Activate Critical Thinking-from media literacy to digital literacy against discrimination Erasmus Project

Project Title

Activate Critical Thinking-from media literacy to digital literacy against discrimination

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 : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Civic engagement / responsible citizenship

Project Summary

In accordance with the framework for ET 2020 and Paris Declaration 2015 scools should recognize the need to develop their students’ critical thinking skills and digital literacy required to handle information and create
new resources so that they become informed citizens able to fully participate in all aspects of society after graduation and equaly recognize, analyse and reject any form of discrimination. Consequently, schools need to adjust their instruction to the students’ interests and to the constant digital changes.
In their endeavour to keep up with the rapid technological changes mirrored in the nowadays society, schools are concerned about the amount of unselected information students are exposed to, but mainly overwhelmed by the impact media and digital media have upon students. As a follow-up to Europe’s Digital Agenda and of ET2020, the project‘s scope is to ensure media and digital literacy through critical thinking to high school students, aged 14-19, in 4 European schools from Romania, Bulgaria, Portugal and Malta, for a period of 2 years, based a cross curricular approach.

The objectives of the project are:
1)To offer teachers cross-curricular opportunities to exchange views, share methods and create useful teaching materials, incorporating ICT and allow them to become creators of a critical thinking framework to be applied into daily teaching, by designing 1 teaching guide
2) To train 4 core teams of students to understand how digital and social media influence our lives, by identifying and sharing similarities & differences in the practices of different countries, using inquiry based learning and critical thinking for 2 years
3) To develop cross-curricular civic and intercultural competences enhancing the learning responsibility of the students’ use of critical thinking regarding media information encountered, enabling them to discriminate between fake news and the authentic ones, between discriminatory messages, in order to reject manipulation, combining at least 3 school subjects
4) To develop digital skills in creating media related content by using digital art for both students and teachers under the form of 1 e-magazine and 1 set of flashcards during the 24 months of project implementation.
The methodology of the project uses blended activities for teachers and students in relation with real life issues: internet exploratory ones, a mixture of creative and real world activities, surveys and workshops, eTwinning couses and teaching resource creation.

Without being exhaustive in reaching the objectives, 2 training activities for teachers and 2 learning activities for students are envisaged, stongly interconnected and dependant on each other, with the aim of linking media-critical thinking-digital media with the view of non-diacriminatory citizenship and educated acces to information.

The expected results are, briefly: 1 survey in the 4 schools; 1 e-magazine for students( digital literacy and art); 1 teaching guide including concrete critical thinking materials applied to media and digital literacy;1 set of flashcards to be used into teaching, 1 webpage for the project; 4 workshops locally organised, etc.; intercultural skills, critical thinking skills, digital skills, collaboration and teamwork developed.

All things considered, by developing students’ digital skills in a creative way, learning becomes meaningful and might be easily related to their future, helping perceiving the benefits of education towards goal-directedness and self-confidence.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 103852 Eur

Project Coordinator

Liceul Charles Laugier & Country: RO

Project Partners

• Escola Básica e Secundária com P/E da Calheta
• Tsar Simeon Veliki Secondary school
• DE LA SALLE COLLEGE SIXTH FORM