at the end of the project, preparatory to formulating a full report for circulation to EU and Australian departments and stakeholders.

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Language

All tuition and the assessable outcomes for students in all institutions will be conducted in English. Each European institution will guarantee the English language competence of their participating students travelling to Australia.  Each of the Australian institutions has a division responsible for supporting the English language needs of NESB students and these will be deployed to support GEJI mobile students.  The pedagogy of journalism involves intensive usage of and feedback on the idiom and syntax of vernacular language, and so English language support is built into the teaching and learning process.  Australian students going to Greece, Denmark or Finland/Norway will be offered a survival language course in the national/regional language, and because the GEJI students will study together with national students, their fellow students and the buddy system will provide extra opportunities to become familiar with the national language.

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Supporting Organisations-

see the entire list here.

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Student mobility

The consortium is seeking funding for staff and student mobility under the EU-Australia Agreement Co-operation. Under the scheme, over the three year period of the funding each EU university will be able to send a total of eighteen funded students to Australia for one semester’s study of five months, and each Australian university will be able to send a total of twelve funded students to the EU for one semester’s study of five months over the three year period.  A balance between European and Australian student numbers will be achieved using supplementary student exchanges.  Placements will be organised so that no one institution receives more than two students per year from any one partner institution, and over the three year period each partner receives approximately the same number of Australian or European students with the stipend.  Each institution will offer its environmental journalism unit (of one semester’s duration) at least once per year, and a rotating schedule will be created so that each sending institution in both the EU and Australia dispatches students to all of the corresponding universities in Australia and the EU.  Students will apply specifically for this program using the online application forms on the GEJI website.  Students will have to nominate exchange institutions by priority 1- 4, and the sending institution will then prioritise the students, so they will be shared among host institutions according to the allocations in the student mobiity table.

Each of the institutions has agreed to waive tuition and associated fees for the participating students. For the purpose of this project all tuition and fees paid by students at their home institution will be deemed to satisfy host institution fee requirements for foreign students.

All students enrolled in the environmental journalism units at the partner universities will be involved in transnational learning and assessment activities, so the role of student mobility is to leaven this online collaboration with direct experience from compatriots who are studying in one of the corresponding countries, and who can therefore interpret and explain to their home-based colleagues the local context and nuances in approach to environment issues, pedagogies and professional journalistic practice.  Each institution will institute a buddy system with local students for visiting international students, and there will be both formal and informal induction and familiarisation activities prior to the commencement of the formal teaching period of the semester.  These tours will include lectures and information on the social demographics of the host country and region, the political structure and institutions, the key industries, corporations and NGOs relevant to environmental sustainability, and an outline of current media coverage of environmental issues.  Where appropriate a survival language course will be offered (Greek, Swedish, Finish, Norwegian, Sami and Danish).  At each institution a journalism academic will be appointed as mentor and liaison officer for the visiting students, and to facilitate the organization of the industry contributions and internships where appropriate.

Each of the mobile students will undertake a full-time semester’s study at the host institution, and there are variations among the institutions in the proportion of study allocated to the environmental journalism unit. Where the whole semester program is not covered by environmental journalism units, mobile students will choose elective subjects from the host institution’s subject bank that conform with their home and host institutions’ pre-requisite structures for continuing study, so that there is no disadvantage incurred regarding progression.   Student will be counselled on their choice of electives to ensure compatibility with progression requirements but also to maximise their learning about the society and culture of their host country. Where appropriate, mobile students will be provided with internship and work experience options, either as part of an accredited subject or, if they so choose, as an extra-curricular activity.  The partner institutions have each committed to the awarding of academic credits for the units of study undertaken by the mobile students.  During the last part of 2008, and prior to the travel of any students, a common matrix of academic grades will be established so that each mobile student’s academic results can be rendered into an equivalent and appropriate grade in their home institution (ECTS for EU institutions, various for the Australian institutions), and that all mobile students will receive full and accurate recognition in their home institution of their academic achievements in the host institution.