Libro

MEDIA LITERACY AND INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE
Strategies, Debates and Good Practices
requires action on three complementary dimensions: the protection of children
and youth people, an audiovisual policy and an education policy.
According Victoria Camps, Professor of Ethics and vice president of Audiovisual
Council of Catalonia “family, school and television are the three most important
educators agents, and the problem is not so much how you look, but what and
how you look.” If the school tries to instill the value of hard work and
perseverance, television offers a view of the world that any wish is possible.
Camps commitment to shared responsibility of parents, teachers and
broadcasters to cope with excessive and improper use of media by children.
In his opinion, the school must educate children to have a "critical eye" front of
the small screen and not become "visual illiterates" and appealed to parents to
"control the television diet of their children as well controlling the food. " In this
sense, Dr. Pauline Castells, child psychiatrist, says that the television, Internet,
mobile, video, etc, damage the mind of the children more than the alcohol.
These media can turn into hard drugs because they force binge drinking makes
them TV addicts, cyberaddicts, mobile addicts...
The case of the child with their parents are very happy because it's very
homelike and never leaves home, always with your computer ... What parents
do not know is what makes your child with the computer, or what you see on TV
(Pérez Tornero, 2003).
Given this radiograph, media education becomes a basic tool to resolve media
and social conflict to the quality of information.
2. Media Education. Background and Context
The research project does not start from scratch but is consolidated and it is
thanks to previous studies on media literacy in the international, national and
regional circles.
Different international organizations have endorsed for years the necessity to
develop media literacy initiatives, as well as the search for indicators of broad
consensus. UNESCO, the Lisbon conference or seminar in Seville in 2002
about the youth education in the media fix the basic parameters for training in
media consumption, initiatives that were followed by others that are
summarized in the recommendations of the European Parliament States:
"Face up the education in the media with the intention of knowing how it
manifests in their territories and how to improve it, defending its role as part of
the" basic training of every citizen in any country in the world, their expression
liberty and their right to information.”
(...) "Begins at home, learning to select from the media services available
(hence the importance of media literacy for parents, who play a decisive role in
the development of the utilization habits of media by children), continues in
school and during the training period and it seems stronger by the efforts of the
159