Our goal was to create methodological activities to support teachers in knowing better the media practices of their students, regardless of their students’ background and regardless of their teaching context.  To do this, we used a collaborative method to co-construct pedagogical activities with the eMERGE consortium as well as with groups of teachers from each of the partner countries (Belgium, Greece, Italy, Romania) between September 2020 and June 2021.

Step 1 : defining the objectives

With their expertise in pedagogy and media literacy, the partners of the eMERGE consortium (Média Animation ASBL, University of Palermo, Athens Lifelong Learning Institute and Mediawise society) gathered to define the specific objectives of the methodological kit and the indicators to evaluate it. The kit would:

• Foster the emergence of media content that teachers didn’t suspect their students consume or that teacher didn’t know about

• Encourage debate about media consumption in class (issues raised by students, contradictions discussed among the group) 

• Enable teachers to identify educational topics to explore more deeply with their students

Having these objectives in mind, members of the consortium elaborated a first draft of the methodological kit with some ideas of activities exploring different kind of media (information/learning, entertainment, games, social networks…) to survey the media practices of young people. This draft would serve as a first base for co-designing further the activities of the kit along with teachers. 

Step 2: focus groups to collect expertise from teachers

The co-design of the methodological kit with teachers was based on a collaborative method called “focus-group” and consisted in discussing collectively with teachers the interim kit to adapt and review it to suit best their teaching context.

Before the focus group, teachers received the draft of the interim methodological kit. They were asked to read it and as a first task to identify the strong points and limits of each of the 6 activities of the kit, to evaluate their feasibility (what changes would they do to implement the activity in their classroom?) and to select the activities they would prefer to use in their classroom. The draft of the kit shared with teachers was designed to let them adapt themselves the content (i.e. the question cards or images for photo language were given as examples but teachers could decide to choose other questions or photos). The methodology used during the focus groups was collaborative and participative. This way, teachers would have a greater involvement in the co-design of the activities. To ensure the participation of all teachers (35 teachers in total), each partner used different online tools. The exchanges in small groups were designed to let participants share ideas to improve the activities and help them decide which activities they would experiment with their classroom.

Step 3: Confront the methodological kit with the reality of field

After the focus-groups step teachers have experimented the activities in their school context with their students. The experimentation of the methodological kit by teachers took place in the four partner countries from February to the end of April 2021 in each country.  In total, the kit has been tested with more than 1000 students in 2021 across the four participating countries. Teachers were asked to fill a logbook and send their lesson plan of the activities tested in the classroom in order to keep track of their experience.

Step 4 Collecting experiences and finalizing the kit

After the experimentation process, the logbooks and lesson plans from teachers were collected. Post-experimentation focus-group sessions were held with teachers in each country to collect their feedback from the field in their national language and exchange on their experimentation. Recommendations and reviews from the teachers were gathered and translated by partners in their national report. From the recommendations of the four national reports, Media Animation ASBL finally reviewed and improved the activities of the methodological kit in order to make them as transferable as possible to any school contexts. The result of this co-design process is the methodological kit for teachers “Know the media culture of your students!”.