Media Education against Discrimination - A guide for teens

The guide includes five learning modules aiming at raising (or strengthening) teens' awareness about how media can contribute to reinforce or contest different forms of discrimination as well as to enable them to produce effective media narratives about discrimination, possibly by questioning it.

Modules vary according to the specific media and/or particular uses/functions of media they focus on. Module 1 concentrates on the processes of encoding and decoding representations of different social groups in and through the news media (e.g., online newspapers, blogs etc.). Module 2, instead, focusses on the ideological functions of fictional media narratives (movies, TV-series etc.). Module 3 deals with social relations and identities that can be performed through video games and also in real life situations. Module 4 revolves around the political discourses about the ‘other’ performed through different media (parties’ video ads, electoral posters etc.). Finally, Module 5 centres on practices of political activism and civic engagement sustained by the use of digital media, especially social networks. Since critical approaches to media education aim not only at enabling young people’s critical understanding of media but also at encouraging their critical participation as media producers in their own right, each module includes five modules on media analysis and five modules on media production. Moreover, the modules have a privileged focus on how media represent specific social identities, power relations and differences between social groups. In this respect, the ‘politics of representation’ can be seen as a prominent aspect of the critical media literacy promoted in this context.