Media and Information Literacy: Don´t get fooled by fake news! Erasmus Project

Project Title

Media and Information Literacy: Don´t get fooled by fake news!

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 : Strategic Partnerships for Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Pedagogy and didactics; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

Context: In the world of “information warfare” and fake news spreading in social media there is an urgent need for critical review of media content. Young people are strongly affected by social media. Fake news tend to concern immigrant issues, which is apt to cause confusion, misunderstanding and prejudices. A new National Curriculum for Upper Secondary Education (Finland) came into effect on 1st August 2016. One of the reforms in the new curriculum is developing the upper secondary school education towards a hollistic approach to teaching and phenomenon -based learning instead of working with isolated fragmentary pieces of information. The new curriculum also emphasizes cross-curricular themes, which are connected to all subjects. Among these are eg. active citizenshhip, intercultural competence and media and information literacy.
A reformed syllabus for the following subjects Civics, Swedish, Religion and History will be introduced in Sweden and Media and Information Literacy (MIL) will play a bigger part of the courses.

Objectives and activities: To create both a social media campaign and also organize educational workshops for younger pupils at other (comprehensive) schools. Creating such a campaign was meant to lead to a deeper understanding of which ways an active citizen in modern society can have an influence- through enhanced MIL and critical thinking for instance – but also what characterizes a strong democracy which can stand up to threats like disinformation and lobbyism.
Through creating the information campaign, the project students could work in a practical, concrete way with information material, which made it necessary for them to take an active responsibility both for their own acquisition of knowledge and that of others. Their preparatory work improved their teamwork skills.
The teachers involved in the project improved their skills and new methods in teaching critical thinking and exchanged experiences of teaching MIL in their different classes. The teachers also learnt about social media and its effect. They did this both through working with the project and by implementing the new curriculum (Finland) and that of the reformed syllabus for Civics, which was released in May 2017 (Sweden). The cooperation between the teachers in Finland and in Sweden has lead to an exchange of good methods and new tools for measuring the competence in MIL.

The project included: Three project transnational meetings, two Students´ transnational exchanges and in-between activities at the two schools.

Participants: 4 teachers and 20 second year students from both countries, altogether 48 participants.
The students from the partner schools came from different backgrounds. They were chosen with regards to skills and interests.

The pedagogies in the teachcing and learning of MIL from Unesco’s “Curriculum for Teachers” (2011), e.g. Issue-enquiry Approach, Cooperative Learning, Textual Analysis, Contextual Analysis and Production were discussed among the teachers as wells as EPA ergo listen-think-pair-share-technique.

Results, Impact and Long Term Benefits: The students have become critical readers and are now able to use their skills in Media and Information Literacy (MIL). Students are now able to evaluate and interpret messages and information from a variety of sources, e.g. news articles, Tweets, photographs etc. The students should now have a deeper knowledge of MIL for their active citizenship and participation in the professional community. The use of MIL can be considered as an essential tool to simplify intercultural dialogue, and mutual understanding and a cultural understanding of people both for students and teachers.

The capacity for critical thinking and source criticism is of utmost importance and form a good basis for active citizenship, which is very important for an inclusive society based on democratic values. We hope that the students now feel even more sure of how they should view news items in the Media – from a more critical point of view, and that they will not be “fooled by fake news !” Working within the project and with its effect, will hopefully have helped also the teachers involved to implement the new directives for teaching in Sweden and Finland. The project will also have good effect on the planning of the following scolastic years with regards to the inclusion of MIL.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 30945 Eur

Project Coordinator

Huddingegymnasiet & Country: SE

Project Partners

• Kuninkaantien lukio