Dialogical Media Literacy

The Knowledge Society has the generation and exchange of knowledge as its foundations. It requires certain minimum knowledge without which access to media is not possible neither analysing critically its messages. More and more diversity occurs in our societies, linked in many cases to inequalities that have specific barriers for access. The persons without basic training and those belonging to cultural minorities, specially migrants are the main beneficiaries of the project, as well as the technical and political responsible persons when it comes to design experiences and to establish lines of action in this field.

The project Dialogical Media Literacy ( DIMELI) has as its main objective experiencing dialogic learning in the ambit of media literacy, as well as the fostering of critical analysis at a European level among people from different cultural backgrounds, gathering the results obtained in a handbook of good practice. We define dialogic learning as the one that parts from the equality of all the participants in the educational process and all the people with cultural intelligence.

Whenever there is discussion about a critical analysis of the messages, implicitly a
perspective is being taken from which educators are in a situation of superiority (traditional) or another one where everything is relative. From a dialogic perspective, it is the collective of participants who reaches agreements about the interpretation of the reality throughout a process of consensus and argumentation. Nevertheless, cooperation between participants, not only serves to interpret reality but also it is the instrument through which people carry out instrumental learning to have access to the own messages, as it would be regarding the learning of the ICT.

The operative objectives that we propose are the following:

1. To create actual and virtual learning spaces: a first level of critical analysis of reality are those spaces where we dialogue about issues of common interest. The participating institutions will create Groups of Analysis and Learning of Communication Media, where the persons of different cultures organise themselves democratically to debate and critically analyse the messages of the different media and, where a trainer offers his/her instrumental support.

The intercultural living together in conditions of equality produces an increase of the capacity of critical analysis and the overcoming of the social and cultural stereotypes. Equally, the participants will also learn about the use of ICT through participation in a forum where they will continue to debate the issues dealt with. The link between actual spaces and virtual ones is specially important as the main beneficiaries have difficulties to have access to the net.

2. To create a through media dialogic literacy net that fosters the critical analysis and the overcoming of the social stereotypes that exist regarding the different cultural communities that live together in Europe. A forum will be created where the groups created in the different countries will participate discussing about the issues agreed upon between the co-ordinating team and the partners.

The project will have three main phases. In the first place, the presentation and analysis of the experiences that integrate the dialogic learning, the access of the ICT and the critical analysis of the messages of the mass media. In the second place, the constitution of the actual and virtual groups, as well as the organisation of the technical media to carry it out and the creation of the European network and the forum. Last, the analysis and the elaboration of a handbook of good practice gathering the results obtained.

The main results are the establishing of dialogic basis for the critical analysis of the messages and the access to the media of the collectives pointed out that overcome
the limitations of the relativist and traditional approaches, allowing the dialogue among cultures and the overcoming of the social stereotypes. The products generated will be the handbook, the forums in each country, the European forum, the web page of the forum and other mechanisms for the functioning of the net and the articles published about the project.

The main contribution of this project is to offer instruments that allow the people belonging to the collective pointed out earlier to have access and critically analyse the messages of the media. The creation of the spaces based on equality among people from different cultural background supposes the recognition of the critical capacity of the persons belonging to cultural minorities and of the non academic persons, which allows to transfer this approach to other domains of life and provides these collectives with the instruments that allow them to actively participate in the economic and social domains.