Multicultural Journalism Education in the Netherlands: A Case Study

Most of the studies on multicultural journalism education tend not to go much further than issues of representation, counting the number of diversity-related courses in a curriculum, the number of minority students and faculty, the number of student projects on multicultural issues, and the number of readings regarding diversity. Although these are all important issues, they tend to ignore the ways in which multiculturalism is given meaning in the everyday praxis of a school of journalism: classroom discussions, comments and level of support by faculty, consensual social arrangements among students, and deliberate location ("embedding") of the school in society. The comprehensive approach taken in the study at hand in a typical multicultural society (The Netherlands) offers a more complex understanding of the issues, taking the contextualization of knowledge and social responsibilities of journalists and journalism students into account. Several educators and scholars have argued over the years that journalism education programs should become more aware of diversity issues and embrace multiculturalism in the curriculum and organization of the school (Baldasty et al., 2003). Studies in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere during the 1990s show consistently a growing number of curricula somehow reflecting such a multicultural sensibility, for example, by introducing courses with titles like "Multicultural Journalism" or "Race, Gender and the Media," or attempting to diversify course materials (Deuze, 2001b). In the United States, the Accrediting Council for Journalism and Mass Communications Education (ACEJMC) adopted specific criteria regarding diversity and inclusivity. Quoting the ACEJMC's principles of accreditation (last amended September 2003): "Programs seeking accreditation should develop curricula and instruction that educate faculty and prepare students with the multicultural knowledge, values and skills essential for professional practice." Even though the field of journalism studies investigates multicultural issues regularly, such a research agenda does not seem to trickle down with much success to journalism education -as in the serious study of education's response to multiculturalism. With some exceptions (see, for example, Martindale, 1993; Kern-Foxworth and Miller, 1993; Dickson, 1995), most scholars limit their work on the topic to normative or descriptive accounts of what a "multicultural" journalism education looks like, generally framed in terms of representational issues: number of minority students, staff and faculty, and number of multicultural courses. In this paper, I aim to take such approaches one step further, recognizing and investigating the various ways in which multicultural issues find a place in the everyday practices of journalism educators and students. How is diversity reflected in classroom discussion? How do related issues feature as library exercises, during hallway debates, or in the overall approach to educating journalism in a particular school? In order to effectively study what multicultural journalism education means, we have studied the approaches to diversity and multiculturalism taken by the four main vocational schools of journalism in our country, The Netherlands.1 In this paper we first explain our theoretical and methodological point of departure, after which we report on our findings using in-depth and focus-group interviews with students and lecturers, as well as an analysis of library and curricular resources available at these schools in Tilburg, Utrecht, Zwolle and Ede. In this introduction we briefly outline the history and context of journalism education in The Netherlands. The term "multiculturalism" encompasses, among other things, issues of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. In this study, conducted during the fall of 2003, we concentrated primarily on ethnicity, as this is the dominant way in which multiculturalism is commonly understood in The Netherlands. …