Nicole Hess

Dr phil. I, Culture Manager MAS
Deputy Secretary General, Federation of Migros Cooperatives FMC

Department of Communication
Namibia University of Science and Technology

July 29 – August 9, 2019

Cooperation with colleagues

Anyone who for the first time works as a lecturer at a previously unknown university is dependent on a variety of organizational, technical and human support. I was welcomed with openness and trust by the Department of Communication of NUST and by International Relations Officer Nico Smit. Whenever a question arose about the processes in the classroom, technical aids such as video cameras, or cultural customs: The team led by Dr Nkosinothando Mpufo, Section Head for Journalism and Media Technology, was there to help. Conversely, it was important to me that the door to the office, which I was allowed to move into during my assignment in the department, was always open. Between the lessons there arose conversations with my colleagues, who gave me valuable insights into their teaching activities, the challenges of the university and the country - but also into personal stories and life circumstances.

Teaching with the students

My assignment included a two-week workshop on professional journalistic interview management for the bachelor students, as well as a short input on the rights and duties of journalists with the master students. As the Department of Communication has since 2015 been in the process of transforming from a college to a higher education unit comparable to other departments of the NUST, classes are currently held in fringe hours or as weekend seminars. This is also out of consideration for working students. Students often arrived late for class, which is apparently not unusual, but once they were there, they absorbed the contents and participated in the discussions with interest and commitment - even during lessons starting at 8 pm.

This fact impressed me as much as the great political and cultural awareness of the young generation. This particularly showed in the practical exercises for conducting interviews, which we carried out in small groups on the basis of the theoretical and conversation-technical basics taught beforehand. No matter whether in the experimental arrangement "Interview with the President" before the elections in autumn 2019 for a print medium, or in the exercise "Interview with the coordinator of the NUST Cultural Festival", which we used in the second week of lectures as a live stage for video recordings: The students prepared and asked relevant and critical questions in both cases. They were particularly proud of the concrete results of the video interviews.

Panel discussion on the role of the media in democratic societies

On the initiative of the Department of Communication and under the leadership of Nico Smit, a public panel discussion on "The Role of the Media in Contemporary Democratic Societies" took place on August 6, 2019. The event, in which participated a print and TV journalist from Namibia, a representative of the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, a senior lecturer from the Department of Communication and myself as a guest from Switzerland, was well attended, especially by students.

The panel not only allowed different perspectives on a current topic, but also impressively showed the challenges Namibia is facing 29 years after the founding of the state. As a young democracy, whose rocky history with colonialization, genocide on two ethnic groups, the experience of apartheid, and a socialist-inspired liberation struggle is far from overcome. And at the same time as part of a globalized world in which online and social media seem to replace traditional media as forums of public discourse. An example of this development was a student's question as to what should be given higher weight in relation to social media: the freedom they offer or the danger they pose to society. As a contribution to a lively public discussion, this question could also have been raised in the so-called West.

The Young Generation - Personal Insight

That the dreams of the succeeding generation may resemble each other across continents was for me the quintessence of a concert by the Namibian pop singer ML at the Goethe Institute. Between two songs that the young woman dedicated amongst others to Independence Day, the Namibian women and Windhoek, she said the remarkable sentence: "In this country the elderly generation is much more united than we are." I took it as a statement that the young people would like to take more responsibility for the country - if only they knew how. And perhaps also as naming of a gap, because a new social vision is (still) missing. Not only in Namibia.