Media Literacy and Human Rights: Education for Sustainable Societies

Content

Media Literacy and Human Rights: Education for Sustainable Societies

Divina Frau-Meigs
Divina Frau-Meigs, professor at the University Sorbonne nouvelle, Paris. E-mail: divina.frau-meigs@univ-paris3.fr

 

SUMMARY

This paper builds on the collaborative work of media researchers and professionals as well as education decision makers and teachers that met in Graz, 5-7 December 2007, at the invitation of the Council of Europe. The purpose of the workshop was to determine the validity of media education and to verify that human rights could be an added value to such an education.
Three main questions were debated, that built on each other: 1) “Which media literacy?” focused on an assessment of the various definitions of media education, trying to come to terms with the distinction between old and new media, old and new literacies. 2) “Which competences, skills, attitudes and values?” considered the core elements for developing coherent literacy training programmes and sought to identify the integration of human rights in current methods of teaching. 3) “How to develop these competences, skills, attitudes and values?” discussed concrete examples of best practice, especially those dealing with interactions between public and private sectors and old and new media. It also examined how to evaluate the efficacy of empowerment practices and policies, raising issues of awareness, self-regulation and the role of the state and of Intergovernmental Organizations such as the Council of Europe.
The results emphasized priority actions for different actors in the field of media literacy, and assessed possible cooperation between actors while highlighting the most important outcomes concerning the three key issues. The first research question, about the feasibility of a comprehensive and inclusive approach to media education was answered positively, with many examples showing that it was already a work in progress. The second research question, about the added-value of human rights, was also verified, though it appears that the introduction of human rights values in the curriculum needs special attention and a modular approach.

Key words: media education, human rights, media literacy, Council of Europe

Introduction and overall hypothesis
Media literacy has been for a long time associated to schools and their needs to incorporate materials that deal with popular culture and the tastes and preferences of students. A more recent trend sees media education as a means of enhancing citizenship and human rights values, inside the school as well as in informal settings. Yet another more recent trend considers media education as a tool for sustainability, as it can potentially insert young people in the kind of workforce that is expected in the Information Society, as framed within the international consensus set by the World Summit on Information Society (2003-2005) or, alternatively, in Knowledge Societies, as framed by Unesco and civil society actors during that same process.
The purpose of the workshop and the main hypothesis behind it was then to test the conditions of feasibility of such a comprehensive view of media education. If media education is a lifelong process, inside and outside schools, what competences are needed to empower young people and the democracies in which they evolve? Are human rights compatible with media education and if so, what mutually reinforcing processes can be devised to strengthen them? How viable would the introduction of a media education curriculum incorporating human rights be, within the context of a very diversified European Union, with many media traditions and education cultures? What action plan could be elaborated so that all actors, from the Council of Europe to teachers and media activists, could be implicated and could imagine creative partnerships?

General European Context
Matthias Traimer, the Chair of the Council of Europe Steering Committee on Media and New Communication Services (CDMC), gave a brief speech on the challenges to media policy posed by the evolution of the media and their increasingly global nature. He expanded on his vision of media literacy as a means of modernizing media policy: it could be a means of updating the role of policy-makers as facilitators, able to frame legal decisions out of bottom-up activities like the one to be taken up by the Graz workshop.
The work of the Council of Europe in the field of media literacy was then developed by Lee Hibbard, Media and Information Society Division, Directorate General of Human Rights and Legal Affairs (DG-HL). He recalled the Council of Europe’s work on media literacy, as expressed in the Committee of Ministers Recommendations on children’s empowerment (2006), on freedom of expression in the new ICT environment (2007), and on public service value of the internet (2007), as well as others in preparation. The position of the Council of Europe regarding media literacy is that it is a powerful tool to empower citizens, which can offer safe ground and real possibilities for progress, especially in fostering trust in media content and promoting human rights, with the help of all stakeholders. The Council of Europe is in need of responses about common definitions, competences and strategies that can strengthen human rights protection and promotion, help member states enhance the democratic potential of new communication services, create an over-arching common vision of human dignity that drives all stakeholders in the same direction.
Josef Huber, Division “European dimension of education“, Directorate of School, Out-of-School and Higher Education, Directorate General IV – Education, Culture and Cultural Heritage, Youth and Sport, then explained the perspective of the “Pestalozzi” Programme, that combines policy and practice by offering training for education professionals for Council of Europe priority themes. He expanded on the relation between media and education as a means for inclusion, intercultural dialogue and for the peaceful resolution of conflicts. He insisted on the notion of sustainability, from an environmental perspective, in which he included the media environment. He insisted on the importance of the intercultural setting provided by the ECML and the framework of the Graz workshop, as a means to find a common language, with different frames of reference, avoiding the two traps of the “guru” myth (the all-knowledgeable expert) and the “bible” myth (the all-encompassing fit-all book). Considering the mandate of the “Pestalozzi” programme to develop modules for the training of trainers in priority areas defined by the Council of Europe, he urged the participants to brainstorm on the what could be the basic ingredients of media education in a human rights perspective.
Divina Frau-Meigs, general rapporteur, then recapitulated the objectives of the workshop. The aim was to explore and describe the competences, skills and attitudes of a democratic citizen in respect of the media (including the new communication and information environment of the virtual world) and ways of promoting these in formal and non-formal education. The discussions were to address these key questions while relating them to core concepts such as democratic citizenship, human rights and intercultural dialogue. The outcome and expected results of this think tank workshop should provide inspiration and basis for future work of the Council of Europe in this field both on the level of standard setting and on the level of the training of education professionals as well as media professionals.

Setting the research ground
“Medi@education.century21st: A Global Positioning System for Human Rights”
Edward T. Hall, in Beyond Culture, proposed an analysis of cultures in which he suggested that they could be set on a continuum between ‘high context’ and ‘low context’ cultures. ‘High-context’ cultures function through implicit communication: they assume that information is internalized by their members through time and participation in social activities. They tend to rely heavily on schools and communities. ‘Low context’ cultures develop explicit forms of communication: information is externalized in the coded messages that need to be transmitted via performance and spectacle. They tend to rely heavily on media and individual member’s self-representation and expression. ‘High context’ cultures tend to be homogeneous, with low immigration levels, whereas ‘low context’ cultures are heterogeneous, with high immigration levels.
In today’s European context, with ever expanding territories and lowered barriers of entrance, Hall’s framework needs to be revisited: European cultures are all becoming ‘low context’, because of enormous immigration flows and also because of intrusive cross-border media and ICTs. The need for explicit forms of communication is being felt as heterogeneous populations, with various historical backgrounds, migrate and immigrate in diasporic online and offline flows. The need for explicitness is especially true for human rights as the body of values promoted by the European Community and more specifically the Council of Europe. Human rights are a “Global Positioning System” for European people, but they are abstract and difficult to internalize. Most often, they are not taught through time and participatory activities. The historical events that brought them about are waning and the generation who developed them is disappearing with their life memories significant only for smaller and smaller numbers of European citizens. Younger people, either coming from immigration or from the territory itself, are illiterate about the meaning and value of human rights.
Human rights need to be made explicit again, with strategies of high and low cultures within our nations, with a combination of school and media, via communities and individuals alike. There is a need for a global repositioning of values considering our increasing connectivity -an explicitly technical word, that means nothing without a human sense of connectedness. Media education and human rights are about connectedness. Hence, it is essential to identify some of the major disconnects that undermine them.

