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Home Front: Culture Wars
Campus journalists as young peace-builders
2006-08-12
This is from Mindanao in the Philippines, but it prolly is a program for young impressionable teens being shipped around the world.
Student journalists as peace builders? Some 158 staffers of student publications from public high schools around Southeastern Mindanao attended a peace writing workshop Thursday at a Department of Education function hall here. The workshop, included for the first time in this year's DepEd annual Regional Training for Campus Journalists, "is part of an effort to build a culture of peace in Mindanao," according to lead organizers from the Office of the Presidential Assistant on the Peace Process (OPAPP) and the Mindanao Economic Development Council (MEDCO). Similar workshops would be organized in other regions in Mindanao, said Romeo Montenegro, MEDCo's chief for media affairs. The students came from the cities of Davao, Digos, Panabo, Tagum, and the Island Garden City of Samal (IGACOS), and from the provinces of Compostela Valley, Davao del Norte, Davao del Sur and Davao Oriental.

Youth leaders from Moro groups, the Lumads and the settlers shared their peace-building experiences to the participants. The Kids for Peace Foundation, which organized the youth camp, facilitated the sharing to illustrate how youth organizations worked on their own peace advocacy projects. MindaNews handled the peace writing workshop, which focused on explaining the need for campus journalists to write accurately and responsibly, by understanding the root causes of conflicts and the histories of Mindanao's peoples.
Well, most of them anyway.
Discussions included the effects of inaccurate reportage on Mindanao and the power and responsibility of the media to help start or end a war. Also, MindaNews explained the media's capacity and duty to help prevent conflicts from occurring as a stakeholder to peace in Mindanao. Organizers sought to introduce key concepts of peace journalism to student journalists in the workshop and encourage them to apply the principles of peace journalism in writing articles. Also, they aimed to develop a Mindanao peace and development agenda among the student reporters. The workshop promoted awareness of the pursuit for peace in Mindanao by providing basic background of the history of conflicts, and the current challenges in adhering to the 1996 peace agreement. It also sought to make students aware of efforts by the youth to build a culture of peace in Mindanao, according to information from MEDCO. Organizers also aimed at developing a high school peer network to champion peace journalism in Mindanao.

The peace writing workshop is part of the cross-sectoral effort to build a culture of peace in Mindanao in line with the aim to strengthen peace constituency and citizens' participation in the peace process, MEDCO said. After the workshop, students will also attend another day of journalism training sessions on editorial writing, news and feature writing, sports writing and editorial cartooning, copy writing and headline writing, photojournalism, lay-outing, and radio broadcasting.
Posted by:Seafarious

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