More information
Description
Participation of young people in the political life of the country is important. People are subject to media influence in the new digital environment and at the same time can create media. People should be prepared for responsible participation in public discussions as early as school. There are problems that concern students in school and in the city and students can join solving them by creating and offering media content on topical decisions of the local authorities. The project aims at preparing pilot teams of teachers and local media representatives in 5 cities who will undertake an educational initiative to prepare students to join a model of participatory journalism or citizen journalism. Involvement of students in the project will aim to achieve two important goals, namely raise their media literacy and promote their civic engagement with solving local problems. The students will learn to apply the Access to Public Information Act and follow the sessions of the Parliament. The following activities will be organized: 4 information meetings targeted at local authorities, a two-day seminar, visits of journalists at school, a series of one-day workshops for students and 25 publications mainly to reflect the work of the local authorities. A learning e-guide will be prepared to share the learning materials used in the project. The target groups are teachers and media representatives and direct beneficiaries are students aged 15-19.
Summary of project results
he project "Young Reporters for Local Democracy" is implemented by the United Nations Association in Bulgaria in partnership with the “For a New Partnership in Journalism” Foundation. Its main goal is increasing media literacy and civic education through a series of activities with a target group of educators, students, local journalists and media.
Increasing the knowledge and building sensitivity towards the need for media literacy was achieved through the implementation of activities such as seminars for teachers and media representatives, meetings with journalists at school, a seminar for young reporters for students. The next activities in the project were related to the formation of school newsrooms and the creation of a school newspaper with media content. In the last activity a toolkit "Young Reporters for Local Democracy" was created, published and distributed.
The Covid - 19 pandemic affected the implementation of the project and our team transformed many of the activities in an online form, which was an unexpected risk in the implementation of the project, but did not affect the training and project results.
Sustainability: The sustainability of the project is based on three main pillars, namely:
- improved communication and willingness to work together between teachers and local media from the cities of Karnobat, Plovdiv, Varna, Montana, Veliko Tarnovo;
- the toolkit, which is distributed both online and on paper to schools, student clubs and NGOs;
- expressed desire from three of the cities to continue to create student newspapers after the end of the project