The Pedagogy of Place (POP) group is a vibrant team of researchers interested in the ways in which an awareness of place can play a role in transforming higher education pedagogies and epistemologies. Poppers presented innovative work at this year’s Community Engagement symposium which was held from the 3rd to the 5th of May 2016 at the Gavin Relly Postgraduate Village.
Rod Amner and Nkosinothando Mpofu (Rhodes University): Nurturing ‘communicative ecologies’: an evaluation of a ‘digital citizenship’ training project at the Community Library in Ward 3 of the Makana Municipality
This paper reports on a ‘digital citizenship’ project implemented by postgraduate students of the School of Journalism and Media Studies in a satellite library (the Community Library) in a hyperlocal space (Ward 3) in the Makana district of the Eastern Cape.
The project is informed by the understanding (substantiated by a recent SANPAD survey on media consumption and citizenship in South Africa) that while the world is awash with information, poorer communities often exist in circumstances of local information poverty. Makana citizens have relatively low levels of access to the internet and legacy media, and it hard to get good information about many aspects of local civic life and government.
The business models of legacy local news outlets are being severely challenged by online technologies, fragmenting audiences and vanishing advertisers. For example, local newspaper Grocott’s Mail provides award-winning public affairs reporting in Makana, but faces a serious decline in advertising and circulation. At over 60%, unemployment is extremely high in Grahamstown (Census 2011) and the relatively high Grocott’s cover price of R7, together with the lack of journalistic capacity to adequately cover the diverse socio-cultural and economic communities in Grahamstown, have worked to limit Grocott’s Mail’s penetration amongst potential local readers. Grocott’s Online, along with a range of other blogs and websites which include local news and information, is also out of reach of the majority of Grahamstown citizens.
This is due to a lack of online access – the percentage of households using the internet in Makana households is just under 30% (Census 2011).Meanwhile, however large numbers of Grahamstonians are in evidence on Facebook and there has been a flurry of Facebook group activity, much of it centered on the Makana Municipality, water and governance crises and the 2015 xenophobic attacks.
Some private citizens and some non-profits like MobiSAM have partnered with the likes of Amatola Water and with their Facebook followers (now numbering in the thousands) to create an ecology of horizontal and vertical communication – between citizens, and between citizens and the state - around the water crisis and other crises in local governance. A number of other open, civic-minded Facebook pages and groups have sprung up in Grahamstown over the past few years that are concerned with providing information and debate about common local problems.
Despite high levels of poverty, we have observed a keen interest in local affairs: people want to engage with local power structures and work with the state to improve local conditions and opportunities. One of our aims has thus been to help more citizens’ access and interact with relevant information and opinion about common local problems, as well as develop their own media messages.
The library ICT project was thus interested in the creation and enhancement of public training in and access to ICTs for the expression by citizens of their views on matters of common local concern. We attempted to nurture an enriched communicative ecology for the participants - we were interested in what possibilities unfold when citizens are given mediated access to information about, and platforms to express the views concerning, common local problems, and opportunities to work out solutions.
To expand ‘communicative ecologies’ and improve public access, the project installed computers, and provided basic computer literacy skills as well as digital citizenship skills to participants. It was hoped that the participants would then be in a position improve their communicative ecologies by using the computers provided at the Community Library by the project to communicate with others about common local problems. The process of implementation, the outcomes, challenges and lessons emerging from the project are discussed in this paper.
Yandisa Sobahle (Rhodes University): Communicative ecologies for entrepreneurs: co-creating communication and marketing plans for community businesses
In this RU Journalism and Media Studies ‘communication for development’ project, an MA student, Yandisa Sobahle, has been working with a group of four entrepreneurs, whose small businesses are being supported by the Assumption Development Centre (ADC) in Joza, Grahamstown.
In the first phase of the ‘communication for development’ project, the entrepreneurs built on their basic digital literacy skills by exploring relevant software packages, social media and the local online ‘communicative ecology’, using the ADC computer lab.
In the second phase of the project, Sobahle worked closely with each of the entrepreneurs to identify and build on their individual ‘communicative ecologies’ – which includes both ‘offline’ and online social networks – to create custom-made communication and marketing strategies for their fledgling businesses.
In the third phase, Sobahle will work with the ADC itself to help co-create a communication strategy for the centre, including the establishment of a social media and web presence and the production of journalism for the wider public sphere.
This presentation will evaluate progress made in the participants’ communication for development programmes/strategies using an alternative, holistic, participatory, learning-based approach based on systems and complexity thinking, feminist methodologies, action learning and other key concepts in the field (see Tacchi and Lennie 2013).
Cathy Gush (Rhodes University): Communicating family literacy practices: engaging with Rhodes employees in an action research process
The Intsomi Action Research Group is a working group that has been formed out of representatives from the Intsomi Parent Support and Literacy Project together with a Masters student in Journalism & Media Studies. The group is applying the principles of participatory action research within a social learning process.
The Rhodes Community Engagement Office established the Intsomi Project at the beginning of 2015 with a group of 26 Rhodes employees who have children of school going age. The Project has provided these parents with books and other literacy resources to take home on a regular basis, in a bid to encourage new and supportive family literacy practices, and workshops have been held on a quarterly basis to provide opportunities for input and feedback.Drawing on the bonding capital that has been built up in the group, due to their shared experiences of the effects of new family literacy practices, a “vanguard” of literacy activists has been formed at grassroots level. Following this is the formation of bridging capital, where communication takes place horizontally into the surrounding community and other similar communities.
