TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Karlo Brunović
The training aimed to educate youth workers and enable transfer of skills in the field of media literacy. Main objective of this training course was to equip youth workers with knowledge, skills and methods needed for promoting media literacy and critical thinking in their daily work with young people. Partner organisations were in need to improve their quality of youth work by raising capacities in media literacy, so the training was tailored to achieve this goal by educating their youth workers.
Participants were youth workers from Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands, Portugal and Romania.
For example, participants questioned the media through improvisational theatre. Moreover, they made short videos deconstructing the stereotypes about their country. Open space sessions were used to provide opportunities for participants' contribution to the topic.
Outcomes include improved critical thinking skills. Namely, understanding how media messages shape our society, recognising bias, spin, misinformation and lies. Moreover, the training improved participants' understanding of the consequences that media have on the formation of stereotypes and prejudices, racism and intolerance. It also encouraged and empowered youth workers to access, analyse and evaluate media messages by using digital tools. Finally, youth workers learned to create and distribute their own media messages in a skilful manner through experiential learning by using free
digital platforms.
In order to evaluate the learning process and reaching of project objectives, our daily programme included focus groups for group reflection and also individual reflection activities. This provided us with participants’ feedback regarding each particular day of the training course and enabled us to gain insight into their impressions, needs and objections.
Furthermore, mid-evaluation and end-evaluation activities helped us to measure the quality of the organisation of the training, participants’ satisfaction with daily activities, learning process and working dynamics. End-evaluation was the most detailed one, indicating participants impressions of the training course by providing them the opportunity to rate their satisfaction with trainers, content and structure of the training. According to the results of end-evaluation (very positive comments from the participants), in comparison with participants’ needs and expectations before the training course, we conclude that the training was highly successful in reaching its objectives.
Udruga Prizma's website:
http://www.udrugaprizma.hr/seeing-through-shadows
In the preparation phase, I designed “Revealing both sides of a story” group task, where one participant was given a task to search, follow and report about positive attitudes toward a selected topic: “Efforts of the EU to fight against climate change”, “Attitude of European citizens towards refugees in Europe”, “Involvement of Youth in social processes and decision-making in EU Countries”, “Role of Muslims in shaping the European culture”, “The Efficacy of Developed Youth Policies in European Union Countries”, “Influence of Brexit on EU”, “Attitudes towards Putin and Russia”, “Attitudes towards Trump and the US”, “Future of the EU”, “Demographic situation in the EU”, and one participant was given a task to search, follow and report about negative attitudes toward the same topic. During the training course, I conducted the sessions in which participants presented their analyses.
Moreover, I was in charge of the session "Media and Intercultural learning" where I urged the participants to question the common media stereotypes and deconstruct them in a short video they needed to make during the training.
Furthermore, I implemented several non-formal sessions such as Group agreements, Tree of life, Mid-evaluation and Final evaluation, as well as helped with daily reflections.
After the training, I co-authored "Inside Media Content - A guide to foster critical approach and creation of quality media content" (available on Salto).