This interview is part of the ”Digital Media Literacy in EDMO Round Table’‘ interview series that is published every month to highlight the work of the 14 EDMO hubs.
BELUX, Monitoring Disinformation in Belgium and Luxembourg.
Authors: Martin Culot and Valentine François, Média Animation, Belgium.
Can you give us an update on your media literacy activities since our last interview?
Media education activities have been refocused around Belgian and Luxembourg operators, most often French-speaking. Média Animation has been coordinating media education activities within the consortium since the departure of MediaWijs in Benedmo 2.0. There are 7 partners who are collaborating on media education. These operators are media education training centers, media (RTBF, RTL-Luxembourg, AFP), operators who schedule visits by journalists to classes (Lie Detectors and AJP) and institutional with the Conseil Supérieur de l’Education aux Médias. All media education operators were able to agree on a positioning text as part of the work in EDMO 2.0.
What exactly is planned as part of BELUX 2.0?
Stakeholders in media education have agreed on a work plan which provides for:
- Media education campaigns from media partners (20 videos);
- “Debate” events about critical thinking for adults (15 events);
- Workshops for adults on ethics in the production of information (we are targeting 150 adults involved) ;
- 25 ready-to-use educational resources for teachers ;
- Train nearly 500 teachers on the issues of fake news ;
- Train 50 journalists and other media professionals on media literacy ;
- Involve nearly 6,000 students in classes with visits by journalists to the Wallonia-Brussels Federation and Luxembourg ;
- Produce a study (including the methodological framework) on young people’s perceptions of the media industries and their levers of action to fight against Fake News
How do you define what constitutes an effective media literacy initiative in your context?
An effective media education initiative is an action that takes into account the uses and understanding of young people. Starting from the representations and uses of young people is important to develop coherent action in media education. During our teacher training we take the time to inform teachers about the realities of young people’s uses: TikTok, Instagram… to properly target the media to work on. Teachers do not necessarily know these elements of digital culture, informing them is important in this sense. This is why we wanted to develop this study on the representations and attitudes of young people about the media industries; this allows a more refined understanding of how students perceive journalists, the media, their role, and the challenges of combating disinformation.
Which groups do you target most often with your media literacy initiatives? (e.g. teachers, librarians, journalists, youth workers, young people, older people) What is the motivation for targeting these groups, and how do you reach them?
Overall, we work in three different contexts:
The school context: on the one hand with teachers and students. Teachers are trained to be able to intervene in class on these subjects. The objective is to train teachers to be able to offer relevant course sessions on disinformation. Also, part of the activities are aimed at students, who will receive a visit from a journalist to raise awareness of disinformation.
The context of citizens: the objective is to organise media expression workshops for audiences who have little voice. As part of these information production workshops, our objective is to invite participants to imagine ethical rules for carrying out journalistic work with respect for the truth. We also organise moments of debate and exchange on the issues of disinformation and critical thinking, particularly in libraries and cultural centers.
The professional context: media professionals (journalists, etc.) will also be trained in the issues of media education. In addition to their expertise and professional journalistic practices, they will be trained in the issues of relevant media education. Also, part of the activities are aimed at students, who will receive a visit from a journalist to raise awareness of disinformation but will also go on visits to media organisations to better understand how journalism works from the inside.
Is there potential for collaboration with those outside civil society in your country/ies? For example, with policymakers, regulatory authorities or the tech industry. If so, what form does such collaboration take?
Le Conseil Supérieur de l’Education aux Médias is a full partner in the project. Concretely, we can work in a network on the issues of disinformation: AI, Fake News, etc. Establishing collaboration with certain stakeholders can be particularely challenging, especially when it comes to media organisations and major digital platforms such as TikTok, Meta and Google. These actors operate within their own strategic and commercial frameworks, and direct engagement with them remains extremely rare.
Where do you think the best opportunities lie for you going forward in promoting media literacy and tackling disinformation in your country/ies?
In addition to institutional positions (place of media education in teaching, in public campaigns, etc.), a major challenge is to be able to update very concrete examples of disinformation in order to work on them with different audiences. We cannot stay with examples of disinformation that are too old and things move quickly, and people who are training or students need to see very concretely the damage of disinformation in video sequences or images of their daily lives.
