New project: Media education and information diet as indicators of the capacity for critical analysis of information content in future teachers (MEDIA4Teach)

Group: DHIGeCs (Didactics of History, Geography, and other Social Sciences)

Principal Researchers: Lydia Sánchez and Joaquim Prats

Project duration: 1 June 2020 to 1 June 2023

Part number: PID2019-107748RB-100

Economic endowment: 37,000€

 

Description of the project:

In the last call for research projects financed by the Ministry of Science, the Media4Teach project (“Media education and the information diet as indicators of the capacity for critical analysis of information content in future teachers”) was awarded, led by Professor Lydia Sánchez of the Faculty of Information and Audiovisual Media, and by Professor Emeritus of the Faculty of Education Joaquim Prats. The project involves professors from both faculties, members of the consolidated research group DHIGECS, and has the collaboration of the journalistic verification company Newtral, led by Ana Pastor, journalist, and presenter of La Sexta.

 

Media4Teach aims to analyze the phenomena of misinformation and how critical thinking can be fermented from the training of secondary school teachers. In democratic societies like ours, the media have an informative role, form public opinion, offer frameworks with which to interpret reality, and involve an element of counter-power. However, the emergence of the Internet has substantially changed the way information is used and consumed. Phenomena as current as of the so-called “false news”, the discourse on “alternative facts”, or the so-called “filter bubbles”, reveal a threat of disinformation, as well as a lack of critical consumption of information. The teachers who have to train the young people of the future have not been trained in media literacy. Thus, the main objective of this project is to determine the relationship between the capacity for critical analysis of information content, the media literacy acquired throughout previous training and the information diet consumed by students in the master’s degree in Secondary School Teacher Training in Spain.