Building a Curriculum Before Building a Career: The 2008 English Curriculum at Arba Minch

I graduated in June 2005, joined Arba Minch University in August, and began teaching in September. Ethiopian higher education was expanding rapidly under a government-led effort to widen access and produce graduates for a changing economy. Academic recruitment was relatively straightforward, especially for graduates with strong academic records. Unlike the elaborate faculty searches I would later encounter in the United States, my appointment involved a single interview, with no campus visit or teaching demonstration. Recruitment was handled by the university, with representatives from the department and college participating in the process. Graduating with distinction had helped open that door.

I joined the Department of English, commonly known as Applied English. The term applied was not unique to our programme; it also appeared in fields such as mathematics, physics, and biology. It signaled an emphasis on putting disciplinary knowledge to practical use. Our degree was not primarily intended to train schoolteachers or literary scholars. It prepared graduates for professional communication roles, particularly in government institutions and the expanding nonprofit sector. Students studied English language and literature alongside journalism, public relations, and professional writing, with opportunities to take business courses. The programme also reflected a broader policy shift: beginning in 2003, the Ethiopian government shortened many undergraduate degrees from four years to three. By the time I arrived, Applied English followed that three-year structure, which we would revisit during the 2008 curriculum revision.

Within my first month at Arba Minch University, I was appointed chair of the Department of English, a position I held until September 2006. Around that period, the Ministry of Education directed the university to establish a separate English program focused on preparing teachers for Ethiopia’s expanding school system. Unlike Applied English, which emphasized professional communication, the new program was designed specifically for teacher education. The two followed different curricular paths. The document I am sharing here concerns the original Applied English program, later formally known as English Language and Literature. In 2008, I worked alongside my colleagues to revise its undergraduate curriculum.

I am sharing this curriculum partly to preserve a document that has remained largely inaccessible beyond the university. But revisiting it eighteen years later, I see more than an institutional record. It captures a particular moment in Ethiopian higher education when English, journalism, and communication were still taught under one academic roof, before the expansion of digital media and the emergence of more specialized programs began reshaping their relationship.

One department, three fields

For much of the twentieth century, journalism and communication education developed in close association with English departments. The connection was understandable: journalism centered on writing, while public speaking, rhetoric, and communication shared intellectual roots with language and literary studies. In the United States, major universities gradually established separate journalism schools and communication departments, particularly during the early twentieth century. Yet the disciplinary boundaries remained less distinct at many smaller institutions, where English departments continued to accommodate journalism, public speaking, and media-related courses alongside literature and language studies.

In Ethiopia, this disciplinary overlap remained particularly visible during the 2000s, when journalism and communication were still emerging as distinct fields of university study. Addis Ababa University’s graduate program in journalism and communication, where I would later study, was itself relatively new. At regional universities such as Arba Minch, English departments provided an institutional home for courses in journalism, public relations, and communication. Applied English reflected this arrangement, combining language and literary studies with professional communication training. When we began revising the curriculum in 2008, the question was not whether journalism and communication belonged in the program, but how much space they should occupy within it.

What the department was

The English programme at Arba Minch had been established in September 2003, inside the Faculty of Business and Economics, when the institute was still turning itself into a university. The placement was not an accident: a programme meant to produce communication officers for public and private institutions sat naturally beside business and economics, and its students drew on those courses. By 2008 it had graduated about 190 students in total, taught every other department’s common English courses, and worked from a three-year programme with no minors and no electives. Books were photocopied. There was no working language laboratory. Instructors did not have offices in which to meet students. The draft says all of this plainly in its “Constraints” section, which is the part I would still stand behind most.

What we changed

We benchmarked the existing programme against English departments at Cardiff, Nebraska, Stellenbosch, and Madras, and against the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at Addis Ababa University. Three gaps stood out: the degree was three years when comparable degrees were four; students could not take a minor or an elective; and the theoretical courses, communication theory especially, had not been updated to match what the graduates were actually being hired to do.

