Localizing the medium, message and action : can community radio contribute to environmental education in Wakkerstroom?
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Date
1998
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Abstract
The field of development communication has up until recently enjoyed little academic appraisal in the light
of emerging environmental discourses within the sociological tradition. No more prevalent is such neglect
than on the level of enquiry into the possible roles for community radio, in contributing meaningfully towards
environmental education. Proponents of environmental education have to this date been sceptic about
transmission pedagogies inherent in the mass media, yet no attempts have been made to consider the position
occupied by community radio as alternative to mass media education. This is a pressing concern, since the
accelerated development and expansion of this sector in South Africa provides widespread potential for radio
initiatives to take up environmental education (in terms of both information transmission and action
programmes), especially at the level of isolated rural communities.
This study examines the possible reasons for such neglect, by drawing both on qualitative and quantitative
approaches to expose and appease the orientations exhibited from the fields of community radio and
environmental education. By considering how both fields are inherently critically-inclined and by drawing
on the views of an exploratory sample of 45 participants in the Wakkerstroom district, it argues that
community radio, as development communication, could provide a meaningful context and multiple roles for
the facilitation of environmental education in that locality . Broader calls for the use of such a medium are also
reinforced by a discussion on the pressing environment and development challenges facing the study area .
Throughout its theoretical discussion the study surfaces emerging themes. The most significant of these state
that community radio 's local modus operandi, its valuing in principle of action , its call for specificity in
broadcast approach, its inherent status quo-challenging temperament, its unique ability to harness
interpersonal social interactions and its opportunity to build a sense of community and collaboration on
environmental matters , provides for a meaningful context in which to house action and experientially-geared
environmental education processes. All these arguments are seen to compliment existing views held on the
media and environmental education, by the study's exploratory sample. By repeatedly positioning the two
fields within a framework of socially-critical methodology, the study suggests that future initiatives in
environmental education should be receptive to grassroots calls for using community radio as an alternative
to generalized media broadcasting approaches, in which specific and local contexts could facilitate
understandings on environment and development matters. It closes with a broad agenda for such further
initiatives, by emphasizing the need to build network, organizational and research links between these two
fields.
Description
Thesis (M.Env.Dev.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1998.
Keywords
Environmental education--Mpumalanga--Wakkerstroom., Radio in education--Mpumalanga--Wakkerstroom., Theses--Environmental Science.