Our general, underlaying objective is internationalization : Pupils and teachers cooperate in the international environment and exchange good practices internationally. Another objective concerns media literacy : We integrate media literacy into classrooms. The project makes pupils and teachers more ICT skilled and enables them to tell truth from fake. We develop sets of teaching materials on Media Education within different subjects. An important objective is related to populism : The project increases awareness among the pupils about populism in the political discourse in digital media, provides pupils with skills for critical thinking about media contents. An important objective is social inclusion : We include more pupils with fewer chances, poorer economic background and weaker access to digital technologies in our project.
In this project, we include vocational and general schools form six countries which educate teenagers from 15-20 years. In the core activities, we will bring at least 80 pupils to shortterm pupils’exchanges, and 20 teachers to short-term joint staff training events. Another 30 teachers will be accompanying their pupils and will also be directly involved in the activities. The pupils will be warily selected (gender, fewer opportunities). Considerable number of teachers and pupils will be also involved in the host school activities.
There will be seven Learning Teaching Training Activities. Three of them are meant for teachers. In the first one, they set the foundation for the development of the project and learn about key points of media literacy; the second one is dedicated to internet safety; the last one, parallel to the pupils’ exchange, talks about teaching media literacy in secondary schools. Four LTT activities are pupils' exchanges. In the first one, they start a national case study on fake news and get familiar with the international institutions from the field, based in Geneva; in the second one, they learn about implications of fake news in the politics and about fighting populism; in the third one, they learn about producing media contents; in the last one, parallel to the joint staff training event, they learn and deliver a TED talk about fake news and related issues. Besides that, there will be numerous local activities and events, from conducting a survey to start a public campaign, some of them with the help of experts, journalists, activists and their organisation, we will seek to include parents more actively.
Tasks should be equally distributed among the partners. Every school sets up one LTT activity. One is responsible for communication design, one for ICT, one for compilation and publishing, local events are in the responsibility of every single partner. There will be regular video conferences, regular activity checks every six months; the communication should be bundled up and be tracked in order to avoid overload and misunderstanding.
After the project is over, we expect following results: survey and report on media literacy and citizenship education in six countries, website of the project, round tables and lectures, report on fake news in six countries, public campaign on press freedom day, guidelines with teaching materials pack, caricature exhibition, eBook of case studies, TED talks on fake news, digital magazine. The project will impact mostly pupils and teachers. We expect, they will develop their multicultural awareness and related skills, they will show considerable improvement in their media literacy, and they will become more aware of not always so welcoming media landscape and more skilful in reading news in social media properly. We think we will partly fill the social gap among some of our pupils regarding their access to digital technologies and their use. We will promote our project beyond the school walls, in the local community, in the region and among the fellow teachers.
In the long term, we expect to start a project with our partners to build on the present one. We will experience changes as teachers – becoming more confident while talking to our pupils on media literacy and populism. We sincerely hope our pupils will benefit most from the project – in becoming smart and virtuous citizens in the social media and elsewhere.