I. Making media education explicit
What is most striking at the moment, when cursorily contemplating the European landscape, is the amount of disconnects that appear. This is most obvious when it comes to defining the various dimensions of media and education. However, while considering the depth of the divides, it is also necessary to look at the seams, at what these dimensions have in common, taking what they do not have in common as complementary forms of learning.
There is a significant disconnect between media culture and school culture, with a curious reversal of objectives over time. Back to ‘ground zero’, media culture originally was about enlightened citizenship (leading to opinion formation and voting) but it has increasingly been about dealing with commercial, service-oriented needs. School culture originally was about producing a literate workforce in the industrial and commercial age (away from farming) but it is more and more construed as the last space where markets do not penetrate. What they have in common is the capacity for the transmission of values and attitudes, as well as a tradition for the protection of minors, usually implicit in their respective missions, – a characteristic of ‘high-context’ cultures.
There is a significant disconnect between media and ICTs (including the new communication services). Traditional media, especially broadcasting, are framed within national policies in which they convey representations, news and local entertainment. New media are mostly international telecommunications platforms, for connexion, for diffusion and for knowledge economies. As such they enter in competition with the schools as the industry provides more and more material for learning and opportunities for tutorials and scholastic activities, to the point that the inductive method, a long-standing pedagogical strategy, is now attached to ICTs, as if learning was technology-bound and not human-bound. Additionally, the discourse around ICTs carries an ideology that is injunctive, performative, explicit, – in other words, ‘low context’. The use of ICTs is presented as the solution to all educational and societal troubles: they will provide autonomy, socialization, even European integration, to all children. What they have in common is that digital convergence is bringing old and new media together on social network and multimedia platforms. Also they are both subject to spatial changes as schools and media institutions are increasingly interacting, while the home is becoming an alternative locus of leisure, learning and labour. They also both provide valid and valuable options for lifelong learning and for long distance education.
There is a significant disconnect between media education and ICT education. Media education tends to be content-oriented, with a determined strand of critical thinking attached to it. ICT education tends to be process- and project-oriented. Besides, it tends to be done via ICTs, which can introduce a confusion with ICT use, whereby utilisation is equated with education. Additionally, media education tends to be done in a variety of subject areas, whereas ICT education tends to be treated as a separate course in the curriculum, often emphasizing the difference between arts and sciences. Along the same lines, media education tends to be related to implicit cultural objectives while ICT education is related to explicit economic ones. Media education thus tends to be ‘high context’, while ICT education tends to be ‘low context’. The stigma of high-brow, low-brow cultural divides can hence be attached to any of the two, according to the European country considered (high brow is not a stigma in France, whereas it is in the UK, for instance). What they have in common is the need for structured pedagogical theories and methodologies, the need for real visibility in curricula, inside and outside schools, the need for their complementarities to be made explicit in a complex world. Arguably, they also need to be clearly united under a common umbrella word, that does not set them in stale binary oppositions. Such words as “sustainable education” or “u-literacy” (in reference to ubiquitous networks and mobile telephony) have been suggested. “medi@education.century21st” refers to the fact that old and new media are digitizing and allowing for yet unsuspected forms of education in the 21st century, owing to coming generations of web 2.0, 3.0, …
So, establishing connectedness implies a number of positive actions and the abolition of antiquated binary oppositions to accommodate for today’s complexity. This can be done within complexity theory, together with the support of cognitive sciences as applied to media. Seaming the ridges of the divide supposes a variety of explicit activities, to be carried on by a variety of actors, be it the media professionals themselves, the decision-makers within the education system or the policy-makers at European level:
• Creating a continuum between media, old and new media, high tech and low tech ones alike;
• Adjusting the cursor between ‘high and low context’ cultures, and high-brow and low-brow attitudes and values;
• Accepting the idea that there can be many literacies, old and new, within an all-encompassing media education framework;
• Spelling out the complementarities between media education and ICT education, and adjusting incrementally the skills and competences required for both;
• Using convergence to stress diversity and plurality;
• Referring to the “Paris Agenda – twelve recommendations for media education” itself an outcome of an international consultation of experts conducted by UNESCO and the Council of Europe, in June 2007, as an empowering tool that proposes a definition of media education by scope, by skills and practices and by objectives in its very first recommendation:
“Media education applies to all media whatever their nature and the technologies used. (...) These changes enrich media education practices with new skills, regarding information, knowledge and interactive communication., including the social, legal and ethical dimensions involved. (…) The main objectives are: to give access to all kinds of media that are potential tools to understand society and to participate in democratic life; to develop skills fro the critical analysis of messages, whether in news or entertainment, in order to strengthen the capacities of autonomous individuals and active users; to encourage production, creativity and interactivity in the different fields of media communication”.
The next two recommendations of the Paris Agenda stress the link between media education, cultural diversity and respect for human rights as well as the need to define basic skills and evaluation systems. Such a document, added to the European Convention on Human Rights and a number of recommendations by the Council of Europe on young people’s empowerment in cyberspace and the public service value of the information society, provide a political and legal compass to guide our steps when elaborating media education frameworks in relation to human rights.

II. Explicitly connecting media education to human rights
Education with regard to human rights exists in various forms, but it is not often connected to media and even less to media education, except where freedom of expression is concerned. Human rights tend also to be disconnected from children’s rights and it is not always clear which version of the human rights doctrine or principles people are referring to (the Universal Declaration, the European Convention,…?).
No research has been conducted on the connection between media education and human rights education, so this cursory presentation is based on a rapid overview of existing manuals and recent research done about media uses in Europe. There is an urgent need for research in this specific area, as media education, to be considered seriously by decision-makers and experts alike, needs to be research-based. Some in-depth studies should be done on children and their awareness of human rights, taking into account their age differences as they will not perceive rights in the same way if they are below 8 (the least studied group) or between 12 and 17 (the most studied group).
There is a significant gap in the frequency of topics dealt with in media use and media education. The least frequent topics mentioned are: civic involvement, interpretation and evaluation of content, content creation (as a form of freedom of expression and a means of identity construction) and certain kinds of search, like search for fun predominates by far search for advice, for help, for information on rights. These topics relate to issues closely connected to media education tenets on creativity and participation. Such tenets have a strong relation to human rights education and their weakness is preoccupying. There is a significant gap in the treatment of exposure to risk and to harmful content (online and offline). If contact and context risks are fairly well identified (sexual, violent, racist materials in such spaces as chat-rooms, online games, etc.), it is less so with commercial risk (manipulation by product placement, cookies, etc) and risks related to user-generated content (hazing, damaging reputation or privacy of others, damaging one’s self-image, etc).
The least identified of all risks is the risk to privacy (hacking, physing, personal data gathering for commercial use, traceable identity and identity checks, etc), as it is offset by the quasi monopoly of freedom of expression, turned into a permissive mantra and emptied of most of its meaning (permissiveness is good for business). Often the perspective of the child is neglected, in his/her own perception of risk (bullying, abuse, spam, exposure to challenging content such as suicide, anorexia/bulimia, drugs, addictive practises, etc ). These are all issues closely related to media education, in its tenets about critical thinking and self-protection from such contents. Such tenets also tend to have a strong connection, if not the strongest, to human rights, as they can refer to issues such as intolerance, hatred, loss of dignity, etc.
There is a significant gap in the conception of the role of the various care-takers (parents, educators, media professionals,…). Very little is known about children’s perception of regulation (in contrast with their parents), about the effectiveness of safety measures and practices (such as filtering, ranking, black-listing, peer-to-peer monitoring, …), about the position of the industry (beyond its self-regulatory stance). The parents’ role in effective education regarding risk and rights is not well evaluated, and neither is the teachers’ part in promoting awareness of risk and solutions for safety. The consequences of online access to real life activities and learning are also a blind spot, that is detrimental to the development of coherent policies, as decision-makers will protect themselves due to a lack of data to continue paying lip-service to media education and human rights without further ado.
So, bridging the gaps implies a number of positive actions, that can also use complexity theory, together with the support of cognitive sciences as applied to media and to human rights, by a variety of actors working together in multi-stakeholder platforms, from the public, private and civic sectors:
• Creating a continuum of rights, both children’s and adult’s;
• Making explicit under-represented human rights, fundamental freedoms and other core values of the Council of Europe: integrity, dignity, privacy, protection of minors, and connecting them to information and communication rights, like freedom of expression, self-image, intellectual property, etc;
• Developing training to promote the exercise of these rights on-line and off-line, by revealing what is implicit and by being creatively explicit (using symbols, icons, indexes, …);
• Raising awareness about human responsibilities as media and communication services increase the roles people play in society, be it in online networks or offline communities, as they can be in turn consumers, users, citizens, players and designers;
• Reducing the risk that media literacy be equated solely with safety awareness and risk avoidance;
• Building trust in media and ICTs, by avoiding the risk that media education be instrumentalized by commercial interests;
• Distinguishing the ‘high and low contexts’ of cultures from the open and hidden agendas of the various actors concerned.
At the end of such a process of clarification, of elucidation, the reward is full empowerment as universal, abstract concepts that can be endorsed and appropriated individually, in connection to real life activities and practices. Such a process presents the additional advantage of maintaining the “plasticity” of human rights, their capacity for evolution and problem-solving while maintaining a principled sense of direction, so that they do not turn into a rigid doctrine or a stale ideology, -the most lethal risk of all!

