More than 150 participants from 25 countries

Here are summaries of presentations from the 4th International Newspapers in Education Conference organised by the World Association of Newspapers with Print Media South Africa.

Session I: NIE and Building Citizens: Where Are We?

Potential in South Africa

Wilna Botha, Director, Media in Education Trust, South Africa

South African schools faced a huge task at the end of apartheid in the mid-1990s.

"Up until 1994, citizenship was the privilege of a small minority," said Ms Botha. "So, we had to come up with a new curriculum. One of the challenges was to design it so to provide all South African children with the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to stand tall as citizens of the new country."`

Newspapers in Education programmes have great potential to contribute to this goal, but the potential has not yet been reached, said Ms Botha.

One place it is working is at The Citizen newspaper, which is distributed twice weekly to 13 schools along with an activity sheet to be used with the paper. The activity sheets encourage students to look for articles in the newspaper, provides class exercises based on those articles as well as homework to be done with family members.

"Children fall asleep if you talk about things like democracy, tolerance and accountability, but if you link it with real events, then it becomes completely different," said Ms Botha.

But such projects are relatively few because NIE programmes in South Africa face obstacles such as distribution into the schools, lack of teacher training and that community values may contradict classroom learning, said Ms Botha.

Nevertheless, "there is a huge market for NIE to come in as a partner of Education Departments on this," she said.

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Never Take Democracy for Granted

Evelyne Bevort, Deputy Director, the Centre for Liaison between Teaching and Information Media (CLEMI), France

Democracy should never be taken for granted, even in established democracies, says Ms Bevort.

"A democracy is never a democracy forever, it is a dynamic process," she says. "One of the lessons of the 20th century is that even among cultured people, democratic societies may make decisions that are not democratic any more. Every day, in schools, in the media, everywhere, we must make people understand that democracy is something that you must mobilise every day."

Therefore, the mission of Clemi is to introduce pluralistic use of information media in schools to build citizens, says Ms Bevort.

"We try to put encourage thinking and reflection with a pluralism of ideas and opinions," she said. "The kind of work we do with newspapers allows us to show concretely the diversity of opinions – with the same events, the same story, you see different perspectives and opinions in the same newspapers. Analysing the content, the headlines – that shows to the learners, even young learners, how different people think."

She added: "we don't just want people to know democracy, we want them to like democracy – we want them to know how important it is to live together."

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More Precious When It's Gone

Roxana Morduchowicz, NIE Director, ADIRA, Argentina

"When you lose something, you learn to value it twice," says Ms Morduchowicz. "We lost democracy in Argentina and we fight for it every day, because we know what it means to lose it."

When democracy was regained in the mid-1980s, educators faced a dilemma.

"Children who were 10, 11, 12-years old had lived all of their lives under dictatorship. They didn't know what democracy was, what freedom of expression meant. So how do you teach them what democracy means when they have lived their entire lives under dictatorship?"

The answer: "we had to reintroduce current events as an object of study in the classroom." Teachers had to encourage students to debate social issues, and NIE was a large part of this.

Nine years later, ADIRA and Stanford University in the United States conducted a study of the impact of newspapers in the classrooms. They questioned 4,000 11- and 12-year old students, half of whom had worked with newspapers regularly.

The questioners examined overall media consumption; how often the students had political discussions with family and friends; their knowledge of current events; if they held strong opinions; their political interest and support for democracy; and their tolerance of others.

In every category, those that used newspapers in the classroom had better results. "You always find better scores and percentages among those who read the newspaper," said Ms Morduchowicz.

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Training the Trainers

Ellicot Seade, Co-ordinator, Media in Education Trust, Ghana

Ghana's first experience with NIE was in 1998, when WAN and the Education for All Forum asked South Africa's Media in Education Trust to conduct an NIE workshop for nine African countries.

Ghana's two representatives to the workshop returned to the country to train educators and officials. The people they trained then trained others, a process that continues to this day.

This year, in April, a permanent weekly column about NIE activities was established in the Junior Graphic newspaper. The country's NIE programmes "show positive results in the schools that use it," said Mr Seade. "We've been changing the closed, authoritarian teaching environment to a democratic concept, letting the world into the classrooms. We've also changed from passive, rote learning to active learning."

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Session II: Great Literacy and Tolerance Ideas from Around the World

Geila Wills, Education Co-ordinator, Independent Newspapers, South Africa
George Kelly, Senior Project Director, Creative Media Concepts, United Kingdom
Roxana Morduchowicz, NIE Director, ADIRA, Argentina

A photo of a distressed child begins this session.

