Abstract:

Lifelong learning, continuous education and the Impact of education on development are target areas of this communication, which addresses the results of Media In Action (MIA), a project at the intersection of technology, education and development. This project produced support materials and training for educators integrating Media and news literacy as well as digital storytelling.

MIA is being implemented in 5 countries (Wales, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain). While steeling the project’s approach towards communities based on the Participatory Action Research model, we used a two-way methodology, proposing a research design based on a more balanced experience between research and communities while potentializing a communication exchange between both poles (Koningstein & Azadegan, 2018).

One of the great opportunities of the use of media capabilities in Communication for Development projects is that C4D is usually implemented in developing countries, whereas the so called “developed world” often faces various situations where this is of most relevance. But we consider that this is a valuable consideration in developed countries (Brites et al., 2017), based in dialogue for social change (Brites, Santos, Jorge, & Navio, 2014; Freire, 1967; Jenatsch & Bauer, 2016; Ravenscroft, 2011) and should be based locally, taking into consideration local needs (Brites et al., 2014; Freire, 1977/1975; Jenatsch & Bauer, 2016), digital storytelling can be transformative, especially when used by people to express their voices (Jenatsch & Bauer, 2016). Contreras-Pulido, Marfil-Carmona and Ortega (2014) studied groups of adults from different regions, aiming at implementing lifelong media education learning projects. They concluded that most of these people display distrust, but also recognize the need for true media literacy.

For this specific presentation, we will describe important details from the training sessions’ field notes and also from the semi-open questionnaires that we administered to participants after the training sessions. Our research questions are related to previous discussion: What was the impact of the training sessions on teachers’ knowledge on media education? How do they perceive their present and future uses of media education with students?

Preliminary results indicate a relevant impact on teachers’ knowledge of media education and an intention to spread the training among students and their school communities. "The sharing of experience, the availability of trainers and the relevance of the content" (Questionnaire 3, Portugal) and "The possibility of broadening my knowledge and sharing with regard to good practices at the level of Media education" (Questionnaire 5, Portugal) also, “I will use some principles and tools learned here as part of my gamified project” (Workshop field notes, Spain) and “I feel confident using this Flipped Classroom platform to introduce the topic of misleading graphs in my Maths classroom” (Workshop field notes, Spain) are among the answers. An initial finding that reveals the importance of his kind of training is their interest in every component of the program including its theoretical and practical elements. Answers also reflect their intentions to implement activities and in some cases even full projects, mainly integrated into school activities. Some of the participants are already using digital tools from the training and also organizing projects adapted to their individual contexts.

Keywords:

Media and news literacy, digital storytelling, teachers training, Communication for Development, lifelong learning.