INgeBEELD Media Wisdom Platform
MEDEA Finalist 2011
This platform for media wisdom/media literacy, was created in 2011 by CANON Cultural Unit of the Flemish Ministry of Education and Training in Belgium. INgeBEELD’s aim is to educate children, youth and adults in media wisdom or media literacy, and it is divided into 4 different educational pathways with a specific target audience: 1) 3-8 year old children – an offline box, 2) 6-14 years youngsters – an offline box, 3) 12-18 years – online website and 4) an online platform for teachers in training and in practice, which is also open to anyone who wishes to learn more about the field of media literacy and media wisdom: media users, educators and parents, teachers, academics, artists, etc.
The showcase video of INgeBEELD Media Wisdom Platform, including an interview with Dirk Terryn
The key-elements that shape the foundations of this platform are that as we live in a multimedia culture, it is therefore crucial that everyone can express him/herself with all the available media: this is the main purpose of multimedia literacy. The INgeBEELD Media Wisdom Platform includes both text and audiovisual materials (clips, films, photographs, interviews, music, etc.) and consists of four interlinked ‘worlds’: The World of Neighbourhood TV; The World of Inspiration; The World of Perception; and The World of Learning. It is a learning environment which consists of different media trajectories in neighbourhoods and schools, and is made up of user-generated content by participants in these trajectories (pupils and young people, their teachers and their mentors) so that the platform and its contents can later be used as a source of inspiration for the creation of similar trajectories by others.
The platform’s structure reflects the media literacy content and is likewise divided into four separate levels: self-use of media, critical use of media, conscious use of media, and sharing all this know-how and expertise and making it available to others in the educational system, which is the purpose of the World of Learning. The know-how and expertise we have acquired must be embedded in the curriculum at every different level of study. Working together with all the other partners in the field of education, this must lead in the long term to a new, dynamic, multi-medial canon.
About the creation of INgeBEELD Media Wisdom Platform
Dirk Terryn, project leader of INgeBEELD, on the background of this entry: “At the initiative of the Ministries of Media, Culture and Education, the IAK (Flemish Research Centre for the Audio-visual Arts) and the CANON Cultural Unit brought together a group of experts in the fields of education and audio-visual media for the purpose of reflecting on the current use of audio-visual imagery and tools in the Flemish educational landscape and the cultural sector. This ‘think-tank’ quickly established the need for an independent inquiry into media use in Flemish education. This large-scale research study resulted in the report by Annemie Goegebuer entitled Audiovisual Training in Flemish Education (2004).
This study came to three main conclusions:
- There is a great need for media-education or media-literacy in both education and the cultural sector.
- If we wish to roll out literacy in the educational field, the focus will initially need to be fixed on the training of pupils, since they will provide the new stream of media-literate teachers. The only way to secure a supply of media-literate teachers for the future, is to devote attention to the necessary skills in the education of today’s pupils and students.
- There is a great need to share know-how and expertise with each other and to build up knowledge on media literacy.
The platform is an answer to the conclusions of the Goegebeur Report. In the first instance, the platform addresses lecturers and students in teacher training colleges and therefore, by extension, all teachers and students in the educational system. The feedback from professionals as well as participants has been tremendously positive, and because of the current stream of new requests from teacher trainers, teachers and students to launch media literacy trajectories of their own are so numerous, which our editorial team is unable to keep up with, we are currently seeking to develop a new organisational structure between Canon Cultural Unit, The Flemish Broadcasting Company (VRT) and VIAA (Culture/Audiovisual heritage).”
In 2009, INgeBEELD was a MEDEA Awards 2009 Finalist for its first three pathways (INgeBEELD 1,2 and 3).
About Dirk Terryn
Dirk Terryn
Dirk Terryn is project leader at the CANON Cultural Unit of the Flemish Ministry of Education and Training, Belgium. He is a former teacher in secondary education and former arts educator in Drama and Creative Writing. He is the author of both study books as well as fiction (poetry, plays). Since 2001 he has been working in the Flemish Ministry of Education and Training and is a staff member of the CANON Cultural Unit, which is part of the Flemish Agency for Educational Communication and aims to build bridges between culture and education. He is responsible for media and intercultural education, project leader of the INgeBEELD Media Wisdom Platform and the Days of Literature Education.
Dirk talked about INgeBEELD in further detail during a presentation at the Media & Learning Conference 2011 Brussels in November 2011. He also represented this finalist entry at the MEDEA Awards 2011 Ceremony where he received a MEDEA medal.