“World Reading Academy”: A handbook on a transformative program for young people
According to Eurobarometer, 81% of young Portuguese between the ages of 16 and 25 think they have already been exposed to “false information”. This is the background to Academia da Leitura do Mundo: o Jornalismo, a Comunicação e Eu (World Reading Academy: Journalism, Communication and Me), a book available online that brings together the results of a project in which an intervention methodology was created and tested in the school community to help students understand the importance of information and journalism in the world around us.
Young people, educators and academics have a new tool to strengthen their media literacy skills. With a public presentation on April 4th in the Vítor Macieira Auditorium, at the School of Communication and Media Studies (ESCS), in Lisbon, the book Academia de Leitura do Mundo: o Jornalismo, a Comunicação e Eu is the result of “an innovative program dedicated to promoting media literacy”, as explained by Ricardo Pinheiro, pro-president of the Polytechnic University of Lisbon (IPL), representing the president, António Belo. Pinheiro, who is also professor at the Lisbon School of Music, highlighted the importance of media literacy among young people, especially, as he explained, “because it comes in a context where information circulates at an unprecedented speed”.
From a humanist and proximity perspective, Fernanda Bonacho, organizer of the book, professor at ESCS, where she coordinates the master’s degree in Journalism, and holder of the UNESCO Chair in Communication, Media Literacy and Citizenship, stressed the importance of “Eduarda knowing how to read the world, Baltazar knowing how to distinguish between news and opinion, and Emmily and Carlota understanding the central position of journalism in the public space and recognizing its impact on everyday decisions”. Bonacho, who is also a researcher at LIACOM (Applied Research Laboratory in Communication and Media), explained that “easy access to information distorts a rigorous reading of reality and that the big challenge is to be able to read this world, but also to respect other people”.
Part of the Gulbenkian Knowledge Academies program, funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Reading Academy was one of 34 projects selected to develop skills that would expand the opportunities for personal and professional fulfillment of young Portuguese people under 25. The idea for the ESCS project resulted from the work of a multidisciplinary team, made up of professionals from different areas of journalism and communication, such as Vera Moutinho, Jorge Trindade, Maria José Mata, Anabela Sousa Lopes, Francisco Sena Santos, Maria Inácia Rezola, Zélia Santos, Helena Pina and Susana Araújo.
Six schools, 400 students per year and 50 teachers and researchers participated in this Academy, with the aim of developing communication skills, self-regulation and critical thinking in high school students through immersive practical, tutorial and theoretical actions.
Despite the success of the project, Fernanda Bonacho admitted that they faced unexpected difficulties. Having officially begun in 2020, the Academy’s work had to adapt, like the rest of the world, to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the purposes that was not fulfilled was working with the parents of the students.
The main objective of the World Reading Academy was, according to Fernanda Bonacho, to work on “three essential skills: communication, self-regulation and critical thinking”. “We had several skills in the Knowledge Academy program. We chose these because we thought they were the most important in the work of media literacy, journalism and communication,” she explained.
Ana Filipa Martins, professor at the University of Algarve, added another concern: the way young people read the world and what they know about journalism. “We identified a problem; we knew that the communication challenges were huge, and we tried to create a space where we could listen to young people. We wanted to find the best in each person and enhance what they should have in these areas,” she said.
A transformative project
From those who participated in the Academy, only positive marks were given to the initiative. Eduarda Gouveia, Emmily Gomes, Carlota Neto and Baltazar Antunes represented the students who took part in this project, in a conversation moderated by professor Luís Bonixe, professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Portalegre, who was also part of the team.
Of the four invited students, only Baltazar didn’t decide to study Journalism or Communications. He finished secondary education at Escola Secundária José Gomes Ferreira, in Benfica, Lisbon, with a view to ESCS itself and 10 minutes away from Agência Lusa. However, the young man recalled that they looked at the university “from a distance”, as they did not know exactly what a higher education institution focused on teaching Communication was. Despite having applied for and been accepted into a Political Science and International Relations degree, Baltazar Antunes confided that “the Academy showed that journalism could be a path” and that the project was very useful for him. “I think it’s interesting to take a quote from Oscar Wilde, who said that the difference between journalism and literature is that journalism was unreadable, and literature was not read at all. In my opinion, this project has made journalism more readable, more accessible to young people and students,” he highlighted.
Eduarda and Emmily had very different experiences before taking part in the World Reading Academy. While Eduarda Gouveia talked more to her parents about the news than to her friends, Emmily Gomes talked to her classmates.
Thanks to the project, Eduarda is now studying Communication Sciences and has managed to take part in another project funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. “The aim was to give young people a voice in solving problems they identified in the world. In my case, I took part in a competition with a colleague of mine and we created a social project to try to combat prejudice and inequalities. We ended up getting the grant to make a documentary about the Roma community,” she said.