References
Buckingham David. Media Education: Literacy, learning and contemporary culture, Boston : MIT, 2007.
Frau-Meigs, Divina. “Media Regulation, Self-regulation and Education: Debunking Some Myths and Retooling Some Working Paradigms”, U. Carlsson and C. Von Feilitzen (eds). Media education : protect or promote ? Goterborg (Sweden), Clearinghouse, 2004, 23-39.
Frau-Meigs, Divina. “Public Service on Digital Media: Letting Young People’s Situation Determine the Timing and Format?”. In the service of young people. Studies and Reflections on Media in the Digital Age. U. Carlsson and C. Von Felitzen (eds). Goteborg: Unesco clearinghouse, 2006, 13-26
Gonnet, Jacques. Les médias et la curiosité du monde. Paris, PUF, 2003.
Jacquinot, Genevieve (ed.). Les jeunes et les médias. Perspectives de recherche dans le monde. Paris, L’Harmattan, 2002.
Livingstone, Sonia. Young People and New Media. Childhood and the Changing Media Environment. London, Sage, 2002.
Potter, W. James. Media Literacy, London, Sage, 2006.
UNESCO. Media Education. A kit for teachers, parents and professionals. Divina Frau-Meigs (ed.). Paris, Unesco, 2006 (in French and English).

The Rationale for the workshop sessions
Rationale for Workshop session 1: “Which media literacy?” focused on an assessment of the various definitions of media education, trying to come to terms with the distinction between old and new media, old and new literacies. It sought to answer questions related to the cultural differences in Europe, the competing definitions of media education and the forms of resistance to it. It was moderated by Divina Frau-Meigs, professor, media sociologist, and director of the master’s programme in e-learning and media education engineering at Paris 3-Sorbonne. She emphasized the disconnects between media education and human rights education, and brought in the human rights specificity and its added value to media literacy, as a means for empowerment, enhanced citizenship and sustainable democracy.
The key input for discussion was provided by Alexander Fedorov, professor, president of the Russian Association for Media Education, who reported research results on the experts’ attitude to the main purposes of media education. He offered the participants an extended view of various possible indicators for media education (competence, motivation, contact, content, activity, creativity…).
The participants then worked in three parallel groups and reported back to the plenary their main suggestions for a comprehensive definition of a human rights-based media education, and looked at arguments (pros and cons) for its development.
Rationale for Workshop session 2: “Which competences, skills, attitudes and values?” considered the core elements for developing coherent literacy training programmes and sought to identify the integration of human rights in current methods of teaching. The session was moderated by Patrick Verniers, Director, Media Animation, General Secretary of the European Charter for Media Literacy, lecturer at the University of Louvain-la-neuve, Belgium. He proposed a comprehensive inventory of competences, skills, attitudes and values, on the basis of the European Charter for media education and on other tools (CLEMI , etc).
The key input for discussion was provided by Susanne Krucsay, Head of the department Media Pedagogy/Educational Media/Media Service in the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, Austria, who focused on what makes media literacy competences different from other related areas like computer skills, etc. She based her analysis on her work in Austria and also on the 8 areas of competence that have been developed by the European Commission.
The participants then worked in three parallel groups and reported back to the plenary their main suggestions for competences, skills, attitudes and values, ranking and highlighting the most important ones.
Rationale for Workshop session 3: “Which way of developing these competences, skills, attitudes and values?” discussed concrete examples of best practice, especially those dealing with interactions between public and private sectors and old and new media. It also examined how to evaluate the efficacy of empowerment practices and policies, raising issues of awareness, self-regulation and the role of the state and of Intergovernmental Organizations such as the Council of Europe. It was moderated by Kristin Mason, Audiovisual Learning Executive, BBC Learning, and Anthony Worrall, Adviser, BBC Editorial Policy, who presented examples of developing media literacy competences and skills in the domain of public broadcasting. The second key input was provided by Anne-Claire Orban, blogger by profession and media trainer at Action Cine Medias Jeunes, Belgium, who presented the perspective of young users, applied to social networking, with a special focus on blogging.
The participants then worked in three parallel groups and reported back to the plenary their main suggestions for the roles of the different actors in formal and non-formal education and the promotion of competences, attitudes, skills and values.
The concluding session dealt with “the way forward”, which established priority actions for different actors in the field of media literacy, assessing possible cooperation between actors and highlighting the most important outcomes concerning the three key issues. It considered the general lines of the coming action of the Council of Europe in the short- and medium-term future. It examined how future activities could benefit from the results of the workshop and how the participants could further contribute to the action of the Council of Europe in the field of media literacy development.
Each workshop session was organized so that:
• three groups (A, B, C) remained the same throughout the workshop,
• one group was provided with interpretation (English-French), the other groups worked in English,
• each group was led by a moderator,
• each group held sessions lasting 120 minutes, with the last segment devoted to preparing for reporting back, i.e. presenting the outcome of the group work on power-point in the plenary,
• the three groups were given a specific task for each key question, to make the synthesis easier to understand and to provide consensual material for the general report.
The sessions brought together participants from the public sector and the civic sector mostly. The majority came from government, education and academia. Most of them were teachers and media educators but the presence of media producers and regulatory bodies representatives allowed for cross-sectorial approaches that were refreshing on the topic of media education. There were about 25 countries represented, which provided a very broad range of outlooks and a welcome reminder of the cultural diversity of Europe and the necessary accommodations to be made as regards media education, country per country. The ‘show and tell’ session organized on the second evening added some concrete examples to those presented during the sessions and allowed for some fruitful informal exchanges.
The general feeling was that the framework for the sessions was very empowering, allowed for a lot of exchanges and intense, creative brainstorming, while the reporting back to plenaries allowed for a new, enlarged focus. This feeling was encapsulated by Patrick Verniers in his workshop report: “The methodological approach of the workshop based on 3 key questions and organised around workgroup sessions was really valuable. This dynamic process based on inputs by experts/workgroup sessions/synthesis sessions make emerge the best of people-thinking and creates an overall valuable learning process. For the participants who were discovering media education, I think this process allowed them to really integrate the concepts and to show them how to reflect on them. For the others, it was a very good experience of clarification and communication of their experiences and views to elaborate a common framework.”

