Educomunicación Matters: Media Education in a Pandemic and Post Pandemic World (Part 2)
/Educomunicación Matters: Media Education in a Pandemic and Post Pandemic World (Part 2)
Edited by Julio-César Mateus, Ph.D. and Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Ph.D.
In the second post of the series on Educomunicación, we present an excerpt of the dialogue we had on May 25, during the webinar “Post Pandemic Educomunicación. Learnings from Latin America 1” co-organized and co-hosted by Universidad de Lima (Peru) and Universidad Javeriana (Colombia). In this webinar we had the opportunity to listen and exchange ideas with four Latin American researchers that have worked on media education and media literacy projects in different countries of the region for several years: Maria Teresa Quiroz (Peru), Silvia Bacher (Argentina), Amparo Marroquín (El Salvador) and Eduardo Gutierrez (Colombia). Below we present, translated to the English language, their responses to the questions Why is educomunicación important today? Why does it matter?
María Teresa Quiroz:
At this juncture, educommunicacion is at the center of new forms of learning. A recent report published by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) suggests that we should ask ourselves about the role of education and its relationship with information technologies. In this sense, covid-19 has brought educommunicacion to the very center of education and has eliminated the distance between the two. This approach invites us to conceive education not as a sum of courses, but as a set of different learning processes that must be carefully designed and prepared.
The educommunicative approach helps us to see that this cannot be reduced to a simple technical problem. There is a serious deficit in the ability to make proper educational use of the new platforms. For that we need children and teachers to develop practices that allow them to communicate and form the same social ties through other modalities: from face-to-face to blended and distance learning. From the educommunicacion perspective, we wonder what the effects of this situation will be on the competencies of citizens, especially those who are still in training.
This is especially critical in Latin America, where it is estimated that 120 million children have lost their classes. One of the biggest problems to be solved, according to the World Bank, lies in unequal access: we have children living in very dissimilar geographical, health and social conditions.
Silvia Bacher:
Personally, I still prefer to think of 'education and communication' instead of educomunicacion, even if it sounds longer. I think it is easier to understand that we are dealing with fundamental rights for millions of people, the same rights that allow us to influence and transform social scenarios. This makes it easier to understand the urgency for post-pandemic life.
We cannot look at covid-19 and its effect without understanding the continuity of policies that have failed, even if they have had some successes. We have worked hard on education and communication, but it has not been enough. If we do not guarantee and demand that governments account for this disparity, the rights of thousands of young people and children will be at stake.
We can imagine many possible futures, but if we don't listen to the voices of youth and children I don't think we can get very far. This is what we work for in Las Otras Voces, to promote the exercise of the right to communication from childhood and, from there, to strengthen participation in democratic life. What we need most is to reinforce critical thinking about the media and information, because we run the risk of deepening and expanding inequalities in Latin America.
Eduardo Gutiérrez:
We have to think about the place of educommunicacion in our culture. From this point of view, we should not only talk about the school, but also about different emerging forms of work that dynamize social and educational processes. By inverting the game, by seeing it from the broad spectrum of the social fabric, the map expands and we can involve different elements.
Something that helps us a lot is the metaphor of “the anthill”: there is a real collective work, but it depends on a multiplicity of processes, actions and educommunicacion strategies that operate in isolation, and little by little show us results. We have a multiplicity of processes and actions in the field of educommunicacion, teachers and institutions work each in their own work, but they all advance the system even if they are not aware of it. The objective is to unify our actions, to be able to weave networks.
We do not have the possibility of seeing the complete map of everything that is being done, but we know that we have an 'anthill' of various actions that are already underway. We have to find the emerging configurations, see the dialogue between actors, the network of contents that is being produced. Educommunicacion must work with this proliferation of initiatives, but also encourage them and allow them to meet and work together.
[Image: Anthill]
Amparo Marroquín:
The processes of educommunicacion based on the Latin American heritage give us the tools to build new citizens who understand the importance of combating caudillismo, populism and authoritarianism, which is key in a region that is democratically very fragile. At the same time, we have a challenge: classrooms remain deeply oriented towards rote learning. The pandemic has only transferred a very precarious type of education to the virtual environment, while meaningful student interaction is very little. The student interacts with guides, takes exams, and nothing else.
The way we think about education has to change if we want to take advantage of this opportunity. In Central America we still risk falling into technophilia, believing that giving a laptop to every child solves the whole problem. That kind of intervention does not mean that we are training the child to be a citizen, not from an educommunicative paradigm. That is why we must bet that education-communication has a place in the communities again. The problems of mental health, but also those of inclusion, coexistence, food sovereignty and respect for the environment, should be discussed at school.
María Teresa Quiroz:
Carlos Scolari says that the pandemic throws us into a world of uncertainty, affects the social fabric and the way children socialize. Faced with this, the educommunicative paradigm proposes a space for reinvention. We have to rethink school and education in conjunction with technological and economic changes. The compulsory public school, created three centuries ago, is outdated today and other forms of teaching, which strive to fight against the misunderstanding of the digital environment, are urgent.
Webinar Panelists
Maria Teresa Quiroz holds a PhD in Sociology. She is director of the Scientific Research Institute of the University of Lima (IDIC) and vice-president of the National Institute of Radio and TV of Peru (IRTP). She is also past-president of the Latin American Federation of Social Communication Schools (FELAFACS) and former dean of the School of Communication at the University of Lima. She has studied the relationship between children and young people and the media. Among other books, she has published Todas las voces: comunicación y educación en el Perú, Jóvenes e internet: entre el pensar y el sentir and La edad de la pantalla.
Silvia Bacher holds a Master 's degree in Communication and Culture (Universidad de Buenos Aires). She is a journalist specialized in culture and education, awarded first prize by the University of Buenos Aires for education reporting. She is the founder and director of the NGO Las Otras Voces, Comunicación para la democracia. awarded by UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Alliance Award. Bacher has published Navigate among cultures. Education. Communication and Digital Citizenship (2016), and Tattooed by the Media: Dilemmas in Education in the Digital Era (2009). She is a member of the National Advisory Board at the Audiovisual Communications in Childhood (CONACAI). She coordinates in Argentina ALFAMED an Euro-American inter-university research network on media literacy for citizenship. https://silviabacher.com.ar/
Eduardo Gutierrez is a professor at the Communication Department of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Bogotá, where is a member of the research groups Communication, Media and Culture, and Young Cultures and Powers. He is a participant of the Political Communication and Citizenship Group of CLACSO. He is also a doctoral student in Education at DIE-UD of the Pedagogical, Distrital and Valle Universities, and holds a Master’s Degree in Communication from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Gutierrez is a member of the Editorial Committee of the journal Palabra Clave (Colombia), of the editorial team of Chasqui (Ecuador) and of the external editorial board of Comunicación Social (Bolivia)
Amparo Marroquín, Ph.D., is a professor and researcher at the University of Central America (UCA) of El Salvador since 1997. Her work has focussed on cultural studies, reception studies and communication in Central America. She is also Visiting Professor at UCA Nicaragua; the Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Quito, Ecuador; the National Universities of La Plata, Córdoba, Jujuy and Salta in Argentina; and the University of La Frontera in Chile, among others. She is part of the coordinating team of the research group on Political Communication and Citizenship for CLACSO and researcher of the International Center for Studies on Epistemologies Borders and the Political Economy of Culture in Temuco, Chile.
