The Certificate in Journalism programme has been structured with 2 main ideas in mind:
In the first place, we want to be sure that each of you will have the most enjoyable and effective learning experience possible. We’ve done that by providing lots of opportunities for you to integrate the theories you’re encountering with practical experiences that will make the theory more concrete. This programme will certainly include attendance at lectures. But it also provides ample opportunities for workshops on campus, field practice, some work experience, and always, reflection. So when you discuss some topic during a class lecture, there’ll be lots of opportunity for you to see and experience how it feels in a journalist’s real world, and then to pull together what you’ve learned by reflecting on what it all means for your journalistic practice, when you’re out there working after you graduate.
Also, in this programme, only 2 of the 10 courses require an end-of-semester exam. Assessment is primarily by coursework, because from our perspective, the proof of what our students can do, is always going to be, primarily, that you can do these things in real-life working contexts.
In the second place, we’re committed to turning out people who can hit the ground running when they enter media organisations. So this programme is structured to give you more and more independence as time goes by. When you begin the programme in the first semester, you’ll have a somewhat structured learning experience. We understand that for many of you, this will be your first introduction to tertiary education. So you’ll find that there’ll be more in-class or directed course activity. But by the middle of that first semester, we’ll be expecting you to go out and find stories on your own, on-campus or off. By the second semester, most of your courses will have you out in the field, practising what you’ve been taught, even if you’re then asked to bring your work in to your supervisor, or to your lecturers and colleagues on campus for comment and guidance.
In the last part of the programme, you’ll be doing most of your work independently, as you carry out independent projects, or assigned projects with fairly simple supervision.
So that this programme has been laid out in such a way as to achieve our two goals of providing you with an effective and enjoyable learning experience, and ensuring that as soon as you graduate, you’ll be ready to begin work:
Semester 1 begins in early September, and goes till December. In that semester, you’ll be introduced to what you might call the contextualization courses. These are intended to help you learn about the conditions under which you will be working. There’s a Fundamentals of Journalism course that will introduce you to the principles and concepts that all journalists must know and by which journalists are (or should be) guided on the job. A course on Caribbean Media and Society will help you to understand the social and cultural contexts within which events happen, the expectations members of the society have of journalists, and how what you do impacts upon society. Our Law and Ethics course will inform you about your legal rights and responsibilities, and the regulations governing your work as a journalist. As you study this course, you’ll also be encouraged to think about the sorts of ethical dilemmas that you will face on the job, and about how you might want to respond. And finally, your reporting course will introduce you to the skills and strategies journalists need to follow and report on a good story. And each of the other courses will feed into what you’re learning about how to tell a good story.
Semester 2 begins in January and goes till early May. In semester 2, you’ll be doing four courses that are all intensely practical. In addition to the follow-up course on Telling the Story, part of which is an internship experience, you will be enrolled in an interviewing course; in a course that introduces you to Investigative Reporting; and another course on presenting the news story for different media.
In May, our third session begins, and at that time, you will be doing an independent project in investigative reporting, following a story that you have identified and successfully pitched. You will also be enrolled in one of two elective courses that will allow you to focus on an area of study you feel will be useful to you – either a course providing a more in-depth introduction to new media technologies, or a course that focuses on Journalism and Business.
So that by the time the programme ends in early July, once you’ve participated fully in all the programme’s academic activities you should be a competent and ethical reporter, capable of working effectively as part of a team, OR of taking initiative and working independently if required. In fact, you should be an asset to ANY newsroom.
