In five years, Media Education has reached all districts and municipalities of Moldova
The school year 2021-2022 is not only the fifth year when Media Education is taught in Moldovan schools but also the first year in which this school subject has reached all of the country’s districts and municipalities. In five years, we have managed to get to every district and convince more teachers that media literacy deserves greater attention among school subjects.
In 2021, the Independent Journalism Center (IJC) organized six more training programs in the field of media literacy and trained 115 teachers, increasing their number to 533 persons. Thus, Romanian- and Russian-speaking teachers from all over the country had the opportunity to develop media competencies in order to contribute to the formation of students’ media culture.
In the current school year, 128 teachers who have obtained media skills in recent years choose to teach the Media Education optional subject to 4,180 pupils in 103 schools across the country. These are the highest figures recorded since the introduction of this subject into the school curriculum in 2017. At the same time, the number of teachers interacting with this field is much greater, given that Media Education textbooks are used as teaching materials in other mandatory and optional school subjects, as well as at homeroom periods in different classes.
At all three levels of school education – primary, secondary and high school – the IJC provided teachers with textbooks in Romanian and Russian, as well as some online teaching materials on the platform Educaţia Mediatică, in order to help them make their lessons more interesting and interactive. The teachers’ enthusiasm passes onto pupils, and the number of teachers and pupils doing Media Education keeps growing year after year.
The Media Education optional subject was introduced into the curriculum with the agreement of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Research in the school year 2017-2018. The first beneficiaries of this subject were 53 teachers who taught about 500 primary grades pupils in 30 education institutions. A year later, starting with September 2018, the subject got to be taught in secondary school, too. From 2019, for the third consecutive year now, this subject is being taught at all three school levels.
Between 2017 and 2021, 7,700 pupils at all three school levels studied Media Education.
The Independent Journalism Center organizes media education activities within the “Strengthening of Media and Information Literacy in the Republic of Moldova” project, with the support of Deutsche Welle Akademie and financial aid from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), as part of the “Media Enabling Democracy, Inclusion and Accountability in Moldova (MEDIA-M)” project, funded by USAID, UK and implemented by Internews in Moldova, and as part of the “Increasing Support for Independent Russian-language Media Outlets and for Media Education Efforts” project, financially supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands.
