Abstract:

This paper draws on data collected during a media workshop initiated by a French literature–theater teacher and a teacher librarian in a Parisian middle school, involving volunteer 8th- and 9th-grade students within an Erasmus+ project Media, Information, and European Citizenship Education (EMICE+, 2022–2024). Conducted in collaboration with partner schools in France, Romania, and Greece, the project places interculturality at the core of information education, not as an outcome but as a structuring condition of learning.

In a rapidly evolving information environment characterized by cultural plurality, accelerated circulation of content, and increasing media complexity, the workshop was designed to engage students in information-making as a situated, experiential, and dialogical process. Guided by an independent journalist and a professional actress-director, students participated in a learning continuum: documentary research, journalistic writing, theatrical improvisation, culminating in the collective production of a simulated European TV news broadcast, from the editorial meeting to the live on-air performance. All along the process, students acted both as local observers and European correspondents, selecting topics, exchanging perspectives, and negotiating interpretations of social and environmental issues while collaborating remotely, except for the final live event.

Interculturality functioned as a central pedagogical and epistemological principle shaping both information-making (Huvila, 2021) and learning itself. Students were continually led to confront and intertwine their understandings of information, culture, and society, constructing shared narratives across linguistic, national, and cultural differences. Thus information emerged as a space of encounter—a symbolic “third place” (Kramsch, 1993, 2009) where meanings are co-constructed rather than transmitted, and where mediation operates as a cultural process making knowledge and experience communicable.

Rooted in the French tradition of information culture as a socio-cultural practice (Béguin & Kovacs, 2011; Maury, 2013, 2025), and informed by John Dewey’s notion of experience and Paulo Freire’s “reading and naming the world,” this study approaches information education as a reflective and transformative process linking knowledge, action, and reflection. Information-making becomes a pathway to world-making (Goodman, 1978; Descola & Ingold, 2014): a process through which learners collectively inhabit reality, construct meaning with others, and engage ethically and creatively with complexity, by composing a common world (Descola, 2025).

Using a qualitative ethnographic methodology (observations, fieldnotes, recordings, production analysis), the results show that the final European news broadcast functioned as a microcosm of dialogical pedagogy. In performing European “news,” students enacted Europe itself—not as a fixed identity, but as a living, intercultural process of communication, translation, and mutual recognition. The workshop illustrates how information-making practices can support world-making within Erasmus+ projects, fostering information culture and intercultural competence as foundations for European citizenship.

This contributes to current discussions on information education by conceptualizing information-making as a form of world-making, and showing how intercultural pedagogies can be concretely operationalized within secondary education Erasmus+ projects.

Keywords:

Information-making, world-making, information culture, interculturality, Erasmus+, EMICE+, media workshop.