Students and educators help develop media literacy teaching tools

Media and information literacy is a buzz term - everyone seems to be demanding it, but the measures in place to support it are very different across educational systems and sometimes not present at all. Regardless of the national contexts and educational policies, debaters and their coaches across the world know full well that media and information literacy are essential to preparing for a good debate. Our Erasmus+ Key Action 2 project MeLitA taps into that knowledge - by connecting experts in media literacy and debate-based education, we aim to develop innovative, interactive teaching methods designed to support a critical approach to media content.

One of the key aspects of our approach to developing teaching or learning materials is to include their target audience in their development. Without comprehensive feedback from educators and students we are developing the materials for, we cannot hope to truly meet their needs and interests. 

This is why we gathered educators and secondary-level students from Estonia, The Netherlands, Poland, and Slovenia (project partner countries) in Tallinn, Estonia for parallel 5-day events during which the participants tested out some of the MeLitA lesson plans and methodological texts developed so far. We will use their feedback to adjust the existing materials to better fit target group needs, as well as use their ideas to develop additional materials by the end of the project. 

For more about MeLitA and the results we are working on - pedagogical strategy, methodological guide, lesson plan collection and e-learning platform - please visit the project page. 

The project is co-funded by the European Union through the Erasmus+ programme.