Key issues
A series of comments and suggestions emerged from the three workshop sessions that help to elaborate an action plan.

I. Which media literacy? An encompassing definition of media literacy, in relation to human rights
The subject of media literacy was strongly developed, and was not in contradiction with the previous Pan-European Conference on “human rights in the information society: empowering children and young people” (Yerevan, October 2006) , nor with the “Paris Agenda – twelve recommendations for media education” (Paris, June 2007). Participants stressed the need to develop a systemic way of thinking about media, placing the Internet in a continuum with other media, with an additional function, interactivity. They also expressed their desire to avoid binary polarizations about old and new media. They felt that education and media were culturally situated and that an overall definition should take this cultural diversity into account.

A consensual, encompassing definition
There was a general feeling that “education” was the general word that was needed, even if each European culture can give it a different meaning. Education was perceived as a lifelong process and outcome while “literacy” was perceived as the operational means and skills needed to acquire education. So literacy can be seen as encompassing info-competence and other text- and image-based competences to interpret media messages and communication services. Media literacy can be taught and evaluated in terms of skills, attitudes and proficiencies, whereas media education can only be assessed in a general way. This implies that media literacy can be taught using an interdisciplinary approaches, including at least education sciences, information and communication sciences. A two-year master’s degree could be necessary and could be developed throughout Europe for that purpose (as demonstrated during the ‘show and tell’ session, with the Paris 3-Sorbonne example).
Defining education also required defining media. These were seen as complex institutions, that combined technological tools and cultural contents, and conveyed a number of representations, norms and standards while offering communication and information services. The participants insisted that they should be set in a social context, without technological determinism, as human-driven communication tools. As such, their capacity for socialization, either through conversation, social networking and user-generated content, was positively evaluated and seen as an asset for the development of shared knowledge societies.

The relation to human rights and its added value
Human Rights, as a body of core values, appeared as an abstract concept to be taught. It was considered difficult to make them explicit because of the little demonstrated connection with real life. Participants felt that they had to be connected to practical experiences and practical examples that made sense to different age-groups. This might imply taking children out of the classroom situation and more into the world of media, to sensitize them to different realities and ways of seeing.
Human rights and media education were perceived as closely linked in a mutually reinforcing process, where human right values meet young people’s practices. The participants expressed the need to preserve a certain balance between the protection of their sensibilities and the encouragement of their curiosity. They felt that the mastery of tools and the critical thinking developed in media education was a way of forming informed and free citizens, especially if such a training process was based on the real uses of the media by young people.
Their was a strong feeling among participants that education for democratic citizenship refers not only to information for critical thinking and active participation but also about rights, entailing some reciprocal responsibilities. It was not so much the issue of risk and harmful content that was stressed as the issue of responsibility, as best preparing for the practicalities of life. Exploring and experimenting with rights was seen as a positive way of learning about them, teaching children self-protection and self-help as much as allowing them to call on adults and peers. Social networking and social connectedness appeared as essential to the child’s well-being and his/her emotional development. Media, in that light, were seen as providers of different experiences about rights, and as a solid foundation for good judgment, empowering for children, especially if they are aware of the way media work, with their own agenda.

“Exploring and experimenting with rights was seen as a positive way of learning about them”

Some participants came up with an elaborate framework, associating human rights to the “International Convention on the Rights of the Child”, adopted by the UN in 1989. The Convention emphasizes ‘Protection, Provision and Participation’, as three regulatory strategies, which can also be related to three different communication policies, the 3 P’s. They could be the basis for a general policy framework around human rights and education, with and about the media (see Appendix 1). This framework could have the added value of not separating children’s rights from human rights. It can also provide a rationale for sustainability in democratic societies, as a commitment to localization of media education, especially in teacher training, as “no size fits all”.

The pros and cons
The participants were overwhelmingly in favour of integrating human rights in media education, as a lot of compatibilities and complementarities could be detected. They felt empowered to do so by the existence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights and, for some, by International Convention on the Rights of the Child. They sensed that globalisation could be a positive way of achieving sustainability and the transfer of various experiences, competences, methodologies and materials while extending the reach of rights and responsibilities to emerging democracies. They also thought that the timing was appropriate as there is a increasing level of awareness among many actors concerning their shared responsibility and shared perception of the need for global ethics within a human rights context.
The participants thought that a modicum of resistance could still come from some actors in the industry, who tend to favour a “hands-off” approach to media education, especially commercial broadcasters. These actors do not feel that human rights promotion is part of their activities and missions. Some saw the drawbacks of globalization, with its economic drive for privatization, exploitation and individualization. A few feared that the very notion of human rights might be abused in this process, and that it could turn into a stale ideology or could be instrumentalized by non-democratic states or strictly commercial interests. Hence the need to ensure that ethics and responsibilities be well-shared across all actors.
Beyond the pros and cons, the participants felt it necessary to identify areas of controversy. They insisted on paying attention to the hidden curriculum: one’s own hidden agenda, related to one’s own values and those of one’s culture, the hidden agenda of media producers, the hidden agenda of policy-makers. They also expressed caution about the notion of empowerment, as it is variously interpreted across countries. Moreover, it was perceived that empowerment is about self and interpersonal experiences; as such it does not encompass a lot of the dimensions that escape the individual, such as control of infrastructures, of expertise, of content production. Personal involvement and responsiveness, especially with regard to the child, does not necessarily give access to these dimensions and cause frustration.

Proposed action lines:

– Raise awareness about the consensual all-encompassing definition of media education to member states. This should provide decision-makers with a rationale for developing media education policies across Europe, in a concerted way.
– Provide the basis for a core media literacy package, with requirements for skills, competences and evaluations, to be used all across Europe. This package needs to be officially supported by states, so as to enable the construction of partnerships between the education sector and other sectors such as the media sector and the culture sector at large in each country.
– Encourage the monitoring of media use by children, with added criteria to measure human rights awareness. This should help every country to evaluate the state of the media competence of young people, and their awareness of their rights and responsibilities concerning dignity and human rights in their everyday life and consumption practice. Calls for research in these areas should be launched to obtain comparative and longitudinal results.

II. Which competences, skills, attitudes and values? A modular, cross-curricular approach
The two keynote speakers gave a very wide-ranging input on the various competing models for competences existing in Europe: the BFI model (England and Belgium) suggests 6 dimensions to media education, CLEMI (France) describes 5 domains of competences while the signatories of the European Charter on media education have identified 7. The European Commission has drafted 8 “key competences” in which media education could be inserted (though no steps have been taken in that direction yet, in spite of a communication to the member states issued in December 2007). It was noted that media education per se as an area of competence was ignored (as were human rights).
It became clear throughout the workshop that, in fact, 3 main over-arching competences were shared by all these models, that could then be divided differently according to each country’s educational traditions and according to the age groups in the curriculum (initiation, mastery, further development or specialization). Recurrently, these models insist on developing competences for comprehension of content, critical thinking and creation/creativity. They are the 3 C’s of media education: ‘Comprehension, Critical thinking and Creativity’, which could be transformed into 5 C’s if (Cross-) Cultural awareness and Citizenship are added, in a European-specific context (this is, in fact, the 8th key competence in the draft of the European Commission).
Areas of analysis and of specific knowledge could be derived from these core competences, that could be broken down into specific modules like technologies, production, representations, languages and publics (consumers and generators of content), for instance, to which one could add contexts and cultures to keep the European dimension. This should then make it possible to assess the output and evaluate what the learners have acquired, in terms of knowledge and skills (both communication skills and information retrieving and producing skills. There was a general understanding that, compared to other subject matters, media education is not about input but is output-oriented, which is to say is concerned with learners’inductive capacities to acquire and produce knowledge (see Appendix 2).

