Edumedia: Critical agenda for the development of media education in Peru

As we found in previous works (Mateus, 2020), the understanding and integration of the media in the school is merely technical, not sociocultural. This means that the view with which teachers conceive ICTs is often that of innocuous and transparent instruments. This approach, fueled by the lack of curricular standards and pedagogical guidelines, generates a wrong story according to which citizens do not need to form and train critical skills for the use of the media (what in the international arena is called “media competence”) (Mateus, Andrada & Quiroz, 2020).
In the Peruvian scenario, in addition to the pandemic, we are in an electoral year where we will elect the next government. The stability of our precarious democracy depends, in large part, on the decisions we make as citizens. The amount of information that circulates through the media is excessive and our capacities to manage it are permanently questioned. As was found in other countries, the increasingly blurred line that separates the presentation of information from opinion, and the use of the logic of entertainment and dramatization typical of the media ecosystem, make the need for critical media education increase from the level school (Cappello & Rizzuto, 2020).
In this context, we ask ourselves the question: How to empower citizens from formal educational spaces to develop critical attitudes in the use of the media? The purpose of this project, therefore, is to produce a guiding framework (a “White Paper”) that proposes critical aspects for media education in the country, in line with the conceptual framework of Media and Information Literacy (AMI) that proposed by UNESCO and other international organizations.

The understanding and integration of the media in Peruvian school is merely technical. This means that teachers often view ICTs as innocuous and transparent instruments. However, the amount of information circulating in the media is excessive and our ability to manage it is constantly questioned. This highlights the need to increase critical media education at school level. The purpose of this project, therefore, is to produce a guiding framework that proposes critical aspects for media education in the country, in line with the conceptual framework of media and information literacy (MIL) proposed by UNESCO and other international organizations.