In contexts of crisis and controversies, bipartisan positioning, and polarising political tendencies, minorities and migrants tend to emerge as a scapegoat to explain social, educational, health, and economic problems, leading to the spread of far-right ideologies and to the dissemination of fake news and hate discourse. Such discourse emerges and disseminates at a high pace in social media and social networks, through text and multimedia resources, meaning that a high level of digital literacy, understood as the capacity to critically read, interpret and engage with (multimodal) news and discourse in digital supports, is needed to navigate information on these hot social themes and their educational implications. CoMMiTTEd addresses these issues by planning, developing, testing, and evaluating resources for digital teaching education, aiming at enhancing student teachers’ critical thinking through enrichened critical (multimodal) discourse analysis abilities and digital teaching competences. By pursuing these issues, CoMMiTTEd: i) advocates a more conscious consumption of information, namely related to socially underrepresented but in the news highly visible minority and migrant groups, thus fostering intercultural education in its “interpreting and relating” skills ("savoir comprendre", in Byram’s categorization, 1997); ii) promotes a more responsible usage of digital technologies, social media, and social networks by introducing the development of critical cultural awareness (or "savoir s’engager", idem) in initial teacher education programs, regardless of the school subject they intend to teach in the future; iii) enhances critical abilities that are crucial for teachers’, and by extension, students’, lifelong learning in times of increasing consumption of digital resources, with both recreational and educational purposes. To achieve these highly demanding purposes, CoMMiTTEd’s multidisciplinary team will develop: i) an on-line databank called Pedagogical Observatory of Fake News relating migrants and minorities to the Covid-19 pandemic or other critical situations, offering analysis and deconstruction of such news and hands-on approach pedagogic resources to support teacher educators and teachers in developing critical thinking and (multimodal) discourse analysis abilities; ii) two on-line teacher education modules, one developing interpreting and relating skills and another developing critical cultural awareness, that can be integrated into diverse teacher education scenarios; and iii) a pedagogical e-handbook for teachers and teacher trainers, presenting theoretical and praxis-oriented principles related to critical (multimodal) discourse analysis and its implementation in classroom and teacher education paths.
Taking the proliferation of Fake (or partial and biased) News as a timely problem, particularly in a time of crisis such as the one connected to the Covid-Pandemic, affecting equal participation and democracy, and as a particular angle of intervention to enhance responsible citizenship, civic engagement, and the development of critical skills and competencies, CoMMiTTEd aimed at: - advocating a more conscious consumption of information, namely related to underrepresented social minority and migrant groups; - promoting a more responsible usage of digital technologies, social media, and social networks by introducing the development of critical cultural awareness and digital literacy in initial teacher education programs, regardless of the school subject they intend to teach in the future; - enhancing critical abilities that are crucial for teachers’, and by extension, students’ lifelong learning in times of increasing consumption of digital resources, with both recreational and educational purposes. To achieve these objectives, pedagogical resources for teacher training were designed based on the analysis of concrete examples of Fake News and direct research with school audiences.
Fake News (FN) is not a recent phenomenon, nor a phenomenon to which only people with lower levels of formal education are more susceptible. FN is almost never about something totally fake, and nor is it necessarily about the news domain. In fact, it is a mixture of facts and fallacies, emotional triggers (typical of non-factual discursive genres) and scapegoating strategies that make FN so tricky. The rapid online circulation of FN and the reach that the internet affords them have made them a recurring phenomenon today. The pandemic caused by COVID-19 was the trigger for the CoMMiTTEd project, as the project team uncovered a problematic issue, circulating in the press and social media, that linked the origins and spread of the virus to migrants and minorities. This connection helped spread hate discourse and xenophobic stances towards groups traditionally more disadvantaged and fragile. To reduce the effects of this problem, the team addressed the development of in-service and pre-service teachers’ critical thinking, intercultural competence, and digital media literacy (among others), as these actors are in permanent contact with students and can help counter the problem.