| Country Burma
City Rangoon
Host Institution American Center
Project Description
The post would like to continue offering classes to young people interested in journalism. Burma has no journalism school and no faculty of journalism at any of its (faltering) universities. The American Center runs five media training courses a year, and the EL Fellow Program has been a crucial complement to those. The current journalism EL Fellow focused most of her efforts on teaching English to professional journalists, which has resulted in their being able to use the internet and other research tools for their work. Her work has been on teaching English through journalism. Now the post wants to switch that around, so the EL Fellow would teach journalism through English, a slightly different focus. The new EL Fellow will build on the Introduction to Journalism curriculum that has been put together, and create and teach an intermediate-level journalism class for promising students from the current class. Last year also offered a class called Introduction to Journalism, which used the cachet of the media to attract non-journalists. This wound up being the sleeper class of the term, with a variety of different students -- political activists, young writers, students who want to study abroad, and other young professionals -- who saw a good chance to improve their critical thinking skills. The EL Fellow would work a following schedule: teaching Level 5 or 6 English (which has an extremely strong writing component), and one or two journalism electives. The current EL Fellow has also provided two-week media training seminars for our second-line leaders of National League for Democracy and ethnic political parties of the democratic opposition. We would like an incoming EL Fellow to continue these short-term trainings for important target audiences among the democratic opposition, including student activists, who are a powerful force for change.
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