The Media Literacy Toolkit is an initiative led by the Austrian and the German Press Councils.
With this toolkit, professors and students will be able to organise role plays on given case studies in classrooms to prepare proceedings of a fictitious Press Council.
The Toolkit objectives are to:
- Strengthen student's media literacy
- Allow students to understand the relevance of independent media and selfregulation for a democratic society
- Raise students awareness of the significance of freedom of the press and of the responsibilities of journalists towards individuals and groups of society mentioned in their coverage
- Familiarise students with good standards for journalism
- Encourage student sensitivity for issues on discrimination
- Allow students to distinguish information from a trustful or untrustful source
- Enhance student communication and presentation skills
The Toolkit is in English and composed of 17 case studies for roleplaying exercises
17 case studies were identified by Councils from Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Finland and Germany. All of them are based on real decisions of the Press Councils involved. For didactical reasons, slight adaptions have been made. Some of the studies are related to topics which especially affect young people.
The 17 case studies are the basis for the role-playing exercise with which students will develop an understanding for the appropriate balancing between freedom of the press and the conflicting interests of individuals or parts of society affected by news coverage.
The participants will perform practice-oriented roleplay exercises and deal with cases presented to various European Press Councils. There will be a division into groups (consisting of approximately ten people each). These groups will work on different cases concerning privacy and personality rights, human dignity, discrimination, proper journalistic investigation, reporting on suicides etc.
Four videos
Four explanatory videos are part of the toolkit as well focusing on media discrimination of vulnerable groups of society (e.g. black people, homosexuals), reporting suicides, privacy and the separation between editorial content and advertising.
One podcast
To complement the MIL Toolkit, a podcast was produced to reach out to the young generation through platforms they usually consume news on. The first episode discusses how to handle reporting on accident and victims through an analysis of reporting standards in the European media.
The Toolkit is aimed for teachers and only available on a restricted area of the website apart from the videos.
To get your access, please send an e-mail to: info@presserat.at