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UNESCO Gulf States & Yemen Office at the helm of an Advanced Discussion on Media Information Literacy in Qatari Schools
The main aim of the workshop, organized in close collaboration with Qatar National Commission for Education, Culture and Science, was to discuss current good practices in developing media and information literacy skills within the primary and secondary schools for the young generation of Qatar. UNESCO Office in Doha is offering this event as a step forward, assessing the current strengths and the feasible future steps for strengthening the media and information literacy components within the school curricula in Qatar.
MIL is amongst the key skills for the young generation because it empowers citizens to access, understand, evaluate, create, and share information and media content in all formats, using various tools, in a critical, ethical and effective way. MIL education can assist in teaching students how to differentiate between reliable and unreliable information, an area which becomes increasingly important 鈥 for example, when the Covid-19 pandemic started, the world also experienced a pandemic of misinformation about the virus and the measures to stop its spread.
UNESCO is particularly committed to offering support in curricula delivering media and information literacy knowledge and skills as well as helpful resources, such as 鈥淢edia and Information Literate Citizens: Think Critically, Click Wisely鈥 (Second Edition of Media and Information Literacy Curriculum for Educators and Learners, 2021). Alongside the Curriculum, UNESCO is also developing an Online Multimedia MIL Teaching Resource Platform to facilitate exchanges and collaborations.
Within this framework, the UNESCO Gulf States & Yemen Office in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Higher Education of Qatar, launched preliminary research on the state of MIL education in Qatar to better understand the MIL education landscape, needs and gaps to be filled. The workshop is part of a scoping study commissioned by the Office and it will be producing a snapshot of the current place of MIL in the school system of Qatar by the end of 2021.
The workshop was facilitated by Dr. Milena Dobreva and Mrs Asma Al-Maadheed.
