04 March 2009
AUT pushes for diverse journalism
28 September 2007
By Sarah Lockwood
Initiatives to recruit more ethnically diverse journalism students are long overdue, says associate professor David Robie, director of AUT University’s Pacific Media Centre.
The university’s student body is now 44 per cent non-Pakeha.
But in communication studies, non-Pakeha students make up only 30 per cent of the roll. And Robie says the proportion is lower still among the school’s journalism students.
“While the demographics in Auckland were changing dramatically, we weren’t waking up to that fact and making changes,” he says.
However, the proportion of non-Pakeha taking journalism at AUT is higher than the national average of non-Pakeha journalists, which is 17 per cent.
AUT recruitment relationships manager Linda Strickson-Pua says to encourage more diverse students the School of Communication Studies needs to employ more Maori and Pasifika staff and the curriculum needs to have a Pasifika focus.
“I’d like to see the knowledge base – the values, the culture – we teach in our university coming from the area we live in, so the journalists we’re producing can go out there and report well on the community we have in Aotearoa-New Zealand.
“We live in the South Pacific and it’s ridiculous that our curriculum reflects a very white Western society.”
AUT equity policy advisor Kitea Tipuna says the school has traditionally been very mainstream, with a mainstream curriculum and mainstream staff.
In his final year in the school, Tipuna was the only Maori student in a class of 80 students.
“I think it has improved a little bit over the last decade,” he says.
He questions whether the school is systemically capable of teaching Maori students, and whether, for example, one experience on a marae over three years is enough.
He also says Maori are sceptical of the media, and choose to study at institutions like Waiariki Institute of Technology or AUT University’s Te Ara Poutama.
“We [Maori] do resistance education. We’ll go to into a system that’s either fringe media, or prepared to challenge mainstream media.”
Conch Day
Robie says there is a lot of ground to make up, and recruiting Maori and Pasifika students is a pressing priority.
The school’s diversity committee, which was set up earlier this year, recently ran an initiative called Conch Day.
Twenty-five Year-12 and 13 Maori and Pasifika students from Auckland schools were invited to participate.
They visited the university’s television and radio stations, attended a few lectures and did some live on-air interviews and digital media productions.
Both Maori and Pasifika students and Pacific Island Media Association journalists spoke about the course and opportunities in the media.
“It was a tremendous success for the students,” says Robie.
He says a lot of the students wanted to be journalists anyway. They are even more keen now after having had a taste of what journalism students do at AUT.
He says next year there will be two Conch Days, and the diversity committee will encourage staff to be more proactive about going into high schools to talk about the course and opportunities in the media industry.
“We can’t wait for them to come to us, we have to go out and find them.”
Other initiatives
The school will also continue to award its Pasifika scholarships.
Since 2003 it has sponsored nine Pasifika students at AUT.
Robie has also proposed a Diploma in Pacific Journalism, which would be open to all journalism students wanting to challenge themselves and learn wider cross-cultural reporting skills.
The journalism curriculum leader, associate professor Martin Hirst, says a problem is making room for it within the existing and already crowded curriculum.
“We’re looking at David’s proposal along with a number of other initiatives to improve the journalism curriculum.”