“Core competences could be broken down into specific modules like technologies, production, representations, languages and publics (consumers and generators of content)”

The participants also identified the need for a curriculum that could be devised for initial, basic training of teachers. This area of training seems to be the least well covered across Europe, as most of the people involved in media education are either self-taught, or have benefited from continuous training (short 1 or 2 day-long workshops), offered very often by institutions outside the school system (NGOs, special government entities, public broadcasting services,…). The result is that they don’t tend to feel supported by their teaching environment.

“Most media educators feel ill-trained, ill-equipped (technically and intellectually), not always up-to-date (to deal with issues like challenging content or children-generated content) , and ill-considered by their hierarchy.”

Competences and skills
Competences and skills were perceived as complementary terms, skills being more operational (keyboard manipulation, video editing, etc) while competences dealt with knowledge of the operating basis of different media. They were both conceived of as being necessary to equip learners through their exploration and understanding of media (in formal and informal settings). They were also construed as age-specific. Competences were not devoid of connection with the three P’s of the regulatory strategies and communication process (Protection, Provision and Participation), as participants felt that learners had to be able to communicate properly and to actively and creatively engage with the media, even by interpellation of decision-makers and producers.
Participants agreed on a number of actions that could define the 4 over-arching competences, with attitudinal change as an output: to manage (risk, on-line postings, etc), to read (decode, analyse, etc.), to deconstruct (the context, the culture, the history, etc), to solve problems, to search and share content, to evaluate (critically, while understanding the others’ opinions etc), to create (adopt fictional identities, remix media contents, etc), to use media responsibly (mainstream and alternative), to share knowledge and to contribute to democratic debate. In relation to human rights, the competences added were mostly about awareness: awareness of the constructions media offer of interests, values and rights; awareness of media as tools for human rights appropriation (freedom of expression, pluralism, cultural diversity, etc); awareness of media as commodities (consumer, producer, etc), awareness of the hidden agenda (sources, gatekeepers, etc). Awareness could then lead to attitudes such as interpretation, evaluation and participation to democratic debate.

Attitudes
Participants believed that the development of competences and skills for media education could foster positive attitudes to education, to media and to human rights alike. They have to be developed both as individual and collective abilities. They underlined the current climate of media use, insisting on its demands and its risks: the constant requirement to be online (to family, to workplace, to consumption, etc) and the damages this created to privacy, to leisure and to self-development.
Among the most sought after attitudes, the most common were: curiosity, critical stance, participation, open-mindedness, interaction (as against passivity), respect (of author’s work, of other’s point of view, etc), willingness to put in an effort (as against current “ennui” in classes), cultural appreciation (for various film genres, media aesthetics, etc), willingness to work collaboratively, consciousness of one’s own rights and responsibilities as regards freedom of opinion and of expression. Such attitudes could lead to a change in behaviour, propitious to a positive appropriation of human rights as well as media contents and services. There was repeated reference to empowerment of the self, with attitudes such as self-reflection and self-determination (choice of media, of content, of interpretation), leading to the control of one’s own media destiny, especially with the new social networks and services.

Values
The participants did not consider the inclusion of values in the framework as a problem. They agreed that values are not to be taken in the moral, religious sense, but in the anthropological sense of what makes a country or a region like Europe stay together. Values were seen as intimately connected to human rights, and more akin to guiding principles than to strict behavioural rules.

“Values are not to be taken in the moral, religious sense, but in the anthropological sense of what makes a region like Europe stay together”

The values most noted were: the capacity to put media and rights into perspective, mutual tolerance, responsibility, respect, self-esteem, integrity, dignity, active citizenship, democratic awareness, a sense of the common good. Some participants connected these values with rights: freedom of expression, freedom of opinion, cultural and personal diversity, cultural and personal identity, intellectual property. It was thus made clear that dealing with human rights was not an autonomous, isolated dimension.

Towards a curriculum?
The participants tended to have a holistic approach to human rights, and did not consider them as a laundry list of items to be ticked away. Nonetheless, it was felt that human rights cannot be taught all at once, which suggested the necessity to give priority to some, especially freedom of expression, but also dignity and privacy. The explicit connection to the European Convention on Human Rights, a binding text for the 47 Council of Europe member states, was made by some participants but not all. In the Convention, Article 3 refers to the right to dignity with particular reference that “No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”, Article 8 refers to “right to respect for private and family life”, and Article 10 to “freedom of expression”.

“It was felt that human rights cannot be taught all at once, which suggested the necessity to give priority to some, especially freedom of expression, but also dignity and privacy”

Besides these priorities, additional rights were mentioned, that relate to Article 5 “right to liberty and security” and Article 9 “freedom of thought, conscience and religion” while others referred to other articles of the Convention, such as the right to the “protection of property” (Article 1 of the Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights), to the “right to education” (Article 2 of the Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights), and to the “general prohibition of discrimination” (…). It was noted, but not always made explicit, that some of the rights mentioned are not human rights per se but have developed as a corpus of information and communication rights. Among them, the right to access to the media infrastructures and their content, to intellectual property, to one’s own image, to which additional protection has been added: protection of minors from harmful or challenging content, protection from hate and race speech, preservation of anonymity, and so on. They should be treated with special care as they deal with the media and their own value and meaning in society.

“The right to access to the media infrastructures and their content, to intellectual property, to one’s own image, protection of minors from harmful or challenging content, protection from hate and race speech, preservation of anonymity (…) should be treated with special care as they deal with the media and their own value and meaning in society.”

It was felt that a modular approach to these rights and protections could be efficient, but that it should not erase a cross-cutting approach in which they are taught within the context and content of other subject areas. No clear decision was taken either about making media education a specific subject area or making it a cross-cutting topic in other subject areas. Each country should be left to devise its own approach, according to age groups and education stages. However, it was stressed that research shows that children in countries which already have a strong curriculum base in media education do better in media appropriation and use than those who do not. It seems difficult for countries to come up rapidly with a national plan, so the cross-curricular approach appears as the most feasible in the short-term, but the basis for a more specific approach could be proposed by the Council of Europe, as part of its contribution to European inclusion, identity-construction and sustainability.

“No clear decision was taken either about making media education a specific subject area or making it a cross-cutting topic in other subject areas. Each country should be left to devise its own approach, according to age groups and education stages. However, it was stressed that research shows that children in countries which already have a strong curriculum base in media education do better in media appropriation and use than those who do not.”

Sustainability makes it necessary for the curriculum to integrate ICTs: it must take into account the multimodality and the multidisciplinary of the information and communication process. The two-pronged approach was seen as necessary in the long run: both cross-curricular, in keeping with the pervasive nature of media in all knowledge areas, and media-specific, especially if human rights are to be integrated within it. In any case, the curricular approach needs to deal with the 5 C’s of media education.
The objective of the curriculum should be to produce learners who are active constructors of knowledge (readers, publics, users, content-generators, etc). They should be able to question the agenda, the motivations of the media texts they are exposed to, so as to build a real understanding of their functioning and their effects. This process in turn should create autonomous individuals who have the ability to deal with multiple media, multiple perspectives, and therefore be competent in social networking, democratic engineering and human rights monitoring.

