Developing students’ cultural competence and global citizenship to educate deliberate professionals | 24 October

Abstract

In this seminar Prof Saba Bebawi is telling her story and the rationale behind the Foreign Correspondent study tour she established in 2015 to Jordan and the United Arab Emirates for journalism students, funded by the Council for Arab-Australian Relations (CAAR), part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) media intern programme.  The pilot was a tremendously successful experience, and since then has been running with locations to India, Philippines, Thailand and Tunisia, with funding also from the New Colombo Plan (NCP) mobility grants and DFAT’s Australia-India Council (AIC).

 

The tour is designed to offer students the opportunity to file news stories on the ground with real deadlines in order to emulate the ‘foreign correspondent’ experience, and which can only be achieved by exposing students to an international study experience outside the classroom. In turn, this study tour prepares them for future journalistic experiences within an international context by providing them with the tools to do journalism within another culture, thus offering a practical skill-based learning experience that develops their cultural intelligence, intercultural competence and will assist in creating graduates who are job ready at a global level.

 

International internships, providing outbound students with learning experiences in other countries, is a key priority for Australian universities and UTS in particular. It provides opportunities for developing cultural intelligence, intercultural competence, global citizenship and professional identity. This aligns well with the UTS Model of Learning that emphasises student experiences that are practice-oriented and globally facing and it strengthens the goals of UTS’ learning.futures which is to produce graduates who are ready for the future of work.

 

After Saba’s story we will unpack Saba’s program to identify features that make it so successful. Franziska Trede will then introduce the idea of the deliberate professional and the pedagogy of deliberateness (Trede &McEwen, 2016). The deliberate professional is someone (a student, teacher or practitioner) who is thoughtful yet assertive. There are four ideas that underpin the deliberate professional: 1) being aware of self, others and the wider context, 2) identifying possibilities that are probable, possible and impossible about how to act, 3) taking a stance and 4) being responsibility for the consequences of actions or inactions.

 

We conclude the seminar with critical collective reflections about what you learnt from Saba’s program and the pedagogy of deliberateness to inform your approaches and strategies to prepare students for future practice and educate the deliberate professional within them.

 

 

 

Bio:

Professor Saba Bebawi is a journalism and media researcher who has published on media power and the role of media in democracy-building, in addition to investigative journalism in conflict and post-conflict regions. She is author of ‘Media Power and Global Television News: The role of Al Jazeera English’, and ‘Investigative Journalism in the Arab World: Issues and Challenges’, in addition to co-editor of ‘Social Media and the Politics of Reportage: The ‘Arab Spring’. She is currently an Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA fellow (2018-2020) for a project on ‘Developing an Arab Culture of Investigative Journalism’. She is also Chief Investigator of an ARC Discovery Project (2018-2020) titled ‘Media Pluralism and Online News’ with the University of Sydney. She is project director for the Foreign Correspondent Study Tour (FCST), funded by the Australian government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), and the New Colombo Plan (NCP) mobility grants.

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Your video, audio and the meeting chat transcript may be recorded or photographed. Please advise the facilitator if you do not wish to be recorded or photographed.

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