MEDIA LITERATE: THE YOUTH WORKERS OF TOMORROW!

Training Course, 13 – 24 May 2022

EKO’s team returned to Greece full of new experiences and skills from a very enlightening Training Course that took place in Amsterdam, Netherlands and hosted by Stichting yEUth from 14 till 23 of May 2022.  25 youth workers from Greece, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Romania and Sweden met up in Amsterdam.

 

The main objectives of the training were to: 

 

  1. Increase participants’ ability to actively and critically consider the messages that they receive.
  2. Provide participants with the necessary knowledge, skills, and vocabulary to understand how media messages create meaning, recognize persuasion tools.
  3. Train youth workers’ mentoring skills and capacity to act as multipliers in their daily work with youth in physical and digital learning settings.
  4. Create a platform, where youth workers can exchange experiences and ideas and make their own contributions to advancing media literacy education, by developing innovative approaches and tools.
  5. Cultivate active media-citizenship attitudes of both youth workers and young people needed to participate in and contribute to the public debate.
  6. Establish & strengthen cross-border partnerships & future common projects and enhance their multiplier effect and impact.

In order to be ensured that there would be a solid, common and fair starting point for all, EKO Greece, which is a very close and valuable partner of the host organization, created a preparatory online meeting in which the participants had the chance to get to know each other before their arrival to Amsterdam, they got familiar with the type of Medias, the Media Literacy definition, the Media Literacy’s principles and the schedule of the mobility. All the youth workers joined the seminar and obtained a common, basic level of Media literacy.

During the mobility, everyone participated in team building activities, ice breakers, energizers games and activities based on non-formal education and designed to present terms such as fake news, persuasion tools, hate speech and freedom of expression. More specifically, through the games and the activities youth workers learned ways to evaluate all the messages they receive on Media and became able to create accurate content online. Finally, there were two scheduled walks in the center of Amsterdam where the participants were divided into teams, received a link from Google maps with specific directions, and had the task to visit buildings related to Media history of the Netherlands. Overall, the youth workers had the mission to create a toolkit with activities about Media Literacy education based on non-formal education. The toolkit includes activities that are designed per country teams.

Besides that, the group had one free day and they visited other cities, museums, typical restaurants and walked around the city. One of the evenings the facilitators took the participants to a party where they had the chance to relax and have fun while dancing and socializing. 


The experience was unique and all the participants returned to their home countries happy and full of energy to disseminate their thoughts and feelings.