eMEL (e-Media Education Lab) is a project which aims to support the development of media education in Europe by strengthening the skills of teaching professionals. Indeed, media education, which has become a key competency in nowadays society, takes place in a highly variable way from one country to another, from one school to another, from one classroom to another, and teachers lack resources and training in this area. eMEL aims to develop teachers’ skills in media literacy through their initial and vocational training. In addition, this project aims to develop and produce open educational resources that will enable teachers’ trainers to develop innovative practices in terms of training in media education and to appropriate oneself the resources. These resources will be developed inside a laboratory for experimentation and collaboration (e- lab) before being in fee access to all. Thus the final beneficiaries are scholars and students who benefit from the impact of the project through a deeper implementation of media education activities dedicated to them. The project will involve about 10 piloting groups of teachers, in initial or vocational training for a total of at least 120 teachers-users of the online environment (e- lab). Each pilot group will be involved in 15-20 hours of training. Then, a minimum of 12 activities of dissemination including those through a decentralized plan and of proximity - the road show - gather a minimum of 200 teachers and teachers’ trainers across Europe. Practically, eMEL project includes the following actions: - Mapping media literacy skills of teachers - Implementing a participatory methodology and teachers-users centred. - Collaborating and developing innovative training methods and scenarios - Developing an online environment (e- lab) for trainers in media education and their target groups: teachers or future teachers - Finalizing the online environment as an open educative resource that can be exploited and enriched - To disseminate this online environment of media education through various dissemination events. From a methodological point of view, the project is based on the involvement of teachers and their trainers, whether they are in initial or vocational training, in order to develop and experiment innovative methods and tools in terms of skills development in media education. The methodology, user-centred, requires their active participation and involvement in the process and will guarantee the relevance of intellectual productions produced. About the impact, eMEL project plans a constant back and forth between local level (teachers’ classroom), regional and national level (Initial or vocational training institutions) and European level (Online and multilingual environment). At a local level (the ground of teachers, their classes), the major impact will be the more important implementation (anchor) of media education in schools promoting critical and creative skills of pupils and students. Finally, the whole process of the project is built on a long-term perspective. The frame of teachers' skills in media education will be a reference document for all subsequent studies and research. The training scenarios will be finalized for wider dissemination and for a long-term. The online laboratory, finalized as open educative resource and available in English and French will remain available to any teacher trainer wishing to develop skills in media education of its teachers groups.
e-Media Education lab : an online laboratory for the development of media literacy skills for teachers in initial and in-service training. Media literacy has become a key competence in our modern society. It raises awareness about media issues and media creativity of students. However we note that its implementation in the compulsory education is highly variable from one country to another, from one education system to another and from one school group to another. This can partly be explained by the lack of support and training for teachers in term of media literacy competencies development. This is why the project e-Media Education lab (e-MEL) aimed to create innovative training strategies for teachers, both initial and in-service training in order to reinforce their media education competences. It’s the fruitful collaboration of seven research or teachers training centers (initial or in service) in media education : Média Animation asbl (BE), Institut des Hautes Etudes des Communications Sociales – IHECS (BE), Tampereen Yliopisto – UTA (FIN), Centre de Liaison de l’Enseignement et des Médias d’Information – CLEMI (FR), Università degli Studi Firenze – UNIFI (IT), Universidade do Minho (PT), UCL - Institute of Education (UK). During three years, between September 2014 and August 2017, the European project e-MEL achieved the main following results: − A European Media education competencies framework mapping the competencies of media education and media literacy for teachers across Europe ; − A catalogue of 21 training scenarios abstracts exploring media environment and developing media education competences with teachers in initial or in-service training ; − The experimentation of 10 training scenario combining face-to-face and e-learning sessions with more than 300 teachers of future teachers in order to develop or reinforce their media education competences ; − The development in open educational resource of the hub platform e-mediaeducationlab.eu for trainers in media literacy to implement and experiment innovative training strategies in order to enrich their teaching practices in media literacy ; − A european roadshow across Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal, Finland and United-Kingdom to disseminate the opportunity of this online environment and for making teachers trainers aware about media education challenges for our contemporary societies. In this resource center www.e-Mediaeducationlab.eu, any teachers trainer in Europe would find : - The Media education competencies framework - 10 training scenarios developing media education and media literacy competences through several topics - Online activities developed into Moodle format ready to be reviewed and exported to other e-learning platforms - An evaluation toolkit composed by media literacy evaluation methodologies and examples of evaluation exercises related to each training scenario. - A map of media education teachers’trainers across Europe - Project documentation with the main outcomes of the eMEL project. Through this project, a first European network of media education trainers has been initiated to reflect on the challenges of the training of teachers or future teachers but also to equip them with the methods and contents of a media literacy. And this, in the long-term perspective, of a better anchoring of the media education within the school system thus favoring the acquisition of these competences by the children and the young people themselves. It is a position of citizen critical and active for everyone who is in the end strengthened.