Kyle James has been conducting DW Akademie workshops in Asia and Central Asia since 2008, covering radio production, multimedia journalism and print.

The smell was nauseating and the sight quite a depressing one. The ten participants of the Climate Change Workshop in Chennai / India, along with the two trainers and our guide, had just scrambled up to the top of a building to get a better view of the Kodungaiyur dumpyard in the northern part of the city. We were there to see how waste disposal, unregulated construction, and short-sighted transportation and energy policies were harming the environment and contributing to climate change by releasing greenhouse gases and paving over important carbon sinks like wetlands.

Kodungaiyur, an area that once featured marshes and cattle grazing land, had been turned into something more befitting Dante’s Inferno—a hazy landscape of rotting garbage, heavy industry and smoke-belching trucks under a relentless, blistering sun. And, it was all located near the homes of about 100,000 people, almost all poor.

The scene was representative of the myriad environmental problems that India faces, and which are beginning to have real impacts on the wider region. And almost every day during the workshop, the Indian papers carried reports on new environmental problems the country was up against. Chennai’s water table was dropping; fish catches were declining; traffic was increasing. Devastating floods in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand claimed the lives of an estimated 1,000, while more than 2,800 were still missing at this writing. Some experts said that the kinds of intense storms that washed away bridges, temples and homes there were likely to become more frequent due to the changing climate.

The real-world events happening outside our seminar room were motivating factors for the participating journalists’ from India, Nepal and Bangladesh. But so were the things we witnessed first hand—polluted rivers, eroding beaches, coal-fired power plants—as well as the people we talked to whose lives and livelihoods were hurting because of them. In some ways it was a sobering time, but it highlighted the urgency of communicating the consequences of climate change to the larger public, and perhaps convincing policy makers to take serious action.

Author: Kyle James

Active acquisition of knowledge to solve concrete challenges creates confidence. And that’s something you need when you have to teach journalism to a classroom full of young Laotian twentysomethings, as do the instructors at the National University of Laos (NUOL).

These instructors are currently students themselves: they’re taking part in journalism teachers’ training and coaching, which is organized in partnership with DW-AKADEMIE’s Asia team.

At a workshop in December we reviewed some of the progress made so far. “I have more confidence in teaching these subjects now,” said one of the younger colleagues. Others agreed.

One senior lecturer brought along a revamped version of a project the training participants had created the previous September – a newspaper made from scratch. It was a showcase item at NUOL’s 15th anniversary celebration in November.

The instructors-in-training had put tremendous effort into producing it, and that has really paid off in their daily work. Here’s why:

Getting down to basics

The task we had set ourselves was quite simple: Create a newspaper. From scratch. In three weeks time.

There are several good reasons for choosing such an exercise. Creating a newspaper is low-tech. If necessary (and if you don’t mind creating only one copy), it can be done with paper, pens, a scissor and glue.

It’s also very tangible, easy to talk about, perfect for discussions in dual-language settings (in Vientiane we use Lao and English with translation in our workshops).

Most importantly, it’s a very generic form of journalism – and thus a good foundation for discussing the core elements of journalistic work.

Active participation instead of passive listening

Creating a newspaper from scratch turned learning into active acquisition of knowledge to solve concrete challenges. Much better than hearing lectures on writing, style, research, etc.

Among the many questions discussed during the production of the newspaper were issues like “What will be our editorial guideline?” (As opposed to the more passive “What is an editorial guideline and what is it good for?”) “What should our layout look like?” and  “Are we on track time-wise, quantity-wise, quality-wise?”

As a result of such exercises that produce tangible results, the university teaching staff are not only gaining a new understanding of journalism practice itself, but also experiencing first-hand fresh and viable ways of conveying knowledge to their students.

By Daniel Hirschler