The methodological kit “Know the media culture of your students” offers to secondary school teachers a series of six activities aiming at identifying the media culture of their students whatever their background is. Its main goal is therefore to give some tools leading to know more about how their students are using social networks, about the kind of media they are consuming, the way they are informing themselves, communicating, searching and consulting information.
The six activities focus on a different kind of media and offer various pedagogical methods to foster the expression of students about their media practices. Each activity can be considered as a potential introduction to more in-depth courses on topics like: gender representations and stereotypes, disinformation, role of media and social media in a democratic society, concept of culture in a social science course, etc.
The first activity “Why do you consume media and where?” includes a preparatory assignment and aims at discussing the reasons why students consume various categories of media and how they perceive their media consumption. It will also enable the teacher to get a general idea of the average time their students spend on different categories of media.
The second activity “What would you recommend?” enable teachers to identify mainstream and popular media practices shared by the whole group of their students and discuss the reasons why some media are consumed by a majority of them: a good opportunity to discuss with students what they consider as a “mainstream media” and why. This activity includes role play and group discussions.
The third activity “Five minutes on your phone” offers teachers a chance to analyze with their students the use of their mobile phone through the usage of smartphones in the classroom, individual thinking and group discussion.
The fourth activity “Have a big picture of pop culture” gives teachers an insight of how students relate to pop culture and have (or not) a critical distance towards it. The pedagogical method is based on pictures of pop culture brought by students themselves to initiate debate.
The fifth activity “Would you agree?” uses the method of photo-language to support students in confronting received ideas about media and help them to position themselves and argue on topics related to media (whatever their opinion is).
The sixth and last activity “To share or not to share” proposes teachers to evaluate the critical distance and level of trust of students towards (traditional or not) news media using role play, individual thinking and group discussion.
For each activity, the same template is proposed: a technical sheet mentioning the students’ age range targeted, estimated time, pedagogical objectives, methods used, etc. followed by the step-by-step instructions to lead the activity. In the introduction of each activity some testimonies of the teachers who tested the activities (in Greek, Romanian, Italian or Belgian schools) are highlighted (see more about the co-design process that led to the methodological kit here ).
At the end of the kit, in the Appendix 1, teaching resources and definitions are proposed as an optional support for teachers. These resources are meant to go deeper into some media-related topics and provide more guidance to the teachers who feel the need for it. The Appendix 2 contains the images of the photo-language to lead the Activity 5 “Would you agree?”.
