Fiction and Stories: MIL’s Companion for 21st Century Learners
In accordance with the Global and Media Information Literacy Week 2022 of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Media and Information Literacy (MIL) for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Network conducted a webinar titled, “The Role of Play and Storytelling in Teaching Media and Information Literacy to Young Children” via Facebook Live and Zoom last October 27, 2022.
As often mentioned, MIL holds significance in the current context of education, and efforts to integrate it into the curriculum are recommended to begin as early as in early childhood education. In line with this, the webinar presents various scholars advocating for media and information literacy from Greece, the United States, and Finland, who narrate the integration of MIL for children in their respective countries and expound on the importance of stories and fiction.
Irene Andriopoulou, a media literacy policy expert from Greece, explained that an education focusing on gaming and storytelling has benefits because it can be interactive and can incorporate discussions and stories that are contextual, thematic, and highly specific, which can guide the students to weigh certain real-life scenarios with empathy and critical thinking.
“We approach play through gamification skills in school for an enhanced visual and interactive experience in the classroom,” Andriopoulou stated.
Further, she shared that together with their partnered countries in the Mediterranean region, MIL education in Greece is crafted based on UNESCO’s MIL approach.
Following Andriopoulou is Prof. Renee Hobbs, an internationally recognized authority on media literacy education from the United States who teaches MIL using plotlines with characters of different experiences, emphasized the importance of the art of creativity. She said that there is a need for students to understand characters and their stories because this can explain how certain things function in the contemporary world, which will make them reflect and create reasons to drive the story.
To materialize and explain MIL to students, Hobbs introduced Flipquid Inquiry, a website that enables students to hold discussions examining media texts and Grandparents of Media Literacy, also a website that narrates how folklore tales worked across cultures.
Folklores are complex and ignite a conversation, citing a Russian folklorist, Vladimir Propp, Prof. Hobb said, “Reading Propp helped me understand that conflict is essential to storytelling. Propp used the term villain to describe one of the key characters of the story, but he emphasized that a villain is not necessarily “bad” or “evil”. […] The villain simply has to oppose the hero.”
Subsequently, Dr. Kari Kivenen, an Education Outreach Expert of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) Observatory in Finland, theorized that children use different types of media sources. He then stated that one example of their country’s creative projects is students creating their own rap and songs.
According to him, in Finnish media education, early childhood education supports children to be communicative and expressive in their communities while also allowing them to explore different types of media and experiment with them creatively.
“In Finland, every little commune they have libraries. And It’s Finnish habit to go to the library from [the] early age,” Kivenen added.
Using the children’s imagination to teach them how to read critically and to let them understand different media texts containing several creative outlets as early as six years old will help them greatly in the future as technology natives.
While adults are doused with data, studies, and news of disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation — perceiving media crises objectively and realistically, children are taught to imagine them using fictionalized stories. From a grand scale to that of a child’s imagination.
Indeed, when we watch a film that centers on humane stories, do we not get the emotional vigor of our reality? Do not we take a moment to reflect and rationalize our own subjective emotions? Upon understanding the complexity of MIL, it is also just as important to foster children with their vulnerability and innocence. Though unable to see it the way scholars of media view the world, educators can begin asking the students their own version of answers to questions like how and why?