Working within a framework of what Melkote & Steeves term Development Support Communication, as opposed to the top-down development communication that characterises the modernisation approach, the group has explored the communicative and media ecologies of their particular communities. Also at times termed Communication for Development, Lennie and Tacchi place this work within a framework of systems theory, where communication takes on complex forms and outcomes are non-linear. The Communication for Development approach recognises that in communicative ecologies, all participants have a role to play, and that the targets of change can also be the agents of change.
Exploring communicative ecologies goes deeper than merely examining or recording media consumption patterns in particular communities, and involves a social mapping process that is a deeper exploration of how and where people communicate in particular geographical spaces and socio-economic and cultural contexts.
The Intsomi Working Group has identified a number of strategies for communicating their family literacy stories to friends, neighbours and community members. These include social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter (used initially only to build group cohesion), as well as more traditional forms of media such as newspapers and radio, and printed media such as posters and flyers that can support word-of-mouth communication in third places such as ward meetings, churches, shebeens and stokvels. Opportunities exist for Journalism undergraduate students to be involved in service learning programmes that support production of these relevant media forms.
Further activism will include meetings with local library services to identify and develop strategies that will make libraries and reading material easily accessible to parents and children in all areas.
The group will be building their identity through an introduction in local newspapers, along with other items that identify them as Intsomi activists. A series of radio shows will consist of interviews/conversations with working group members as well as other stakeholders such as librarians and teachers. It will also include a story time for children, as the group feels strongly that more children should benefit from the project, and that children play an important role in agitating for change.
Once some of the strategies have been implemented, the group will meet to evaluate the effects of these and to adjust where necessary, in line with the action research cycle.
In due course, the communications activities of the working group will spread to involve the wider group of 26, and then to the group of between 100 and 200 parents that have signed up for the programme in 2016.
Hancu Louw (Rhodes University): The use and value of Civic Mapping methods for community journalists to better understand and respond to the communicative needs of marginalised hyperlocal communities in Makana Municipality
Grounded in a practice-led approach which seeks to integrate theory, practice, intellectual rigour and social intervention as academic endeavour this project was conducted as the first two phases in an action research cycle. Working from within a critical realist paradigm which views social structures as both limiting and enabling the research was conducted as an in-depth qualitative study located within the parameters of Ward 3 of Makana Municipality. The research therefore sought to explore and develop a contextual interest in a particular hyper-local community. Theoretically the research responds to the widely held normative conceptions which govern most of the mainstream South African news media landscape which assumes as operational default a “watchdog role” in the young democracy.
Drawing on recent studies on the relationship between South African journalists and the citizens they purport to serve as the fourth estate in a constitutional democracy, this research suggests that South African journalism is not able to connect with and usefully engage with large tracts of the citizenry. Much of the mainstream journalism produced in South Africa fails to connect to / with its envisioned audiences as indicated through research conducted on youth identity, media and the public sphere in South Africa by Malila et al., (2013). Through this research Malila (2013) found that there are substantial disconnects between South African citizens and local legacy and community media. According to their report, “the socio-economic conditions that govern the lives of South Africans play a defining role in shaping the relationship between citizens and the media.” (Malila, 2013:37). The study found that most respondents regarded the media available to them, specifically local media as, “not relevant to the context of their daily lives” (Malila 2013:39) and did not adequately address the information needs that they require to participate in, ““democratic practices, rituals and traditions which shape democratic subjects” (Chipkin 2008: 13).
In an attempt to respond to this disconnect between citizens and journalists, Public Journalism and Social Capital theory was employed as the primary theoretical lenses through which to address this issue. By drawing on ethnographic and journalistic social science research methodology the research employed civic mapping methods in an attempt to uncover the layers of civic life and various civic leaders and activists which comprise the complex network of communicative ecologies within the sociopolitical and economic context of a particular hyper-local space. The aim thereof being to better understand and subsequently equip community journalists to report on and with members of hyper-local communities in an attempt to locate existing connections between people so as to better understand the way in which community journalists can better serve their hyper-local audiences. Over a period of 6 months of largely field based research, employing a range of journalistic research methods and techniques a cursory reading of the data at hand shows that these methods are becoming increasingly valuable in enabling journalists to act as facilitators of larger processes of hyper-local communication across layers and between actors in the civic life of communities. By paying attention to the complexities of daily life and collaboratively working with key informants in fostering new connections between people and institutions the research has yielded promising qualitative data. What has become increasingly evident is the need for community journalists to renegotiate their ways of interacting with and thinking about the communities in which they work, especially when seeking to address the structural inequalities and the well documented ineptitude of local government to heed and respond to the basic needs of socially, economically and politically marginalized communities like the people who call Ward 3, or the “Coloured Area” home.
The symposium saw participants sharing research, narratives, theoretical frameworks, and lessons and insights from practical experiences in the scholarship of engagement. Participants included staff, students and members of community based organisations interested in community engaged learning in the form of volunteerism, engaged research and service-learning from international and national higher education institutions and community based organisations. The aim was to promote the scholarship of engagement, service learning, engaged student leadership, as well as national relationships and partnerships around engagement. The presentation categories included research papers, project and practice narratives, poster presentations and workshops.