The Revolutionary Media Education Decade: From the UNESCO to the ALFAMED Curriculum for Teacher Training

Abstract

Nations across the globe are immersed in a technological revolution—intensified by the need to respond to COVID-19 issues. In order to be critical and responsible citizens in the current media ecosystem, it is important that students acquire and develop certain skills when consuming and producing information for and when communicating through the media. This is a major challenge that educational systems worldwide have to face. Hence, new curricula in media education to guide future teachers towards the successful acquisition of new media skills have been proposed. The aims of this work are to conduct a theoretical approach to this worldwide technological and media evolution in the past decade, to make an in-depth comparison between the Curriculum for teachers on media and information literacy published by the UNESCO (2011) and the publication of the new AlfaMed Curriculum for the training of teachers in media education (2021). This framework starts by providing an extensive analysis of the key elements of both curricula and of their corresponding modules, establishing, thus, a constructive comparison while updating them, according to the needs, changes, and realities that have taken place regarding digital literacy in the past decade. Finally, the chapter concludes with the detailing of the challenges and with proposals for teacher training in media and information literacy.