Our colleague László HARTAI represented our Institute at the second Experts Panel Meeting of the European Media Literacy Study (EMEDUS) in Rome, on the 6th and 7th of March 2014.
The goal of the consultation was to present, discuss, correct and finally accept materials, reports and the most important findings of the EMEDUS project. Participants were the experts asked for this task by the project coordinators in 2012. Before the official agenda points, it was announced that according to consultation with the coming Italian presidency, Italy will pay special attention to media literacy, and organises a conference around this topic, to which they invite representatives of the EMEDUS project. László Hartai was one of the three presenters (from three working groups), and he presented the most important results, and the propositions of the working group.
According to the working group’s findings, media education does not have a mainstream model in European schools, and curriculum research showed that three main approaches are identifiable. The working group’s results also question the efficiency of the cross-curricular approach towards media literacy. European curricula seem to lack a cooperative link between media literacy and digital competence development. Overall, the link between media education and ICT is not quite clear, media curricula are sometimes a bit vague, and there are no common criteria for quality assurance. The proposition of the working group to this specific problem was to create a website with access to best practices about the teaching of new media and to draft a proposition for education managements of European countries with a set of minimal criteria for quality media education. A lack of knowledge about what actually is going on in the classrooms encumbers development of the field, so the working group encouraged initiating research that would focus on classrooms. The presentation was very well received, and the propositions were accepted.
The two other presentations focused on informal media education and media education of disadvantaged groups. The meeting continued the next day with the presentation of the EMEDUS website and discussion of the final tasks within the project, with an upcoming final conference to be organized in Paris in May 2014.
