Last July the Summer School promoted by Med (Italian Association for Media Education and Communication) in Lucca (Italy) focused on the relationship between school and territory from a Media Education perspective. The several lectures and workshops planned for this 26th edition of the Summer School offered theoretical and practical insights on how a Service Learning approach can inform the development of Media Education projects in and with the local communities surrounding the schools.
In this frame academics, teachers, media educators, policy makers and media producers shared their respective reflections and experiences about contemporary Media Education as a mean to promote critical and active citizenship in and beyond the classroom. In this respect, Prof. Gianna Cappello (President of MED) underlined the risk for Media Education to disempower itself when advocated on the basis of the dominant equation between technological innovation and social progress. In another talk, Prof. Maria Ranieri (scientific coordinator of MEET) discussed the potentials of mobile learning to support the social agency of children and adolescents. In addition to the plenary sessions, the Summer School hosted dozens of interventions presenting teaching and learning resources, formal and informal educational experiences, methods of evaluation and working tools developed in the context of local, national or international media literacy oriented projects. In one of these interventions, Dr. Francesco Fabbro (MEET researcher) introduced e-EAV online resources, which were originally designed to address the discrimination issue through media and citizenship education activities.
