A BRIEF HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

Three hundred and sixty years ago, a book entitled Orbis Sensualium Pictus (which can be translated as The Visible World in Pictures) was published in the city of Nuremberg. Its author was Amos Comenius who, in addition to being an education reformer, was one of the first people to stress the importance of images in education and knowledge. The success of his book in modern times underlines an idea and a purpose of Comenius: to show that an image cannot be regarded as a mere illustration of a written text, but that it has an educational and cultural value in itself , as a specific language.

Image taken from Orbis Sensualium Pictus

It is, however, with the development of the so-called mass media and their impact on society, especially cinema and radio first, and then television, that the awareness begins to emerge that education cannot ignore the new media culture. Thus, in 1922, when films were still ‘silent’, the first national conference on educational cinema was already being organised in France and, in the following decade, the first film clubs for young people were created, aimed at encouraging the discussion of films and developing critical sense, artistic taste and creative capacity. In England, a screen education movement developed in the first half of the 20th century which was also concerned with the aesthetics of films and the promotion of good taste and the ability to distinguish between what has quality and what does not.

In the second half of the century, in several countries -the United States and France, among others – current affairs began to attract growing attention with the focus being primarily on the use of newspapers and magazines in the classroom, both as a teaching resource and as a subject for study. It may be traced back to the 1920s with Celestin Freinet, who created the school press and encouraged the production of school newspapers to promote communication both within the school community and between schools in different regions.

A milestone in this process is the Grünwald Declaration on Media Education of 1982, which resulted from a meeting of experts from different countries under the auspices of UNESCO. It incorporates the transformations in the communication and media field, namely the cultural impact of audiovisual media and their instrumental function in promoting citizens’ active participation in society. At the same time, it sets forth a path of approaches which will constitute a benchmark for the following decades.

Information and communication technologies, namely computing (in the 1970s and 1980s) and the Internet (from the mid-1990s onwards), and their associated portable media, such as the portable computer and the smart phone, have significantly facilitated access to information and communication practices. However, they have also brought with them new challenges, when it comes to training citizens: learning new languages; awareness of new exclusion risks; threats to privacy and individual and collective security; the degree of misinformation and manipulation; opportunities for people and communities to express themselves, among others

The history of media literacy, both at a country and global level is yet to be done. There are , however, some conclusions that can be drawn from the course taken thus far: a) media and information literacy is nowadays a cornerstone of citizenship education; b)  since it is rooted in different contexts, it is formulated and materialized in different ways and worded differently; c) it is inextricably linked to digital , but continues to build bridges with  analogue; d) it should start as early as possible ,at home and at school,  and develop throughout life; e) educators and teachers need to be specially trained in this area ; and  f)  it will be effective if integrates, in a coordinated manner, public policies in the educational, communicational and cultural spheres.