Telling, Doing, (Media)Educating. Adolescents’ Experiences, Expectations, Suggestions Concerning Media Education

Frequently the relation between young people and the technologies of communication is trivialized by describing adolescents as naturally predisposed to digital technology or as incautious users. Media education goes beyond this oversimplification in trying to help adolescents to improve their digital and media literacy. Many debates have taken place around media education but only a small number of them take into consideration what adolescents think about their experiences with media education and what they expect from it. In this paper, I will discuss the results of a qualitative study carried out in the Veneto Region (Italy) on upper secondary school students. The article aims to explore media-educational activities through adolescents’ own words. The objective is to bring out what interviewees define as the strengths and weaknesses of media education as they have experienced it. The paper seeks to be a point of reflection about media-educational activities, which frequently in Italy continues to be crystallized around technical aspects and sometimes maintains an old approach that could be incapable of listening to girls and boys or of comprehending their lives and needs.

"According to the analysis of the interviews, media-educational actions until now have maintained two different tracks. On the one hand the teaching about how technically to use the media and the computer in particular; on the other hand encounters dedicated to how to protect oneself from the digital media’s risks. The interviewees during the research spoke more about the latter, defining that as important, but considering the way in which adults usually did it as paternalistic, normative, boring and unnecessary. [...] Adolescents perceive media-educational activities as something that stands alone. [...] Interviewees’ suggestions push through in this direction: a better integration of topics relating to media with other portions of everyday life." (Scarcelli, 2017, p. 116).