Proposed action lines:

– Base media education on human rights by way of a trans-curricular approach. Media education modules could be devised to accommodate the basic principles of dignity, respect, tolerance and responsibility in their content and activities. These could be based on the European Convention of Human Rights. It should be accompanied by a series of activities inside and outside the classroom to help spread a concrete knowledge of their existence, for children and adults alike often have only an abstract, disconnected knowledge of those rights and their attendant responsibilities.
– Adopt a two-tiered approach: integrate media education into every subject matter in the school curriculum as a trans-curricular approach; create a specific subject matter in the school curriculum on media education which incorporates human rights, to be taught as an individual subject. Media education with its four specific over-arching competences appears more and more as a solid body of knowledge and skills, that needs to be scaled up in every country and across Europe, as one of the potentially most successful means of creating a European identity. But integrating media education into a trans-curricular approach should not preclude states from creating a curriculum with specific requirements, pedagogies and evaluations of media education, according to their own expectations, requirements and states of preparedness. This should be dedicated primarily to basic teacher training, if not extended to the students themselves.
– Offer a separate module of media education incorporating human rights, to be taught separately. This is not in opposition to the trans-curricular approach, but is complementary and additional. It takes into account the specific needs of certain countries, that may prefer to prioritize such education and to give it visibility, especially at the initial stage of teacher training. This should imply creating a module that could deal with issues that inter-relate human rights and information and communication rights like right to access, to intellectual property, to one’s own image, protection of minors from harmful or challenging content, protection from hate and race speech, preservation of anonymity, etc.
– Update the various recommendations of the Council of Europe, to incorporate human rights literacy, especially those related to new communications services and social networks in the Web 2.0 environment. Human rights should be transferred to these new technologies rapidly, without lagging behind innovation. This should ensure that these technologies are human rights-proofed, either a priori (in their design) or a posteriori (in their use).

III. Which way of developing these competences, skills, attitudes and values? Strategies for multi-stakeholders in the web 2.0 environment
The actors identified were very numerous and reflected the diversity of European situations. Some emerging countries emphasized the role of public service and private sector local radio while others stressed the role of the mainstream press and local school newspapers and magazines. Public councils and ombudsmen were identified as having considerable importance and we were reminded of the role of self-regulating media systems that are people-driven.
The participants also felt it necessary to identify clearly from where the audiences were acquiring their information, their entertainment and their educational materials. They did so by distinguishing between age-groups, from pre-schoolers to the elderly, passing by teenagers and middle-aged adults. Predominantly, school and on-line emerged as the two dominant places for such tasks for the younger generations while traditional media and informal education places (video libraries, 3rd age universities, long-distance training institutions, etc) were valid for the older generations. This pointed to the risk of a generational divide in Europe (due to its demographics). Participants felt the need to devise strategies to bridge this divide, all the more so because in most European countries the digital switchover will take place within the next 10 years (in 2012 for the United Kingdom, for instance).
Actors could be placed into three main categories, with different powers and means of control according to the European country considered: public sector, private sector, civic sector. Among the public sector, the role of decision-makers such as national and European Parliament, Council of Europe, ministries of education, communication and culture, public service institutions and regulatory bodies was underlined. Among the private sector, self-regulating bodies, commercial services, service providers, operators (phone, cable, etc) were considered as the most active. Civic sector was the most heterogeneous: family, friends, citizens, associations of all kinds (parents, families, paediatricians, young people,…) as well as foundations and charities. Educational actors were given a special status and role, as they were considered key: community centres, private schools, universities (including long-distance and 3rd age). Positions like the ones of inspectors, teacher trainers, teachers (in media education and in other subject areas), curriculum designers, librarians, social workers, researchers and professors (see Appendix 3).
The strategies proposed ranged from very stringent policy-oriented ones to more voluntary-based ones, with a mix of bottom-up and top-down initiatives. They can be divided into 7 basic categories (not exhaustive):

- Setting general orientation, policy papers, directives, standards, codes of ethics, with the actors most implicated being: governments, the Council of Europe, school decision-makers, media regulatory bodies and culture and education ministries.
- Producing media education materials, with the actors involved as a priority would be: school curriculum designers (specific to media education and cross areas), media public services, libraries and museums, NGOs, cultural associations and foundations and charities.
- Training and implementing media competences, with the actors involved as a priority being: Council of Europe, school teacher trainers, teachers in media education and other areas, media public services, culture and school decision-makers, cultural associations, individuals.
- Providing access to infrastructures and content, with the actors involved as a priority being: the parliament, government, media regulatory body and commercial / public services, museums and libraries, families and friends.
- Eliminating social exclusion, with the actors involved as a priority being: parliament, government, Council of Europe, schools, media regulatory bodies and public services, cultural associations, foundations and charities.
- Nurturing positive feelings for media education (trust), with the actors involved in priority would be: Schools teachers in media education and other areas, School curriculum designers, University body, Family and friends, Individuals and citizens.
- Fostering sustainable attitudes (creativity, artistry, appreciation and appropriation), with the actors involved as a priority being: government, Council of Europe, cultural decision-makers, school decision-makers, libraries, museums, cultural associations, foundations and charities, family and friends.
These strategies were complemented by further suggestions to take into account the key competences and the potential obstacles that might arise according to the actor’s agenda (see appendix 4). Moreover, there were suggestions to actively promote a human rights culture: create awards to bring attention to good quality materials; use public service publicity to meet young people on their own terrain; make use of charity and foundation initiatives (especially for funding of international projects); encourage the creation of media literacy “corners” in magazines, on line and offline; channel feedback from audiences via platforms or hotlines, about issues related to media literacy and human rights.
Raising awareness about human rights issues was also seen as being possible through a creative means of using the media themselves: drama and other content could be devised (e.g. items on talk shows). The models of the BBC digital switchover communication programme and the BBC project entitled “People’s War” were very suggestive of the creative solutions available, with possible extensions to other experiences.

Multi-stakeholderism
The various examples of good practices referred to during the plenary drew attention to two particularly important actors, besides Intergovernmental Organisations (IGOs) like the Council of Europe : public service broadcasters and young people. They brought very different perspectives on media education, from the point of view of the media themselves. They allowed to consider scenarii for the future that were innovative and challenging.
The BBC examples provided by Kristin Mason and Anthony Worrall were very creative and wide-ranging, and although they did not have the stamp “media literacy” on them, they certainly related to that category. They tended to favour a hands-on approach (e.g. “Me and My Movie”) and were related to people’s everyday lives and histories (e.g. “People’s war”). They also dealt with ICTs in a constructive, not intrusive way (e.g. “21st Century Classroom”) and promoted events that valued the experiences of young people (e.g. “Blast”, “BBC News School Report”).
Examples of youth press organizations, online and offline, and especially the case of blogging, confirmed the need to integrate young people early into the design of educational materials as well as in policy-making. As expressed by Patrick Verniers, “The concept of Media Education 2.0 was presented by Anne-Claire Orban as a need to redefine media education and to put into a new dynamic our common understanding of Media Education. She showed us the road to the real uses of young people and the scope of the new “hyper-connected” generation. And essentially, I understood that we need a “shift” of perspective for Media Education dealing with new ways to develop and integrate it in the cultural world of young online generation.”
These various actors in fact have a shared social responsibility to perform and they have a mission to succeed. The complementarity of expertises and strategies was quite apparent, even though each partner kept to its role. There was a general feeling among the participants that online platforms for discussion were needed as well as forums and seminars for further negotiation. Among the priorities it was felt that more exchanges were necessary with various actors of the private sector as well as with young people themselves. The media education curriculum, integrating human rights, might gain more currency if presented to these actors and if their forces were joined to the education and media sector of the Council of Europe. Media and new communication services might be interested in providing materials and platforms for free or for a minimal fee, while children and young people might find it beneficial to test those materials in advance and provide feedback before they are finalized.
There was a strong feeling that the core curriculum could be developed with professionals and young people, so that creative materials, drawn from their everyday lives could be produced. These materials could integrate new content and activities on human rights, as a criterion for quality. The idea of sustainable development was attached to such an integration, as a combination of citizenship, consumer rights, human rights and media literacy development. The role of the IGOs like the Council of Europe was seen as a facilitator for finding the right scale of interaction and of connectedness for all actors, across all sectors.

