Éducation aux médias:

avancées, obstacles, orientations nouvelles depuis Grünwald:

vers un changement d’échelle?

21-22 June 2007, Paris

Speech by Gabriele Mazza

Director of School, Out-of-School and Higher Education, Council of Europe

MEDIA EDUCATION: THE WAY FORWARD? INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

Mr President, Ladies and Gentlemen,

1. I wish to sincerely congratulate the French UNESCO Commission for the initiative to organise this timely conference to take stock of how far we have come over the last 25 years in an area of competence which was well on its way to becoming a crucial area of education and socialization when it was discussed in Gruenwald, but has become even more critical today. We are well into the21stcentury and the past years have exceeded most – if not all – predictionsabout the development of media, information and communication technology.

2. Who would have imagined the extent to which information and communication technology has become part of the everyday life of children and young peoplein addition to the more “classical” media like books, magazines, newspapers, radio, television, films, etc.

Mobile telephones, text messages, multimedia messaging with photos and video clip recorded on one’s mobile phone, online chat programmes, discussion fora, blogs, etc. have entered their lives – and ours - at unprecedented speed.

3. The Gruenwald Declaration rightly said that we were living in a world dominated by images, words and sounds, that we, children and adults, had to learn to decipher the different systems of symbols, and that education needed to make provision for these competences.

4. Today the world has moved on and our surrounding reality – on top of the images, sounds and words – is marked by the omnipresence of information and communication technology not only as means of information storage, transmission and retrieval but also and above all as a means of content production: the – critical or passive – receivers of multimedia products and information are changing into – hopefully creative – providers of content.

5. Well, for the time being one might be tempted to say that while the technological set-up and preconditions as well as the wide-spread availability provide the potential for this to happen, it hasn’t quite happened yet.

Education will have to play its part to move beyond the potential state to a new responsible media culture where people are empowered to fully participate in the multimedia world of entertainment, information and communication.

Gruenwald was a forward looking initiative. 25 years ago it called for programmes of life-long and life-wide media education to equip people with the necessary competences as well as for the necessary training of educators and for interdisciplinary research.It is time to look at what has been done, and how far we have come and at whether the practice of media education has followed suit, and if not, at what were the obstacles that prevented further development – and what can and needs to be done by the different actors and stakeholders to overcome these obstacles.

7. Over the past five years there has been an increasing understanding that media education - or media literacy - is a vital ingredient of the competences of individuals in our modern, complex societies.

a)In 2003 the Ministers of Education of the Council of Europe member states meeting in Istanbul placed great emphasis on education for information and communication technologies in their final declaration: equal or equitable access, education and training in the basic competences for the use of ICT media, and the importance of preparing teachers for this role stood out prominently. Since then, ICT have moved on and the question today is much more about responsible and competent use, as both information seeker and content provider.

b)The Action Plan of the 3rd summit of Heads of State and governments of the Council of Europe (Warsaw, May 2005) placed the emphasis on security of citizens and respect for human rights and the rule of law in the information society and on challenges created by the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) with a view to protecting human rights against violations stemming from the abuse of ICT.

c)Especially the security of children.The Council of Europe shall also continue its work on children in the information society, in particular as regards developing their media literacy skills and ensuring their protection against harmful content.

d)Again the “7th European Ministerial Conference on Mass Media Policy (Kyiv, March 2005)” underlined a number of issues in its resolution and in particular the importance of

  • Media education for the general public
  • Training of children in media literacy enabling them to benefit from the positive aspects of the new communication services and avoid exposure to harmful content;
  • Development at all stages of education and, as part of ongoing learning, of media literacy which involves active and critical use of all the media, including electronic media.

e)In 2006, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted a Recommendation on empowering children in the new information and communications environment,which takes up all these issues and anchors them firmly in the framework of a human rights perspective.

f)Meanwhile, our Media and Information Society Division produced a second edition of its Handbook on internet literacy for teachers, learners and parents (a remarkable piece of work).

g)And we understand that the European Commission is working on a Communication on media literacy.

8. The list of examples of initiatives is a long one, and illustrative of the pressing need to advance in this field. Apparently and despite all that has been undertaken over the years current practice does not seem to fill the bill to allay fears of being overtaken by reality and overwhelmed by multimedia,while lacking the necessary skills and competences to make full sense AND full use of it.

9.Studies on the consumption of media show that young people spend on average per year,1 500 hours in front of various screens, 850 in front of teachers, 50 in front of parents.

Research results show a partial erosion of emotional and cognitive references that can be associated with the socialization process due to media culture. They point to a situation of transition, with the co-presence of American cultural scraps and enduring blocks of national culture.

The most striking fact is the dissonance between the values and behaviours coming out of their visual experience (or modified by it) and their interpretation of the deep meaning of the institutions they live with. This cognitive dissonance seems characteristic of a situation of cultural scrambling produced by an ill-mastered acculturation process.

As a result of the current state of acculturation, young people seem to be in a general state of confusion about their values, and this leads them to a feeling of powerlessness and of inarticulate and somewhat constrained consent.

This calls for a first definition of digital inclusion: in Europe, inclusion is beyond access to the technology, it is about access to content, to one’s own culture and about one’s capacity for the appreciation and the creation of content.

10. According to the3rdPan-European Forum on “Human Rights in the Information Society: Empowering Children and Young People” (Yerevan, 5 and 6 Oct 2006) our current solutions seem to suffer from being based on outdated patterns and perceptions of the child, the family, the media and the school system, as well as on a faulty understanding of children’s perceptions of content and communication and of their perception of themselves as online media actors, and of social connectedness.

This is why media education is so important, and this conference so timely.

11. Mr Chairman, I am convinced this initiative will succeed in reviewing the past and identifying signposts for the future: new questions and fresh answers that are fit for today and fit for the future, leaving outdated patterns of reasoning behind, unless we want to run risk of seeing our educational efforts (continue to) lag behind the reality of our offspring, in this fast-moving and developing area of media, information and communication.

I wish you an exciting and productive time together.

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