Media education has become a watchword, with budgets, labels and schemes. And yet most of the professionals I meet feel that it is not taking hold: young people can recite that you should check your sources, and go on believing what they want to believe, like all of us. I think the problem comes from the way we have built this field, and I have several possible ways into a discussion with your teams.
First direction: fact-checking does not produce critical thinking
Verifying a piece of information presupposes that somewhere there exists a true version, held by someone authorised. That is a position of power, and young people spot it immediately. I propose a talk that takes this critique seriously without slipping into relativism: what objectivity means, how a fact is made, why verification schemes sometimes produce the opposite of what they aim for. It comes from The fact-checking imposture, The Mythology of Truth and The Lies of Experts.
Second direction: media education done by those who make the media
Entrusting media education to journalists seems obvious, and poses a real epistemological problem: a profession is being asked to train people in the critique of its own production. I have proposed the concept of attestational dramaturgy to describe the journalistic staging of reality, and it provides very concrete tools of analysis, usable with teenagers from the very first session. See Attestational Dramaturgy, The Journalist and His Mirror and Media and Information Education : Rethinking the Role of Journalists.
Third direction: going through creation rather than analysis
This is the heart of my practice. You understand how an image manipulates by making one, not by listening to someone explain how it manipulates. This is the most vivid direction: I can have the room experience it in ten minutes with the phones already in their pockets. It draws on Creativity as a political weapon against the society of the spectacle and on Image education as a space for connection.
Fourth direction: distinguishing the regimes of images
Many misunderstandings come from the fact that we call “image” objects that have neither the same status nor the same function: the image framed by an institution, the autonomous image produced by a machine, the vernacular image that everyone makes and circulates. I proposed this typology because it is a political, educational and heritage prerequisite, and because it immediately makes many discussions clearer. See Framed, autonomous, vernacular : a typology of the regimes of images and The contemporary functions of images : beyond memory.
Fifth direction: listening before showing
Ethnographic collection is a method for gathering people’s words radically different from the journalistic interview, and to my mind it is the best entry point into media education. Learning to listen in order to learn to see. A direction well suited to structures in the social field and to territorial projects. See Ethnographic Collection as a Tool for Media Education.
Sixth direction: critical thinking in the age of talking machines
When an artificial intelligence produces a plausible text on any subject, the question of verification changes in nature. I treat this direction with creative exercises, where we make fakes together in order to understand from the inside what makes something credible. See Media and ai education through creativity and Delegated Thinking.
What happens in the room
I have people make things. Depending on the time available, this ranges from a two-minute exercise on the sound of an image, enough to overturn the perception of an entire room, to a workshop where everyone produces and shows. I also use the moving debate, where you physically position yourself according to what you think of a statement, which shows that disagreement runs through the group itself, and not only through the young people we intend to educate. See The moving debate revisited : playing positions, revealing power, keeping a trace and Sound is the first factor of immersion.
What remains
The room’s productions and written contributions stay online. For networks building an image education policy across a territory, this material becomes a shared assessment, as in the work carried out in Nouvelle-Aquitaine.
Formats and preparation
An hour and a half of participatory talk, a training day, or a professional day designed with you. I prepare through video calls, seeking above all to know what your teams have already tried and what has failed: that is where the useful talk starts from. I can also support a member of your team in carrying these contents themselves, which is often the best investment for a network [see the page “What if someone from your team did the talking?”, to be linked once published]. Talks are given in French and in English.
Some past talks
Training Eyes in the Age of AI : A Day to Rethink Image Education; Collaborative assessment of screen literacy education in Nouvelle-Aquitaine; Image Education and Citizenship : When Youth Professionals Rethink Their Practices; APSV : Conference « Potentialities of image education in the field of social action ».
All the resources: Media and Information Education (MIE) and Image Education / Research on the Image.