“There was a strong feeling that the core curriculum could be developed with professionals and young people, so that creative materials, drawn from their everyday lives could be produced”

Proposed action lines:

– Develop scenarii for the future based on the concept of “media education 2.0” (or, alternately, “medi@education.century21st”). The use of social networks could be examined with a view to seeing how they could provide media education in non-formal settings and yet with quality controls and evaluative returns. User-generated content, especially when created by young people, can be constructed positively to add to the 5 C’s and 3 P’s.
– Map out the professions at the interface between users and contents (such as ombudsmen, webmasters, list moderators, computer tutors,…) and train them with regard to media literacy and incorporating human rights. These media professionals (old and new) are both in a fragile and strong position: they are at the forefront of all new issues, not always knowing how to deal with them, and they are also considered as role-models on social networks, as children will tend to rely on the authority of their peers rather than on the one of the adults. As youth leaders, they are potential agents of change and they should be offered online training sessions and workshops, as part of digital inclusion and of sustainable education.
– Call upon the social responsibility of the private sector, especially Internet service providers, and call for human rights-proofed software and hardware. Human rights need to be thought about at the level of the design as well as the level of implementation of their products and services.
– Invoke the social responsibility of media professionals, to extend and adapt online their various self-regulation systems (codes of good practice, ombudsmen, letters to the editor, professional journals, citizens’ councils, …). Traditional media, especially public service media, have developed their own ways of being media literate and to pay attention to their publics. This could be done on-line as well, with a human rights perspective added to it.
– Appeal to the social responsibility of policy-makers at all levels of the decision-making process and encourage them to consider the advantages of media literacy, incorporating human rights. Decision-makers have to be sensitized to the coherence of media education and to its benefits for sustainable democracies. This could be done through a series of workshops or seminars for high executives across Europe.
– Identify the risk of a generational divide in Europe and raise awareness among states of the need to devise media literacy strategies to bridge it, especially in relation to the upcoming digital switchover. This may be an opportunity to expose older generations to the need for media literacy and to propose workshops and on-line tutorials that might have wider extensions and create positive routines once the switchover period is over.
– Call upon the Council of Europe to create a platform or a clearinghouse for the exchange of good practices in media literacy. This clearinghouse could be a means to reach sustainability and to provide social inclusion. This platform could incorporate a human rights hotline as a means of helping and guiding professionals and interested parties from all sectors when new issues emerge.
– Encourage the use of all media (low-tech and high-tech)in initiating and promoting literacy initiatives, especially those coming from the civic sector. The civic sector suffers chronically for lack of funding. Its experience in such matters has helped it develop materials for such media as radio and the local press that can reach older generations and should be sustained.
– Create a Pan-European media education award, to reward media education materials, initiatives, innovations. This media education award could be attributed during Information Society week (in May), to give it a lot of visibility. It could cover various categories and the prize could consist of a reward, together with the translation in different European languages as well as the placement on the Council of Europe’s website.

IV. Which way forward?
Participants came away from the workshop with a general feeling of having been empowered in their own actions and initiatives related to media literacy. They expressed the desire to be kept informed about possible outcomes and initiatives by the Council of Europe. They expressed their readiness to be part of a think-tank or any other entity that might further contribute to the action of the Council of Europe in the field of media literacy development.
Participants also extolled the strength of the cross-sector approach, to revisit media education’s scope and objectives and to bring consensual views on definition, competences and human rights incorporation. The dynamics started by the Council of Europe were seen as innovative and fruitful and should be continued. The role of the Council of Europe was perceived as one of leadership and encouragement to create synergies among regions as well as private sector and civic entities, across borders and across sectors.
Looking ahead, the general lines of the coming action of the Council of Europe in the short- and medium-term future were thought to be in standard setting, teacher training and fostering human rights and media awareness. To the action lines already suggested in the prior sessions of the workshop, a few more were added that could be turned into future activities and benefits:
• Entrust the Council of Europe “Pestalozzi” Programme for the training of education professionals with the development and running of a training programme for the development of human-rights based media literacy. This should be done with a large mix of people that aims primarily at basic teacher training. Media literacy development rests on transmission, appropriation and evaluation, a set of dimensions that still remains among the priority missions of education.
• Encourage the Council of Europe to adopt and promote the 7 basic strategies for multi-stakeholders in the web 2.0 environment. These imply to: set general orientation policy papers and standards, produce media education materials, implement core media competences, provide access to infrastructure and content, eliminate social exclusion, nurture positive feelings for media education and foster sustainable attitudes.
• Create a taskforce to maintain reflection on media literacy issues as they emerge, to foster awareness, to spread the word via its members’ networks, to promote cooperation with all actors and sectors. It could monitor budding risks and issues: addiction and dependence, well-being on line and offline, open access and open source new rights, traceability and anonymity related to protection of online and offline identity.
• Encourage the media sector of the Council of Europe to organise a workshop with media specialists and professionals (from online and off line media), and come up with recommendations for self-regulatory systems in cyberspace. It seems important to bank on the experience acquired by traditional media in assessing their relations to the public and to see how the different mechanisms they have invented can be transferred and adapted to online situations and practices.
• Develop the debate around public space and public service on the internet and the social networks. The question of how to develop public goods and information commons, seems crucial to address in relation to media literacy and its requirements for provision, protection and promotion of children and adults alike.

Conclusions

In 2008, there will be the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This should be a unique occasion to celebrate them and to advertise the different lines of the plan of action that the Council of Europe can devise, from the suggestions that came out of the workshop. They could be presented in a series of important venues, like Information Society Week (Geneva, May 2008) or the Internet Governance Forum (Hyderabad, December 2008).