In the case of Emmily Gomes, the Academy helped realize that journalism wasn’t as far from her reality as she thought. “Before, I had the view that being a journalist required a lot of seriousness. With the project, I discovered that I could have a voice to talk about issues that were important to me. As young people, we already have a somewhat uncertain future, and I didn’t see much about it [in the news]. It was always journalism that wasn’t very close to my reality. I discovered that things were very different from what I thought,” she said.
Carlota Neto always knew she wanted to be on television. In the Academy, she realized that journalism could be that opportunity: “As a child, I always wanted to show myself to the world and have a voice. At the age of ten, I thought that if I wanted to be on television, it had to be in theater or soap operas, but I wasn’t any good at that. This project has made me want to be on television more and to study in this area, to show people that journalism isn’t just the ‘dry’ part of television news, but that there’s also a lot behind it.”
Teachers also expressed enthusiasm for participating in this media literacy project. Adélia Magrinho, Maria Fernanda Oliveira, Vera Moutinho and Albertina Leitão, moderated by Sónia de Sá, spoke about the experience and how the initiative affected schools, as well as recalled the past and what this project meant to them.
To Maria Fernanda Oliveira, director of Sebastião da Gama School Group, in Setúbal, “all the challenges that schools face today can only be mitigated and resolved by enriching the curriculum with projects and an external perspective”. According to the teacher, “the relevance of the project lies, in large part, in the possibility of diversifying students’ academic curricula, enabling the creation of fundamental tools for life as citizens.” Oliveira also recalled “the ease with which students participated in the activities, the interest they demonstrated and the openness to deconstruct the main fears they felt at the time, such as the pandemic and the future”.
Students’ participation in the project was also highlighted by Albertina Leitão, a librarian teacher at Escola Quinta das Palmeiras, in Covilhã, who stated that, in her educational institution, “students have always been given a lot of voice, and the project has only given them more strength to have an active voice in society”. Regarding memories from the project, the teacher said that resilience was what stuck with them: “Even with the pandemic and Zoom calls, the project did not die. When schools reopened, students who had not even signed up for the project asked to participate, and one of the students is now studying Communication at the University of Beira Interior.”
Not all of the educational institutions involved were fully receptive to the challenges of the World Reading Academy. Adélia Magrinho, a teacher at Mouzinho da Silveira Secondary School in Portalegre, shared that “at first, students weren’t very enthusiastic, because they thought it would be a very theoretical project”. It was only when the subject of study visits and activities outside school came up that their defenses were lowered, and students finally embraced the project. In these groups, some students who were undecided about their future ended up deciding to study Journalism at the Polytechnic of Portalegre. “From time to time, you have to understand that, even in the countryside, there are opportunities to continue studying,” the teacher commented.
As more students join the ranks of future Journalism and Communication Sciences graduates, new concerns arise. For Vera Moutinho, professor at ESCS, there is a distancing from the news among young people, adding that “when they get to college, many young students are a reflection of this distancing, without much choice of sources and social networks. Although this is the environment in which they grow up, it causes a biased idea of journalism”. The journalist also revealed that one of the things that caught her attention the most about the students “was the fact that they saw the world as a whole and not the things that happened outside the screen, on their street, with the people closest to them”. To conclude her intervention, Vera Moutinho also encouraged teachers not to reprimand young people for not reading newspapers, but, at the same time, she expressed the wish that “newspapers would be more attractive to young people”.
It was precisely to the youngest that João Pedro Fonseca and Paulo Nogueira, journalists from Agência Lusa, addressed the presentation of the book Academia da Leitura do Mundo. Invited to read the book before its launch, they described it as a “very useful handbook” for the training that the two journalists provide in other schools, especially in these times. Currently, in the words of journalists, “the desire to be the first to break the news, the first to have the news on the front pages, often overrides the fact-checking process”. With the amount of information circulating on online platforms, the selection of sources, encouraged and explored in the book, is, as the two journalists pointed out, “increasingly important in the world of journalism”. The coordinators of the Escola Lusa project left a message very similar to that of Vera Moutinho in response to the distance and lack of identification of younger people with news and journalism. In the words of Paulo Nogueira, “we need to be close to young people and understand how we can be more appealing”.
To end the session, Lídia Marôpo, a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal, took to the stage and shared some of the lessons learned during the study: “We always have to think about doing media literacy through participatory strategies because, as you can see, young people are always more receptive to practical activities rather than theory. We always have to start from young people’s interests and try to include groups of similar ages to create links of familiarity. Finally, a diversity of contexts is necessary. The classroom is no longer enough. Visits to studios and other campuses are our best allies for this type of study.”
To conclude, the same researcher made an appeal: “To change the future, we must join it, not remain stuck in the teaching methods of the past.”
