Media Literacy Conference – The Superpower of Tomorrow’s Teachers
Media literacy is a superpower, it’s your superpower, because it is you, first and foremost, who are citizens better prepared to face the world around us. Maybe you are parents who are a bit more at ease when talking to your children about media and media literacy and because you succeed in talking about such complicated topics in class. Another thing that media literacy does, and we’re not saying this, you said it, and you presented it as a superpower, is the idea that it rethinks the curriculum, that it gives your students the understanding that school is not something abstract, that Romanian Language and Literature is not just that subject that they have to study in order to pass the baccalaureate.
CIJ’s Executive Director, Cristina Lupu, explained at the media literacy conference on 18 May. Over the past few years, more than 700 teachers, with each lesson in which they infuse media literacy concepts, have developed the superpower of media literacy in approximately 90,000 pupils, teaching them how to verify information, recognise propaganda and think critically. The media literacy conference held this year was dedicated to them and to exploring how they can continue to develop this superpower in the context of the current challenges.
Media literacy in schools and the superpowers teachers have
The dialogue between Cristina Lupu, Executive Director of the CIJ, and Bogdan Cristescu, State Secretary in the Ministry of Education, focused on the importance of studying media literacy for pupils. “Media literacy is not related to a subject. It has to do, first of all, with a value system and a certain attitude and a foundation that allows you to make a value judgement”, explained Bogdan Cristescu. He talked about the importance of context, the power of “why” and the need to pass on skills, not knowledge, including the ability to ask questions: “We need to interact with the child, with the pupil, to teach him to explain why, what his reasoning is based on, and how he came to this conclusion. These are questions that I don’t think are the questions of a specific discipline.”
Teachers need a lot of superpowers, one of them is to be good listeners, another is to be open-hearted and to offer respect to the students they teach. Another superpower, the most important superpower, is asking critical questions about what you watch, see and read.
Renee Hobbs
Renee Hobbs is one of the world’s leading figures in digital and media literacy. She is a teacher, researcher and founder of the Media Education Lab. At the conference she spoke about the challenges we are facing these days when it comes to media literacy, the history of the field in the United States, artificial intelligence and propaganda. She showed us that we have always lived surrounded by “unreal realities” and that we should not be afraid of artificial intelligence, but instead turn it into a tool for developing the superpower of media literacy.
Digital media literacy – challenges and solutions at European level
Nicoleta Corbu, Professor at the Faculty of Communication and Public Relations and researcher at BROD, spoke about misinformation and how it influences the level of Euroscepticism in Bulgaria and Romania, according to the latest studies. “What can be done? What all of us hope that we have already done as part of BROD, namely awareness campaigns about all the tools that can be used to disinform”, Nicoleta Corbu concluded.
Andy Stoycheff is the founder and director of NTCenter and he talked about the way the brain perceives the world and tries to predict what’s going to happen next, which is where our cognitive biases come in. He also talked about the way sounds, images and symbols send a quick message to our brains and why we need to constantly reflect and ask ourselves questions. “So what we need is a collective drive towards creating those resources, creating lesson plans, creating worksheets. Perhaps we’re doing the first steps on that, because within the EDMO network we now have the first set of standards on what is the best practice and what should be within the professional standards in creative media literacy initiatives, and that includes the resources that we produce.” How do we develop resources that are appropriate and attractive for students? Bianca Rus, project manager at CIJ, explained, presenting the latest data on young people’s media consumption.
A very important component in developing a data-based curriculum is the proactive attitude of being connected to the media world of young people, and somehow accepting the challenge that all the resources that we develop will not remain as we design them the first time, that they need to be constantly updated considering new examples and new contexts in which the young people you work with, and we work with, live their lives.
Bianca Rus
Elena Calistru, president of Funky Citizens, thinks we should have more faith in young people. She talked about fighting disinformation, fact-checking and how these two aspects become tools for attracting young people towards media literacy: “What we discover surprisingly, and the surprise is a pleasant one, is that when they have the right tools, young people are very well. There are techniques and there are formulas through which you can get to capture not just the interest, but also the energy of these young people and I strongly believe that fact-checking is one of those tools.”
Media literacy in the baccalaureate exam and school curriculum
I think we find ourselves very often in <this struggle> with what we want to pass on, what we want to form, we are gripped by fear and panic. We don’t know what to do with this very strong emotion and then we take the easy, well-trodden path.
Horia Corcheș
The integration of media literacy into the school and baccalaureate curriculum was the topic of the discussion with Monica Halaszi and Horia Corcheș. Teachers of Romanian language and literature and trainers in the Media Literacy Programme, the two talked about the courage teachers need to find within themselves in order to develop superpowers – whether it’s in how they approach the curriculum or how they overcome their emotions.
Monica Halaszi and Horia Corcheș are just two of more than 100 superheroes attending this year’s media literacy conference. Together with them, there are 600 other teachers in the Media Literacy Programme who are developing media literacy skills in pupils all over the country.
More about the conference here.
The third edition of the media literacy conference is part of the Media Literacy Programme, was organised by the Center for Independent Journalism in partnership with the Romanian – American Foundation, with the support of the Embassy of the United States of America in Romania and BROD (Bulgarian-Romanian Observatory of Digital Media).