Appendix 1: General Policy Framework for Standard Setting (adapted from group A)

The 3 P’s/ Actors and Rights	Protection	Provision	Participation
Actors	children, peers and adults	government, schools, media institutions	children, elderly immigrants, minorities
Contents	harmful, challenging, illegal	information knowledge share access	communication codes
Rights	protection of minors, respect of integrity, privacy	education, intellectual property, data and identity security	citizenship, freedom of expression and broadcasting, consumer rights

Appendix 2: Competences per Media Areas for Teacher Training (adapted from group A)

The 5 C’s/ Media Areas	Comprehension	Critical Thinking	Creativity	(Cross-) Cultural Awareness and Citizenship
Technologies	identify tools	figure out agenda	use video	compare screen sizes
Production	identify industry	check mission	write a script	US/EU studios statements
Representations	...	...	...	…
Languages
Publics
Contexts and cultures

Appendix 3: Strategies for Promoting Competences and Rights per Actors (adapted from group A and B)

5 C’s/rights/ actors	Educational actor in public sector	Educational actor in private sector	Educational actor in civic sector
Comprehension	Set general orientation	Train their own personnel/set codes of ethics	Train
Critical thinking	Produce materials/ train	Train their own personnel	Produce materials/ train
Creativity	Provide infrastructure and access	Provide infrastructure and materials	Provide user-generated content
Cross-Cultural awareness and Citizenship	Eliminate exclusion	Foster international cooperation	Nurture positive media education attitudes
Freedom of expression	Foster sustainable attitudes	Set codes of good practice/train ombudsmen and other personnel	Implement activities and events
Dignity	Foster sustainable attitudes	Set codes of good practice/train ombudsmen and other personnel	Implement activities and events
Privacy	Set general orientation, standards	Set codes of good practice/train ombudsmen and other personnel	Implement activities and events
Intellectual property	Foster sustainable attitudes	Set codes of good practice/train ombudsmen and other personnel	Implement activities and events
...	...	...	...

Note: One major strategy per cell per actor was chosen. The more complete list is below:
- Setting general orientation, policy papers, directives, ordinances, standards, codes of good practice. Actors: governments, the Council of Europe, school decision-makers, media regulatory bodies and culture and education ministries.
- Producing Media Education materials.
Actors: School Curriculum designers (specific to media education and cross areas), Media public services, Libraries and Museums, NGO’s, cultural associations and foundations and charities
- Training and Implementing Media Competences.
Actors: Council of Europe, School teacher trainers, teachers in media education and other areas, Media public services, Culture and school decision-makers, Cultural associations, Individuals
- Providing infrastructures and access
Actors: Parliament, Government, Media regulatory body and commercial / public services, Museums and libraries, Families and friends
- Eliminating social exclusion
Actors: Parliament, Government, Council of Europe, Schools, Media regulatory bodies and public services, Cultural associations, Foundations and charities
- Nurturing positive media education attitudes
Actors: Schools teachers in media education and other areas, School curriculum designers, University body, Family and friends, Individuals and citizens
- Fostering sustainable attitudes (creativity, artistry, appreciation and appropriation)
Actors: Government / Council of Europe, Cultural decision-makers, School decision-makers, Libraries, museums, Cultural associations, Foundations and charities, Family and friends

Appendix 4 (adapted from group C): Actors for Media Education

Actors	Value-added	Obstacle	Key Competence (priority)
School	Equality/ universal access	Slow adaptation to societal change/ evolution in real time	Comprehension and Creativity
Teachers	Pedagogy	Lack of Pre-service and inservice Training	Comprehension and Critical thinking
Parents	Personal contact	Lack of Knowledge Not always fair attitude	Cross-Cultural awareness and Citizenship
Other…	...	...	...

Appendix 5: Action Plan for Standard Setting, Training of Education Professionals and Fostering of Human Rights (summary)

Actions at the Pan-European level:
• Raise awareness about a consensual all-encompassing definition of media education in Council of Europe member states to develop a fully-fledged programme for media literacy as a key competence to sustain modern democratic societies;
• Provide the basis for a core media literacy package, with requirements for skills, competences and evaluations, to be used across Europe;
• Develop scenarii for the future, based on the concept of “media education 2.0” (or, alternately, “medi@education.century21st”);
• Identify the risk of a generational divide in Europe and raise awareness among states for the need to devise media literacy strategies to bridge it, especially in relation to the upcoming digital switchover;
• Create a taskforce on media literacy issues to keep on thinking of about emerging issues, to foster awareness, to spread the word via its members’ networks, and to promote cooperation with all actors and sectors;
• Develop the debate around the public space and the public service on the Internet and social networks;
• Create a Pan-European media education award, to reward those who develop media education materials, initiatives, innovations;
• Encourage the monitoring of children’s media use, with added criteria to measure human rights awareness.

Actions for member states:
• Base media education on human rights by way of a trans-curricular approach;
• Adopt a two-tiered approach: integrate media education into every subject matter in the school curriculum as a trans-curricular approach; create a specific subject matter in the school curriculum on media education which incorporates human rights, to be taught as an individual subject.

Actions for the media:
• Encourage the social responsibility of media professionals, to extend and adapt their various self-regulatory systems (codes of good practice, ombudsmen, letters to the editor, professional journals, citizens’ councils,…) to the Internet;
• Encourage the use of all media (both low-tech and high tech) to promote literacy initiatives, especially those coming from civil society.

Actions for key non-state actors:
• Map-out the professions at the interface between users and contents (like ombudsmen, webmasters, list moderators, computer tutors, etc.,) and train them on media literacy incorporating human rights;
• Encourage the social responsibility of the private sector, especially Internet service providers;
• Encourage the social responsibility of policy-makers at all levels of the decision-making process and encourage them to consider the advantages of media literacy, incorporating human rights;
• Call for human rights-proofed software and hardware.

Actions for the Council of Europe:
• Update the various recommendations of the Council of Europe to incorporate human rights literacy, especially those related to new communications services and social networks on the Web 2.0.;
• Call upon the Council of Europe to create a platform or a clearinghouse for the exchange of good practices in media literacy;
• Entrust the Council of Europe “Pestalozzi” Programme for the training of education professionals with the development and running of a training programme for the development of human-rights based media literacy;
• Request the Council of Europe to organise a workshop with media specialists and professionals (from online and off line media) in order to propose recommendations for self-regulatory systems in cyberspace;
• Promote the 7 basic strategies for multi-stakeholders in the web 2.0 environment:
– set general orientation policy papers, standards and codes of ethics;
– produce media education materials;
– implement core media competences;
– provide access to infrastructures and content;
– eliminate social exclusion;
– nurture positive feelings for media education (trust);
– foster sustainable attitudes (for creativity, appreciation and appropriation).

Copyright©: Council of Europe

ENDNOTES:

1. Divina Frau-Meigs, Research paper presented by the General Rapporteur, to set the rationale for the workshop.
2. For example, see the materials proposed in “The European convention on human rights, a starting point for teachers” published by the Council of Europe, 2006.
3. See the report “EU Kids on line”, produced by Sonia Livingstone et al, London School of Economics, for the European Commission “Safer-Internet” project, 2007.
4. Centre de Liaison de l’Enseignement et des Médias d’Information.
5. I am grateful to Patrick Verniers and Kristin Mason for their reports on their workshop sessions that have helped me elaborate this general report.
6. See conference website: http://www.coe.int/t/e/human_rights/media/Links/Events/Forum2006YERE VAN_en.asp#TopOfPage.
7. The Yerevan workshop came up with very similar recommendations for 5 C’s and 3 P’s, which confirms that there is a growing consensus, within Europe, about the pertinence and the adequateness of such an approach.
8. See the results of a comparative European survey at www. mediappro.org
9. Issues around Web 2.0 were also clearly identified during the Council of Europe’s Pan-European Conference on “Human rights in the information society: empowering children and young people” (Yerevan, October 2006), where young people played an important part. Some words of caution mentioned then are worth keeping in mind: “Young people appeared as competent and curious beings, and as a legitimate actor to be introduced in multi-stakeholder platforms for media literacy. Such introduction should not go without preparation. The importance of making sure that young people’s voices are heard and are not expressed just in “emotional,” “hot” terms, that undermines their credibility was clear and was necessary, to match the level of preparation of adult experts.”