"This is a 9-year-old girl going in school in Northern Ireland. As she walks to school, she's being heckled, things are thrown, it got to the point where a bomb went off near them. She is a Catholic, and her school is in a Protestant part of the city. I find it shocking that we have adults who can treat children this way in a civilised society," said Mr Kelly.

The photo prompted Mr Kelly to call the Belfast Telegraph to ask how it promotes tolerance in their city. He learned that the newspaper tries to do nothing that emphasises differences; instead, it runs a wide range of programmes across the entire city and tries to bring children and families from the different sides together.

So begins the session on great literacy and tolerance ideas. The idea behind programmes that promote these values, says Ms Morduchowicz, is that "democracy means diversity, it cannot be based on exclusion, ignorance and discrimination."

Here are a few of the ideas presented by Mr Kelly, Ms Morduchowicz and Ms Wills:

--The Evening Gazette, United Kingdom, which built a computer centre at the paper where students design their own newspapers. It is tied into the newspaper's computer system so they have access to many kinds of files;

--The Derby Daily Telegraph, which provided a large print edition for readers with vision problems;

--The Times of London, which ran a reading programme for immigrants in which 3,600 families and 124 schools took part;

--The Junior Graphic in Ghana, which provides democracy and peace education is a regular column;

--The Independent of Cape Town, South Africa, which published a supplement called Race and Reason which looked at the perspectives from different races and religions about how they felt and how they were treated;

--The Teacher of South Africa, which ran a series on "Celebrating Differences – Towards a Culture of Human Rights in the Classroom."

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Straight Talk From Young People

Jan Vincent Steen, NIE Manager, Norwegian Newspaper Association
Jeff Mathews, Manager, Print Media in Education, South Africa
Margaret Boribon, Director, Belgium Newspaper Association
Cindy, Nicola, Robert and Aashiegah, students

When you want to know what children want in a newspaper, you should go to the source.

That's what WAN did, invited four 12-year-old Cape Town students to join a panel to talk about what newspapers mean to them.

The students, in fact, were representing their classes which had been asked to cut out all stories about children that appeared in their local newspapers during a week in September, and then classify them in five categories: kids as victims; children helping others; little devils; kids are brilliant; 'kids these days'.

Ninety percent of the stories fell into the kids as victims category.`
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"Our class thought the media are putting more attention on children as victims rather than on our accomplishments," said Nicola. "There should be more articles on what children do, on the positive things."

Said Robert: "There should be a page about children achieving things in their schools and community."

The classes were also polled about their perceptions of newspapers and of the world in general. This is what the poll found:

--three-quarters of the students said the media generally portrays young people in a negative light.

--two-thirds of the students were optimistic about their personal future, and 50 percent were optimistic about the future of the world in general.

"I think if we all treat each other as equals, the whole world would be better and everyone would be optimistic," said Cindy.

The week of studying the daily newspaper was a positive experience, the students said. "It's funny how the paper opened my eyes to things I see every day," said Aashiegah.

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30 Great Ideas – in 30 Minutes!

George Kelly, Senior Project Director, Creative Media Concepts, UK

WAN has collected 30 great ideas from newspaper around the world for increasing circulation by attracting young readers and, to demonstrate how simple and effective they are, it asked Mr Kelly to present them in only 30 minutes.

"You don't have to have a big fancy project to increase circulation. In fact, it is easier to go down the simple route," he said.

Here are a few of the 30 ideas:

--"Quiz Nights" created by The Dominion of Wellington, New Zealand,. As the quizzes are based on the Outlook current events page, The Dominion sells 8,500 extra copies on Outlook days.

"I'm a great fan of news quizzes," said Mr Kelly. "It's something that can be made up quickly. They're great fun, and everyone wants to show off their knowledge."

--"Birthday pages" in the youth newspaper Pyat Uglov of St Petersburg, Russia, which will create a one-off, easily personalised copy of on the birthday of anyone. It generated 1,900 new subscriptions from 2,893 orders for a personalised edition.

--A fiction series for children, connected to local history and culture and accompanied by a teacher's guide, was serialised weekly by The Roanoke Times in the US and generated 4,833 extra sales a week and US $ 8,000 profit from the sale of the series to other newspapers.

"Series are a huge circulation boost," said Mr Kelly.

--A "Write for Rewards" project in which students create their own newspapers generated a 10 percent sales increase for the 300,000 daily The Star of Malaysia on supplement days. The project, which involves annual contests, teacher workshops and sponsorship, resulted in 370 schools signing on in four years and a 62 percent increase in bulk NIE sales from last year.

Some of the others built circulation using local history, school information, elections, games, sport, travel, puzzles, special events and baby photos.

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