Linking Education, Pedagogy and Communication
ADEA embarked on its Communication for Education and Development (COMED) program with an understanding that education and communication are critically linked and, in many respects, tailored from the same cloth. Both have the same stock-in-trade, which is the transmission of information and knowledge.
Education is about the cognitive and social learning of children and young adults. Much of the process involves the transmission of information, knowledge and skills (and values, too) to the learners. Education systems and educators teach individuals--hopefully all individuals--on a highly organized and mass basis. This implies a system that is organized and managed, one that provides its services to all children of eligible age. The challenges are daunting. Everybody in society is concerned by them--all want the best for their children and many have opinions on how these challenges should be met, who should do them, and how much they should cost. Very quickly, and with little effort, education becomes political.
Communication is also about the transmission of information and, sometimes, knowledge. In today's societies communication happens--increasingly but not exclusively--on a mass scale through newspapers and electronic media. However, mass communication is very differently organized than education. It is not concerned with developing individuals and societies for the future, and it has a very different sense of social responsibility. Mass communication is for today, whereas education is for the future.
Furthermore, in today's mass societies there is a symbiotic relationship between education and communication. This phrase takes on its full meaning when we look at the marketplace for communication enterprises. Most forms of mass communications, the written forms in particular, target an educated clientele. Educated populations are good for the communication business. However, in order to educate on a mass scale, education systems and their decision-makers need to communicate with their public, which includes the public at-large of parents and taxpayers as well as specifically concerned groups such as teachers (generally the largest labor force in a country) and university students, each of which often has its own claims on the resources of an education system. Our challenge is to know how to unite these forces and constraints so that the development of education will benefit from the power and reach of the means and practices of communication.
What we have learned
We are beginning to learn that the success of education policies and reforms often depends on the abilities of education systems' leaders and decision-makers to effectively communicate their policies, proposals and programs. This was pointed out by several case studies done for ADEA's Prospective, Stocktaking Exercise that were presented and discussed at our Biennale held last year in Johannesburg. Examples of this are the systematic use of communication strategies by education ministers in Guinea and Senegal to promote their respective policies of teacher redeployment and volunteer teachers. These cases provide striking examples of the effective and proactive use of communication to promote politically difficult policies that wound up having a significant impact on improving primary school enrollments.
The picture, however, is much larger than that. Our mass societies are becoming more democratic and pluralist. An increasing number and variety of voices--all concerned by education--want to be heard. The demands of transparency and accountability are increasingly present. It is in this context that we aspire to education for all, with quality and equity.
With these understandings, ADEA, in cooperation with the World Bank and its Norwegian Education Trust Fund, developed the COMED program. Its basic objectives are to enable (i) journalists to have better understandings of education and (ii) education communication officers in ministries to have better understandings of the hows, wherefores and whys of communication. In this second issue of the Newsletter focused on this program (the previous issue was Vol. 11, No. 2 of April-June 1999), we report on the realizations to-date, what we have learned from our work, and the road ahead [See article on page 3].
Indeed, we have learned much about the importance of the task, as well as the inherent difficulties. For example, by working together with education ministry communication officers and journalists specializing in education, we learned the extent to which the ministry-media relationship is characterized by mutual frustrations, and the importance of overcoming them. Professor Opubor's article discusses this [See article on page 7].
We are learning that availability of information, especially reliable information that the media will consider "newsworthy" (i.e., that speaks to their economic interests), is central to developing a communication for education capacity. Also, we are learning that the type of information provided by education management information and assessment systems (EMIS) is essential. This includes the information itself and its user friendly availability to journalists. For this reason, ADEA has responded favorably to requests from journalists in Senegal to organize a workshop on education statistics for journalists.
Last, but far from least, we are also gaining a better understanding of the linkages between communication for education and the overall governance of education sectors. This governance stretches well beyond the education ministries into civil society and into national parliaments. This is illustrated by the article on the experience of the Education Commission of Benin's Parliament [See article on page 11].
Communication--its reach, processes and the means by it occurs--is increasingly globalized. In Africa, people are increasingly listening to and watching the global networks such as BBC, RFI and CNN, which, in some places, are crowding out the national information sources. This has consequences for news and communication that is local in nature. We will need to learn how to reconcile national communication needs with the emerging global realities. One response to this challenge could be to bring these private, international players into our network and develop partnerships with them.
We will continue to learn as we go forward. The stakes are high--nothing less than the effectiveness of educational change and the responsiveness and adaptability of education systems to their environment.
Richard Sack
ADEA Executive Secretary
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