Czech teachers in the world of media

Abstract

Today, media literacy is a very important skill, allowing us to move around safely in the vast world of media, and to actively participate in creating it. The Covid19 has proved how important it is to be able to deal with information in the virtual space, and how virtual space can significantly affect the non-virtual space.
In our new research called Czech teachers in the world of media, we focus on media literacy and media education, a cross-subject topic within the Curriculum framework for primary (and higher) education which is, in various forms, taught in primary/lower secondary schools in the Czech Republic. We focus on several key aspects: Which media the Czech teachers perceive as trusted and non-trusted and which media they follow in
a regular basis, where they get information for lessons from, and whether and how they use YouTube. We also wanted to know whether they are able to identify publicly funded media in the Czech Republic.
Another part focuses on disinformation – we explored whether Czech teachers are able to identify disinformation content which is commonly present in the on-line space. For our analysis, we picked 34 widely known statements from 3 topics and we asked teachers to choose which of those they perceive as true or false, and teachers were also given the option to say that based on information available, they cannot make an informed decision.
A separate part of the research is focused on media education in schools – we wanted to know whether teachers perceive media education as important, what form, topics and number of lessons they prefer, whether they have completed any professional training in media education, and whether they keep learning today in this area.