“The great problem of today’s school is that it teaches a society that no longer exists.” It is a phrase of the professor Joan Ferrés of the Pompeu Fabra University, to which the Professor of Education and Communication at the University of Huelva Ignacio AguadedHe adds that the same school “also has to teach the society of the future.”
At present, there is already a gap between education and technology that the pandemic has made even more evident and “given that society has changed, it is also necessary to change the training of teachers,” explains Aguaded, one of the hundred teachers from all of Spain – fifty from Education and fifty from Communication – who have recently signed a manifesto to demand a double degree in Education and Communication. “New trained teachers have to enter. The user level is not worth it because that does not allow you to be a mediator, an advanced level is necessary and now the teachers are overwhelmed ”.
The signatories of the document have also requested an interview with the Minister of Universities, Manuel Castells, to mark a public policy strategy, “there is a lot of research but little implemented,” laments Aguaded. Ultimately, the objectives are for these future trainers to know well “social networks and the impact of the media, in addition to providing themselves with media competencies”.
These should act as filters to separate the grain from the chaff because, as Aguaded explains, “overinformation generates underinformation, clichés that many times cannot be processed ”. The school has to favor “an intelligent consumption of the media to extract the good and discover the bad that is in them” and, very importantly, “know how to differentiate fiction from reality, that is substantive”.
For the Onubense professor, the initiative “can revolutionize the school without the need for the entire cloister to have that double degree, but to have that figure on which all areas pivot as a transversal axis ”.
“The world is technological “, diagnoses, and due to this reality considers that a preparation that “cannot depend on small isolated courses” is “fundamental”. The consequences of this change would not affect only the students, the training would also benefit parents, fundamental pillars of education.
Although this movement has started with the demand for this double degree, it is a global project that goes further. An initiative that seeks to “transform the curriculum of teacher training” and also with regard to communicators. In this sense the secondary school teachers they must also face this challenge of today’s society and that is why he points to the need to transform the curriculum of future teachers, “it does not make sense that there is not a transversal subject”.
In addition, consider that the enabling master that allows that once the degree is completed, teaching can be exercised, it must have a communicative approach to better teach students who “are more autonomous”.
Teachers play at a disadvantage in a situation where “the mobile phone is omnipresent and omnipotent, with universal and free access ”as well as“ a very dangerous instrument if you don’t know how to use it.”. The reality is that “the image penetrates more than education, the former is more intuitive and direct.” In short, explains Ignacio Aguaded, “the power of the media has grown exorbitantly and the question that must be asked is whether people have come to terms with this fact.”
The development of media competencies has been on the agenda of international organizations such as the Unesco, which already in 2010 issued guidelines considering that the education of the future had to start from other premises.
Ignacio Aguaded is part of Alfamed, a Euramerican interuniversity research network on media competencies for citizens made up of twelve countries. This network organizes congresses and research online with Unesco. They analyze social networks and examine the why of the relevance of instagrammers. “But later it has arisen Tik Tok, which is three years old ”. “It’s all complex,” concludes Ignacio Aguaded.
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“Prestige comes with higher quality content”
The change in society does not only concern educators and the Professor of Education and Communication at the University of Huelva Ignacio Aguaded also focuses on the role of communicators in the formation of a critical citizenship. In this sense, he recalls that “every medium has a sense of social service and ethics plays a fundamental role.”
He defends that “you can make good television and good press with an ethical sense”, The problem comes with the savage battle for audiences but, he warns,“ prestige comes with the highest quality content ”.
Everything returns to the origin because, he estimates, “bad content is the reflection of an untrained audience”. He considers that media competencies in communicators are fundamental because “they focus on people and give importance to values”, while digital ones are limited to the merely technological.
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