The revised programme proposed a four-year degree and organised the major into linguistics, literature, and skills streams, with a small set of electives (film studies, mythology, theatre). It also proposed four minors: History, Amharic, Communication Studies, and Journalism. The Communication Studies minor covered communication theories, interpersonal and mass communication theory, development and intercultural communication, gender and communication, persuasion, interviewing, and public relations. The Journalism minor covered newspaper and magazine writing, feature writing, photojournalism, layout and design, media law and ethics, media management, principles of journalism, and investigative journalism. In other words, the revision took the applied purpose that had always defined the department and gave it a formal structure.

Literature at the centre, media at the edges

Two things strike me about the course list now. The first is how much of it is literature. The literature stream is the longest in the document: survey courses, poetry, drama, the novel, African literature, literary criticism. Nobody on the committee questioned this. In 2008, in an Ethiopian English department, even an applied one, literature was not a legacy to be managed down; it was the discipline’s heart, and the thing that gave the degree its seriousness. The journalism and communication courses sat at the edges, as minors, as the newer and slightly less respectable relatives, even though they were the courses most directly connected to the jobs our graduates took.

The second is that the newer relatives were already visibly growing. The minors we wrote are, in effect, the skeleton of two departments that did not yet exist. Communication theory, media law and ethics, public relations, layout and design: these are the courses that, within a decade, Ethiopian universities would begin housing in schools of journalism and communication of their own. You can see the pressure in the draft itself, in the complaint that the theoretical courses were out of date and that students had no formal path into the media professions expanding around them.

What technology did next

What finished the job was digital technology. The arrangement in which English departments hosted journalism and public relations made sense when journalism meant writing for print and communication meant speech, theory, and the press release. It made less sense once the work involved audio and video production, web publishing, data, social media, and the study of platforms. Those things needed labs, equipment, and faculty whose training was not in literature, and they attracted students in numbers that an English department’s minors could not absorb. In the United States, the small colleges that still house journalism in English are now the exception, and even there the courses have migrated toward “digital media.” In Ethiopia the same shift happened faster and later, compressed into the 2010s, as universities created journalism and communication departments wholesale and the applied English model quietly disappeared.

I was part of that shift without quite knowing it. Reading the course list now, I can see the outline of what I went on to teach over the next fifteen years at Arba Minch, Oregon, and Hamline: media law and ethics, public speaking, argumentation and debate, research methods, intercultural communication. I did not know in 2008 that I was writing my own syllabus, or that the minors we tucked into an English curriculum were a preview of the field I would end up in.

Why post it

Three reasons. First, curriculum documents from Ethiopian universities in the 2000s are hard to find; most lived on one office computer. If you are studying the history of English, journalism, or communication education in Ethiopia, this is a primary source, and a record of a programme type, applied English, that no longer exists in this form. Second, the “Rationale for Curriculum Revision” and “Constraints” sections describe conditions that many departments across the continent will recognise, and that rarely get written down. Third, I want colleagues who read my CV line “Co-author, revised four-year B.A. curriculum” to be able to see the thing itself, and to see that the bundling of English, journalism, and communication it represents was not a provincial oddity but a stage that most of the world’s universities passed through.

The 2008 document is a draft, as its preface makes clear. I am sharing it as an archival record rather than presenting it as proof that every proposed change was subsequently implemented. The original document is reproduced without editorial changes.

Documents

• Revised Curriculum for the B.A. in English Language and Literature, Arba Minch University, draft, August 2008 (PDF, 40 pages). A collaborative curriculum revision in which I participated.
• A later departmental curriculum for the B.A. in English Language and Literature, April 2021 (PDF, 104 pages). I was not involved in this later revision. I include it for comparison, particularly to show how communication, journalism, and public relations continued to appear in the programme.

If you taught or studied in the department in those years and have corrections or memories, I would like to hear them.