Travel far enough, you meet yourself

This quote by David Mitchell, a British author describes my summer of travel very well. 

Immersing yourself when you travel leads to more than just making memories. Combining travel with intellectually stimulating conferences and opening yourself to a community of people who are all willing to share their perspectives and work with you is so empowering. It can be transformational to the way you see the world.

This summer, in late June, I traveled to the Azores to assist Belinha and Vitor with the 5th International Media Literacy Research Symposium which brings together an amazing community of researchers and educators. I was able to add on some explorations of the islands and Portugal. In July, Alexandre Le Voci Sayad, working with DCN Global, convened a forum on “Unlocking Media Literacy” in Helsinki, Finland. I was lucky enough to be able to stay in Europe, explore Helsinki before the forum, and then meet a much wider, diverse network of media literacy practitioners from around the world through DCN. Belinha, Vitor, and I came away from that experience, on top of our earlier conference, inspired to collect and absorb as much as we could from these learning communities, before returning to our own corners of the world. Here are a few pieces of how my perspective has changed from the summer of 2024.

Ponta Delgada, São Miguel Island, Açores, Portugal

In the opening keynote panel, Antonio Lopez defined media literacy as a “care discipline” that requires social emotional learning to truly engage people in the work. Making that direct connection between the human qualities of self-awareness, identity, and empathy and our work in media literacy shifted my view of what we do. I started noticing this connection in almost every presentation at the conference. 

Alice Lee is addressing the needs of her Gen Z students for more connection and active participation through integrating a service learning project into her . There is no better way to learn than to have to teach someone else what you are learning yourself. Her students needed to feel the connection to their learning through personally choosing someone to teach. In her analysis of this pedagogical approach, she states “Traditional lecturing “pushes” knowledge into students’ brains, while service-learning “pulls” knowledge out of their brains.” This is exactly the direction we need to move toward to truly shift our model of education.

Maarit Jaakkola’s research on the affective impact of readers’ responses to journalism asks us to consider the emotional connection to both the production and reception of news. To be media literate, individuals must first become aware of and learn to manage their emotional intelligence in order to form critical, reflective responses to media. This shift in approach in media literacy education can be seen in what Lesley Farmer presented. To approach fact checking, she asks middle and high school students to “look through, look up, look across, and look inside.” The “look inside” asks students to reflect on their own values, biases, and perspectives to make the final judgment on information they read online. Both Jaakkola and Farmer see the importance of getting to the heart of the relationship between the individual and the media, not just the head.  

The passion of learning through curiosity emanates from Patrick Usmar’s very being. He showed concrete ways to cultivate useful curiosity in his students, building empathy for multiple perspectives along the way. Joanna Marshall taps into her students’ knowledge of pop culture to combine both joy and rigor in the classroom. Other young educators and researchers presented so many creative ways to integrate collaborative arts, video game design, and fanfiction into media literacy education. So much potential came through our time together in Portugal.

Helsinki, Finland  

Place factors into the conference experience and Helsinki, Finland astounded so many of us from other parts of the world at the DCN Global Forum. Trust became the buzzword of this convening. As we listened to Leo Pekkala, Deputy Director of the National Audiovisual Institute in Finland, we were blown away by the level of trust that is built into the culture. In education, they trust their teachers to teach. They trust their journalists to report the news as fairly and unbiased as they can. They trust their ministries to govern and protect the people’s interests as they should. Our audience included representatives from almost all continents and regions of the world. Many of us could not imagine so much trust in what has been called the “Post Trust Era.”

As Maarit Jaakkola, Co-Director NORDICOM, University of Gothenburg, Sweden stated in her research, we must study the conditions of trust in our personal relationships with media. I started noticing the social emotional connections in the work presented here as well. Gustavo Cardoso said, “People are the message. We are all gatekeepers now.” Yonty Friesem, Executive Director, Media Education Lab, U.S. connects peace to media literacy in that just as peace is not the goal, but the way. So is media literacy. Roslyn Kratochvil Moore, from Deutsche Welle Akademie, Germany advocates for a systems approach to Media and Information Literacy in which we work toward an “earned trust, rather than a naive trust.” Julia Nitz, Professor, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany added that she teaches “distrust” facts, helping her students to deconstruct meanings and feelings of media. Joey Alagaran, Founder, Philippines Association of Media and Information Literacy (PAMIL), Philippines prefers the term “media mindfulness” because it is less associated with formal education and leads citizens to explore, empower, and engage with media in a more intrinsic way.

Speaker after speaker shared their work and their passion for media and information literacy and its powerful potential to bring about a better world. Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture designated 2024 as the “Year of Sivistys,” a word similar to “bildung” in German, a self-cultivation, intellectually, emotionally, and socially. Immersing ourselves in the place of Helsinki, Finland, built upon rock, there is an urgency for “Sisu,” finding inner strength, determination, and resilience in the face of adversity. I think we all came away from the Forum with a clear determination to truly unlock the potential of media literacy for future generations.

The International Council for Media Literacy wants to support and grow the work begun at these conferences. We want to encourage creating different structures for dialogue and growth. Time together, in-person, is incredibly valuable to strengthen the media literacy community who so often work in isolation in their own spaces. We believe in the value of time together, to slow down our thinking, and go deeper to reach toward our collective goal of a media-wise, literate, global society.