International Communications Instruction with a Focus on Women

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The teaching of development communication, international communication, and international journalism courses on the one hand, and the teaching of women in development (WID) on the other, have proceeded side by side with little cross-fertilization thus far. A handful of educators have brought women in development centrally into development communication and international communication courses with good effect. This article makes the case for a wider adoption of both feminist content, and feminist and critical pedagogies in the teaching of development communication, international communication, and international journalism courses.(1) Development communication One of the central components of a development communication course is a critique of development theory and practice, as well as a critique of development communication models and practices. This critique is driven by, among other concerns, a growing concern over maldistribution of development benefits and adverse unintended consequences of development projects (see, for example, Melkote, 1991). On the other hand, a large part of women in development literature also focuses on how women have often been left out of development concerns, or how they have suffered disproportionately from modernization and development efforts (see, for example, Deere and Leon, 1987; Lourdes and Feldman, 1992). This literature brings home the contradictions in development theory and practice. Focusing on women when critiquing development is most useful because women are often among the most disenfranchised and the poorest of the populations in the Third World. Exploring the antecedents and consequences of their condition, therefore, is a good starting point for asking where and why development has gone wrong. In fact, WID as an explicitly feminist approach to development can be instrumental in critiquing each of the major perspectives to development, including the liberal-capitalist, dependency, neo-Marxist, and various liberation approaches. Both the possibilities and limits of each perspective can be explored in relation to the experience of women vis a vis development projects. For example, a study of how female-headed households compose a distinct socioeconomic category, and that this is rarely taken into account by development theory and practice would provide the opener for a discussion on the devaluation of women's labor, on the patriarchal mold of development programs, on the possibilities and limitations of the newer development models which explicitly include women in development concerns, on the inadequacy of neoclassical and Marxist theories when it comes to a full accounting of women's labor, etc.(2) When exploring new approaches within development projects, the class could closely examine cases such as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh which provides collateral-free loans and several social services for the poor, and whose members are predominantly poor rural women.(3) In a development communication course, as in any course on development, it is not enough to create a context for increased knowledge of other nations, cultures and peoples, but rather a context for greater respect for, and engagement with, other nations and peoples (Savitt, 1993). Only in the context of such an engagement will critiques of development be meaningful for students, and only in such a context will they become active participants in envisioning, and perhaps creating a new development paradigm. A focus on women will facilitate the bridging of student experience with the subject matter of development in such a way as to get them more involved and invested in the content. Because women are usually responsible for the day-to-day survival of the family, a description of how they are affected or bypassed by development lends itself to concreteness, to a specificity that will help create empathy and concern. Most students can relate to the material of everyday life, although they very likely have not experienced the hardship and constraints under which a vast majority of Third World women labor. …