MIL Heroes and Villains Guidebook: Enhance Your MIL Workshops and Trainings with a Flexible Storytelling Approach

"Media and Information Literacy (MIL) provides a framework for developing skills that enable youth to critically access, evaluate, and create media content."

This guidebook is designed to provide media and information literacy (MIL) educators with strategies to use the power of storytelling to make concepts around MIL engaging and relevant for learners. The approach is based on the use of five Heroes as they tackle common challenges young people face in both social media and the wider media landscape. These challenges include: cyberbullying, fake news, hate speech, propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation. Overall, the intention is to empower young people to become more critical and thoughtful consumers and creators of content in today's media-saturated environment.

 

Developed by Deutsche Welle (DW) Akademie for MIL curriculum developers, educators and trainers, the manual is designed to be adaptable to various formal and information teaching situations such as schools, universities, and community centres. The lessons are primarily intended for young people aged 14 to 25, but they can be adapted for different age groups based on context and media literacy knowledge levels.

The guide uses the storytelling approach for the following reasons:

• It helps to transform complex media literacy concepts into lively discussions for young audiences.
• It fosters increased engagement, encourages the sharing of experiences, promotes constructive discussions, and prompts reflective thinking.
• It helps to create relatable narratives, cases, and scenarios related to MIL topics.
• It helps to make lessons interactive and fun. Participants draw from their experiences with their (social) media environment to shape characters for role-play sessions and games.

The first section of the guide explains the different characters and how the guide is intended to be used.

The Heroes concept is based on a personification of the five MIL competencies (AACRA: access, analyse, create, reflect, act). These are the skills needed to become MIL competent:

1. Access information from diverse sources and platforms.
2. Analyse information critically, evaluating credibility, bias, and impact.
3. Create media content, such as videos or articles.
4. Reflect on media consumption, production, and broader implications.
5. Act responsibly based on media literacy, advocating, discussing, or engaging in activism.

The Villains, on the other hand, represent the full variety of evil and bad actors in our media environment: misleading information, bias, mis- and disinformation, unethical media practice, propaganda, cyberbullying, unsafe online practice, etc.

As the lessons are meant to serve as templates that educators can change to fit their teaching style and their students' needs, the guidebook offers three different ways in which it can be applied to or integrated into lessons. These three ways are represented by three fictional educators - Elena, Yousef, and Jia - who each take on a different goal and approach to adapting the MIL Heroes and Villains concept to meet their specific needs in achieving MIL learning outcomes. The three approaches or journeys explore different lengths of courses (short, medium, or long journey); the guide can also be used in standalone lesson plans, or a Heroes and Villains session can be incorporated into a broader curriculum.  

The second section, "Sample Sessions and Materials", is the "how to" section of the guide. It outlines how the three fictional educators design their classes and make use of accompanying materials and session ideas to integrate MIL Heroes and Villains learning sessions into their curriculum.

For all their Journeys, regardless of the length, the sessions utilise the following core materials:

• Illustrations of the Heroes and Villains
• Introduction of the MIL Heroes: their back-stories and attributes
• Introduction of the Villains: their malicious operations
• The Villain's MIL Topics: the lead-up short stories featuring a Villain, which serve as a problem statement around an MIL topic
• Resources: includes links to the actual material