Around
35 Estonian and Latvian teachers and youth workers got together on
August 21-23 for three days to discuss, learn and share best
practices of developing media literacy and critical thinking among
the youth within the frame of global citizenship education.
The
three days were packed with innovative ideas and methods, groupwork
and also fun around how good are we as adults at analyzing all that
media input that reaches us whether we want it or not.
1 Introduction to Media Literacy Education by Kadri Ugur |
2 Who said it worst and how big is the damage done? |
The first day started
by Kadri Ugur (phD, University of Tartu) investigated the question of
media education at school level in general and how biased or unbiased
are we while processing media. After the lively discussion the group
was divided in two and presented to three different tasks based on
the European Commission campaign “No hate speech movement” and
the freshly translated methodological handbook “Bookmarks –
Combating hate speech online through human rights education”1.
The first exercise challenged the participants into how do they
confront cyberbullying at in their institutions. We concluded that
not having social media accounts does not protect you against the new
forms of online bullying and in any case, it must be dealt with
delicacy and persistency. The second exercise called “Wear and
share” asked the question about the difference between real life
behavior and online behavior. What is the information you would share
online, and would you still do the same on the street? Some samples
went to humoristic extremities, but helped illustrating the idea of
privacy and security. The hardest exercise for the participants was
about hate speech on social media – to decide who says it worst was
not that easy to decide upon within groups and the difference between
discrimination, prejudices, cyberbullying and hate speech was not
always clear. (See more “Bookmarks”, Chapter 5). These somewhat
personal workshops really helped opening our reality. The experience
sharing with real life stories and problem solutions was highly
valued by the participants.
Because
the discussions were deep, and we needed to keep up the positive mood
the second half of the day concentrated more on mainstream media and
media campaigns – which social campaigns work and why. Different
European campaigns were analyzed by the groups.
The
topic of the second day was migration, internally displace persons
and refugees in media. The topic moved from fake news – how to spot
them, how they have been constructed and how to control sources –
to the research made by Marlen Kakkori (University of Tallinn) on an
Estonian Facebook group called “No to refugees”. All previous
topics were more thoroughly treated in the global café where
questions like “How to diversify the media consumption of the
youth?” and “What are the good practices for developing media
literacy?” debated and later shared for the future work of
participants.
3 - One sample of group work - "Intruder in wolf skin" by a radical site on the topic of social inclusion. |
The
second day concluded with a lovely dinner cooked jointly by the
participants of the summer school and Syrian refugee family who has
been living in Estonia for over two years. The family shared their
migration story and challenges integrating in the Estonian society.
On
the third day our Lithuanian guest Reda Stangyte held a workshop on fake news. The participants learned what is a hoax, a clickbite or a troll. And how to check whether information we see in the social media is true or not. Afterwards, Kadri Ronk, Social media expert gave some tips and
tricks how to track other’s activity on social media, how false
news catch their audience so easily and how to collect data that has
been stored on oneself by Google or ther big media companies.
Despite
the long days of cooperation, all participants confirmed they had
broadened their areas of knowledge, gathered ideas for long time
projects with their youth like campaigning and thematic days and
built Estonian-Latvian partnerships for future collaboration. We all
at #Mondosummersch2017 agreed upon wanting a #betternewsmedia and
will contribute in achieving it with our youth groups!