CoMMiTTEd – Covid, Migrants and Minorities in Teacher Education: A Fake News Observatory to promote Critical Thinking and Digital Literacy in Times of Crisis Erasmus Project

Project Title

CoMMiTTEd – Covid, Migrants and Minorities in Teacher Education: A Fake News Observatory to promote Critical Thinking and Digital Literacy in Times of Crisis

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Civic engagement / responsible citizenship; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

In contexts of crisis and controversies, bipartisan positioning, and polarising political tendencies, minorities and migrants tend to emerge as a scapegoat to explain social, educational, health, and economic problems, leading to the spread of far-right ideologies and to the dissemination of fake news and hate discourse. Such discourse emerges and disseminates at a high pace in social media and social networks, through text and multimedia resources, meaning that a high level of digital literacy, understood as the capacity to critically read, interpret and engage with (multimodal) news and discourse in digital supports, is needed to navigate information on these hot social themes and their educational implications.

CoMMiTTEd addresses these issues by planning, developing, testing, and evaluating resources for digital teaching education, aiming at enhancing student teachers’ critical thinking through enrichened critical (multimodal) discourse analysis abilities and digital teaching competences. By pursuing these issues, CoMMiTTEd: i) advocates a more conscious consumption of information, namely related to socially underrepresented but in the news highly visible minority and migrant groups, thus fostering intercultural education in its “interpreting and relating” skills (“savoir comprendre”, in Byram’s categorization, 1997); ii) promotes a more responsible usage of digital technologies, social media, and social networks by introducing the development of critical cultural awareness (or “savoir s’engager”, idem) in initial teacher education programs, regardless of the school subject they intend to teach in the future; iii) enhances critical abilities that are crucial for teachers’, and by extension, students’, lifelong learning in times of increasing consumption of digital resources, with both recreational and educational purposes.

To achieve these highly demanding purposes, CoMMiTTEd’s multidisciplinary team will develop: i) an on-line databank called Pedagogical Observatory of Fake News relating migrants and minorities to the Covid-19 pandemic or other critical situations, offering analysis and deconstruction of such news and hands-on approach pedagogic resources to support teacher educators and teachers in developing critical thinking and (multimodal) discourse analysis abilities; ii) two on-line teacher education modules, one developing interpreting and relating skills and another developing critical cultural awareness, that can be integrated into diverse teacher education scenarios; and iii) a pedagogical e-handbook for teachers and teacher trainers, presenting theoretical and praxis-oriented principles related to critical (multimodal) discourse analysis and its implementation in classroom and teacher education paths.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 164070 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITAET HAMBURG & Country: DE

Project Partners

• UNIVERSIDAD DE NAVARRA
• UNIVERSIDADE DE AVEIRO
• STICHTING KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT BRABANT