91Â鶹¹ú²ú¾«Æ·×ÔÅÄ

UNESCO and partners around the world promote concepts related to MIL such as cultural literacy and intercultural competencies.

Cultural literacy can contribute to:

• Understanding better the values and perceptions of a society, including knowing its historical references, heritage, and communal languages, and decoding interwoven threads of contexts behind and beyond the political and economic aspects;
• Expanding access to diversified cultural contents, which responds to the global commitment to promote human rights, with the right to a diversity of cultural expression being an integral part. As such, the promotion of cultural literacy becomes increasingly urgent in the context of both the globalized potential of content from different parts of the world, as well as the digital divide, albeit also evident with the print and broadcast media.
• Encouraging the sharing of one’s own culture and being open to learn about other cultures, and thus fostering mutual understanding and dialogues, combatting stereotypes, discrimination, xenophobia and other related intolerance, and contributing to the rapprochement of cultures.
• Strengthening learning outcomes, and cultivating competencies such as empathy, critical-thinking and creativity by highlighting the significance of cultural and artistic contents, and showing how these are complementary to Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education.

In summary: as discussed earlier in this Curriculum (Part 1) various pedagogical approaches are possible. Please review the list in Part 1 and decide which approach to apply to the suggested Activities below and others that you may formulate.

• Guide learners to explore the  to learn, explore and engage. The platform offers various learning activities and opportunities to learn about other cultures and participate in purposeful dialogue.
• Protection of heritage and fostering creativity are at the heart of UNESCO’s mandate and they constitute an important part of UNESCO’s work on the promotion of respect for cultural diversity. Consult . Investigate and discuss how these instruments are being implemented in your country or community.
• Henry Jenkins defines a participatory culture as a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, the availability of formal or informal mentorship where knowledge is shared, where citizens believe their contributions matter, and feel a level of social connection with one another (Adapted from
  ). Such participatory culture consists of:
  
  • Affiliations
  • Expressions
  • Collaborative problem solving
  • Circulations/Sharing/Distribution

This framework was developed in the early 2000s in connection with media education (now encompassed in the overarching concept of MIL). Discuss with educators and learners how these enable cultural exchange, learning and dialogue.

Henry Jenkins proposes the following skills which build on traditional literacy and critical analysis:

• Play - the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
• Performance - the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
• Simulation - the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real- world processes
• Appropriation - the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Multitasking - the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details
• Distributed Cognition - the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
• Collective Intelligence - the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
• Judgment - the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
• Transmedia Navigation - the ability to follow the flow of content across multiple modalities
• Networking - the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
• Negotiation - the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

Source: Adopted from the UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Policy Guidelines (Adopted from , p. 56).

Educators should develop creative activities around each of these proposed skills and relate them to cultural production and entrepreneurships. Are they relevant to both online and offine transmission of cultural and creative industries? How do some of the basic MIL questions apply in cultural and artistic creation: Who created the cultural context? For what purpose? What are the messages? What supporting evidence is given? What is included? What might have been left out? Who will benefit? Who might be affected by this content?

• Consider the concepts, competencies, and principles related to intercultural competencies as listed in the UNESCO resource,  (p.10-27). Develop activities to explore how these related to Henry Jenkins participatory culture skills above, which are related to MIL.
• Digital technology offers new potentials to the old art of storytelling. In many ways, social media for example is very much a big digital storyboard and ‘circular communication’. UNESCO and Routledge Focus have reinvented the learning method called Story Circles38. The Story Circles technique focuses on fundamental elements of intercultural competencies development, including respect, listening, curiosity, self- and other awareness, reflection, sharing, empathy, and relationship building. Read more about the Story Circles to develop intercultural competencies in the .
• Design creative activities using this approach. Use prompts that are adapted to the technological and institutional context. For instance, see the creative resource Flipgrid which is a free and open video discussion tool that captures the idea of Story Circles.
• Educators and learners should consider the roles of content providers such as libraries, archives, museums, media and digital communications companies, in cultural creativity and entrepreneurship. Put educators or learners in groups to select one type of content provider and investigate the cases of cultural production and distribution. Apply the MIL questions above and various MIL competencies listed in Part 1: Curriculum and Competency Framework of this MIL Curriculum for Educators and Learners.
• Public service media are major producers, distributors, commissioners, disseminators and mediators of quality cultural content. Guide educators and learners to investigate the extent to which this is happening in their country and/ or community. Prepare a series of questions for them to answer. They should consider how different genders, age groups and ethnic groups are reflected in the selected cultural content. What actions can educators and learners take in response to their findings? What recommendations would they make? Consider the UNESCO resource in the process, .
• In the , see the statistics/findings, A Gender Gap Persists in Culture in the Chapter, Gender equality: missing in action. Now search for statistics about how women are represented in media staffing and media content. What do you find? How arethese related? Discussions should be guided.
• Artistic freedom is related to freedom of expression and access to information. Artistic freedom is germane to the rights of cultural producers and audiences. It is also crucial in digital environments. Guide discussions around successes, challenges and recommendations to artistic freedom for educators and learners local, national, or global environment. Search and use other related resources in the process. Maybe there are similar resources with specific national and regional contexts.
• Discuss the commercial logics of content providers such as YouTube, both for itself and its contributors, along with the cultural phenomenon of 'influencers' who can have hidden sponsors behind their content. How does YouTube recommend content and why does its algorithm seek to keep and prolong engagement with content on its platform?