New Beginnings...
It was the start of our fourth year - and we felt that we had arrived. We knew something about the practice of journalism. We recognised that it necessarily involves community engagement, and we were confident that we understood what was involved in this. But as we got to grips with the Engaging Spaces project, we found that we had to consider the concept of engagement all over again, from completely new angles. For a while, we felt as if we were back in first year!
There have been other instances in our undergraduate programme in which we were required to participate in community engagement as part of our coursework. To begin with, we approached such tasks as we would any other part of our studies - as something we were being graded for. I mean hello, its school so surely everything we do is about marks. It did not occur to us, in those early years, to consider the impact we make on the communities and they on us. But when we were both second year students, we attended a seminar at which our Deputy Vice Chancellor gave a speech. Some of the comments he made really touched us. He said that we need to realise that working with the community is a “give and take” relationship. So it really taught us that “Ubuntu” is a lived concept and that undeniably “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu”. By the time we were in our third year, we were becoming more and more immersed in work that involved communities in and around Grahamstown. We began to realise that the people who lived in these communities are more than just sources that journalism students can squeeze facts and figures out of. Rather, they too are human beings with their own views and values about the world they live in.
Now we were in fourth year and here we were again, faced with the reality that we still had a lot to learn about what it means to be involved in a community partnership. We had volunteered to work with Upstart on the Yung Amplified radio show, because we were both drawn to the idea of working with young people. Working with teenagers was not new to us; we both have younger siblings, after all! But as we started making our plans, we began to feel more cautious. We wondered how theYung Amplified would see us. This was not the first time that they will have worked with students from Rhodes. Sometimes, when others have gone before us, we have to either pay for their mistakes, or have big shoes to fill!
This, we decided, would be our first big challenge: to build a bond of trust with the team. We understood that this could take a while - but we also knew that it was vital to the success of our project. We could not predict how the team would respond to us, or we to them. In the end, all we could do was to watch, listen and learn.