Active Media Education for Disabled Youth Erasmus Project

Project Title

Active Media Education for Disabled Youth

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 youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Disabilities – special needs; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

The project “Active Media Education for Disabled Youth” (AMEDY) deals with the challenges of the digital world for young people with light intellectual disabilities and the needs of the professionals that are working with this target group. Although young people with disabilities show high interest in digital technology and even use media intensively in socialisation, results show e.g. that bullying and victimisation seem to be more likely to happen to these young people. For them, it is often difficult to take advantage of the opportunities offered by digital technologies; likewise, they also need special support to cope adequately with the risks they might encounter while using them. This project therefore aims to empower vulnerable youth by enhancing their media literacy and teaching them to make use of digital devices and services in a responsible and creative way. By training professionals and their organisations, they become media literacy experts and can pass on their knowledge to the vulnerable young people. However, there is still a lack of social media knowledge and media literacy among social services and their staff in several European countries. This was also confirmed by the previous EU projects and by a small survey of professionals who participated in this project.

Digital literacy (basic instrumental ICT skills, information literacy, media literacy and computational thinking) must be effectively promoted in facilities where children und youth use digital devices and the internet. Also, as European society turns more digital, social care workers today are working in a field where digital competences have become a prerequisite to ensure high quality social care work, while also focussing on closing the digital divide in European societies.

To further address the issues arising from the special needs of young people with light intellectual disabilities in the digital world, the AMEDY project has focused on the following objectives:
– raising awareness for the importance of active media education for young people with intellectually disability on national and European level
– meeting the demand of professionals working with this young target group to enhance their practical digital literacy knowledge
– involving the management level of organisations working with young people with intellectually disability to raise awareness for further vocational training of the professionals who work directly with the young target group
– offering support strategies for all involved target groups (young people & their parents, professionals, management level)

During the 26 month project phase, an extensive collection of interesting and supportive materials was developed to contribute to solving the problems mentioned above.The collection includes an online training for professionals working with young people with intellectual disabilities, a support strategy paper suggesting how to deal with problems in everyday media use by young people, and a collection of best practices for events and actions that raise awareness for the special needs of this young target group. In addition, the interesting methodogical approach of “Design Thinking” was presented as well as a guide to develop support strategies and organise awareness raising activities yourself.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 192073 Eur

Project Coordinator

STIFTUNG DIGITALE CHANCEN & Country: DE

Project Partners

• UC LIMBURG
• IASIS
• UC LEUVEN