13 Oct CLIP – CRITICAL VISUAL MEDIA LITERACY AND EMPOWERMENT
13 Oct, 2022
The purpose of the CLIP project is to strengthen digital capabilities of the Higher Education sector (HE), and increase resilience to manipulation and polarization, working on the important issue of critical visual literacy, that is a fundamental component of the way European students and citizens are getting informed in the digital era.
The project will provide European HEIs with tools and educational resources to detect image bias as well as stereotypes in visual artefacts, strengthening their capacities to work with media and images manipulation from a critical viewpoint.
It tackles a specific and not yet fully covered area of digital literacy, i.e. visual media literacy, which influences the way people learn, communicate and interpret reality. A typical feature of on-line communication in the digital age is the pre-eminence of visual over textual communication, which requires a deeper understanding, and the start of a new dialogue among qualified Higher Education institutions, and between academy and society at large.
The project’s main target groups are:
– First and second-level HE students, nearly all of whom are online every day, which will be equipped with more sophisticated competencies for digital media literacy and fluency;
– Professors and researchers involved in the field of humanities, which will share analytical tools, and pilot the implementation of the project in their universities;
– Academic staff, which will put the findings emerging from the research to the practical test, with an experimental definition of new, non-biased strategies for the communication among universities, and between the academy and society at large.
CLIP brings together four partners from three countries (Italy, Belgium, Greece) with vast ranges of complementary expertise in education, (digital) participation, and network cooperation.
OBJECTIVES
- Raise awareness of the role played by higher education in Europe to enable the fair and resilient digital transformation, tracking disinformation and bias in visual communication through education and training
- Increase the digital fluency and critical consciousness about visual media of European students and faculties, both within communication study communities and transversely across subjects, nourishing misinformation resilient behaviours and providing them with the practical skills to detect image bias as well as stereotypes in visual artefacts
- Enable academic staff, senior management and communication staff at the universities to develop sustainable strategies for integrating visual media literacy at all levels of course offering
PROJECT OUTPUTS
– The Report on Visual Media Literacy in Europe
– The Micro-learning course in critical visual media literacy and fluency
– The scalability and transferability toolkit containing operational guidelines and recommendations for the implementation of a learning offer on visual media literacy in HE.
PARTNERS
- UNIMED (Unione delle Università del Mediterraneo) – Coordinator, Italy
- IULM (Libera università di lingue e comunicazione), Italy
- ALL DIGITAL, Belgium
- HOU (Hellenic Open University), Greece
