MAPPING EDUCATIONAL ROLE DIMENSIONS AMONG CHILEAN JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATION EDUCATORS

Abstract

The challenges and uncertainties that journalism education has historically faced have led to reconsiderations of its approaches, definitions, and functions in society over time. Yet, little attention has been paid to assess how Journalism and Mass Communications (JMC) educators see their roles, as well as individual and contextual factors that influence their orientations. Based on a survey of educators and data collected from JMC schools in Chile, JMC educators' roles can be grouped into four distinctive categories: the scholarly-oriented, the didactic-oriented, the practice-oriented, and the journalistic-oriented roles. Overall, the orientation that received the greatest support was the practice-oriented, followed by the didactic and the scholarly-oriented. The findings also reveal that education level, job commitment, gender, current professional journalism experience, organization type, school accreditation and the existence of graduate programs are factors that best predict educators' orientations.

Keywords:

• Chile
• educational roles
• JMC educators
• JMC schools
• journalism
• journalism education

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Research for this article received funding from Fondecyt Grant No. 1080066.

Notes

1. The academic rank of the educators was not considered in the study, because of the lack of uniformity in both the hierarchic level, as well as the criteria used by the different Chilean universities to categorize their own faculty members.

2. The Chilean educational system categorizes universities in two different groups: the first group is composed of state auto9nomous universities (known as public universities), and by private universities established before 1980 (known as “traditional” universities), all of which receive state funding on the same terms. The second group is composed of private universities created after 1980, which have a little or no state funding.