Development through education:
Arcada response to NORTH-SOUTH programme

The CIMO programme North-South Higher Education Network Programme (NSHENP) has distinctive objectives and present unique challenges. This article hopes to give the reader a concise but reliable account of how Arcada is responding to these challenges.

The project Training for Ecological Broadcasting is Arcada Media response to the challenges addressed by the NS-HENP. Foreign partners so far are three institutions from two South African Universities: the Film School and the Department of Media at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg ¹⁾ and South African School of Motion Picture and Live performance (AFDA) in Johannesburg and Cape Town ²⁾. With this project Arcada Media wants to give a practical contribution to Finnish development cooperation and, in particular to the “promotion of equality, democracy and human rights, by improving developing country capacities and abilities in their higher education institutions” ³⁾.

The importance of media communication in general and TV broadcasting in particular for developing countries can hardly be overestimated and it has been the focus of authoritative attention in the Seventies ⁴⁾. By contrast, the saliency of professional education in broadcasters’ profile in contemporary societies is normally underestimated. This is unfortunate since professional education is a delicate process and a very influential one on the quality of the final products.


Matteo Stocchetti, Jan Nåls and Ann Karkulahti

Training for Ecological Broadcasting

Training for Ecological Broadcasting is a project in support of scientific research and professional training in metacultural broadcasting. Based on the assumptions that TV is a most important educational tool especially in countries with a weak educational infrastructure, the project aims at fostering cultural diversity as a competitive value in the media and, more specifically, in TV broadcasting. The achievement of this goal requires the effective coordination between the three dimensions of the project itself: scientific, pedagogical and media industry.

On scientific ground Training for Ecological Broadcasting is part of a broader research programme Metacultural intelligibility in broadcasting (MIB) whose goal is to preserve cultural diversity in broadcasting by the systematic enquiry into the conditions of appeal and intelligibility in high quality local broadcasting.

On the pedagogical dimension, the ambition leading the project is to create a new generation of professionals equipped with the personal experience and professional knowledge necessary to oppose discrimination, tokenism and other unwanted effects of careless communication in the visual media.⁵⁾

The integration between research, training and production activities is the corner stone of Arcada educational policy. The quality of training programmes is supported by in-house research and by the close cooperation between Arcada and the world of public and private broadcasting. African partners participating the programme benefit from the results of this integrated activity network.

One of these results is the initiative Digital Inventive Narrative Appliances (DINA) whose main goal is to provide a close-to-reality environment for creation and production of inventive digital content aimed at specific audiences. DINA originated as a pedagogical project in which professionals of today and tomorrow can learn how to co-operate and to be responsible for a whole television channel. Beginning in winter 2005, DINA run a multi-platform test bed for digital content delivery to a genuine audience.

The Keys to Success

By the end of the pilot phase an approximate 20 students and 15 teachers will have been directly involved in the project. Numbers can be small but there are reasons to believe that impact can be far more substantial. Durable changes in the media management of cultural differences do not come cheap. In the case of Arcada at least three elements have proved crucial for the effective use of available resources: first the integration between research and teaching activities; second the organizational flexibility in adapting domestic curricula to foreign institutions within the framework of European Credit Transfer System (ECTS); third, the capacities of the teaching staff that have embraced the challenge of cultural diversity in broadcasting with an enthusiasm that is seldom available among professional with an established reputation in this business.

Finally a further important advantage should be mentioned: Arcada is a Finnish institution. The implications of this fact should not be underestimated. In the today’s world, the idea of genuine cultural encounters with diversity is more credible when proposed by the educational institutions of a nation with no colonial past and a non-violent international posture in the present. In times of growing cultural polarization and violent strife Finnish commitment to human rights and peaceful resolution of international disputes is very beneficial also for institutions dealing with “low” politics. As I am not Finnish myself, I guess I can safely say that this attitude give Finnish agencies working in the delicate domain of intercultural communication an important comparative advantage.

1.) See http://slls.uiplay.co.za/index.aspx?Action=MediaStudies and http://www.wits.ac.za/artworks/ respectively.
2.) See http://www.filmdramaschool.co.za.
3.) cfr. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland, “North-South Higher Education Network Programme 2003-2006” Project Document, p. 4
4.) See e.g. the MacBride Commission report, Many Voices, One World, UNESCO, 1980
5.) See e.g. Multicultural Broadcasting: Concept and Reality. Report edited by Andrea Millwood Hargrave, Director of the Joint Research Programme Broadcasting Standards Commission and Independent Television Commission, British Broadcasting Corporation, Broadcasting Standards Commission, Independent Television Commission, Radio Authority. November 2002. Available at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/rau/publications-archive/adobe-pdf/newsreleases/Multi1002.pdf