The GMF's first plenary session took up fundamental questions about the role of the media

The Global Media Forum started on Monday with plenary session 1: “Rating vs. Quality: Media caught between market pressure and the mission to educate.” It was a very engaging discussion, and there were representatives from the US, Germany, Russia and South Africa. Above all, participant Trevor Ncube made a particular impression on me. He is deputy chairman of M&G Media Ltd in South Africa and chairman of Alpha Media Holdings in Zimbabwe, and he started by saying that when the media neglects Africans, it is generating misinformation.
He was referring to a video that we had seen before the panel started called “Colours.” It consisted of several people of different nationalities saying what countries they come from. Even though the piece intended to be universal, there were no Africans there. When Travor asked the audience, “Has anyone noticed anything wrong with the video?” He then proceeded to highlight the lack of Africans, which represent one billion members of the world’s population. I thought to myself: “Yes, that is true, and there are no Latin Americans either on the video.”

The audiovisual piece was not the only thing he took contention with. He also questioned the media’s role in education. “It is presumptuous to say that media has an education role,” he stated: “I always have the premise that my audience is more educated than me.” And with today’s access to media, they are also more informed than in the past. In his view, media’s role is to engage and be relevant to its audience, providing good quality content, analysis and intelligent commentary. Given that there is only a fine line between education and propaganda, Travor finds ascribing an educational role to publishers and other media outlets is rather problematic.

His view struck a cord with me. Ever since I attended the Salzburg Global Seminar on Media and Global Change, I had been thinking how I could transfer the knowledge I got there to others. It was at that seminar that I got to know the subject of media literacy for the first time – as well as how to transfer such knowledge to others in a systematic way. I attended the Salzburg seminar while I was in my last year of journalism school. Since then, I have seen media literacy as a subject that should be taught to teenagers in high school; in my view, people need to be conscious of how media works from a young age. I actually thought of designing a workshop for a high school in my neighborhood.

Fellow blogger Hellgurd with Amrita Scheema, a DW news presenter, at the conference

Trevor’s questions brought up a lot of other questions. Are people who read newspapers and watch TV really more educated than journalists in Argentina? The truth is: It all depends on what fragment of reality you are watching. In my country, poverty-stricken communities are now going through their third generation of non-professional citizens, unemployment and school dropouts. There is a huge phenomenon of retelling history on behalf of the ruling party (we call it “reinventing history,” when people manipulate historical facts according to what suits them).

There are two main actors involved in this retelling process: political representatives (through public speeches) and the national media. I prefer to hear all sides of the story in order to make up my mind. And when I do so, I become very conscious of my experiences in higher education. But what about people who didn’t even finish secondary school? Can they tell when reports are far from the truth?

I do believe that by promoting consciousness of these issues, you are working to provide a better quality of life. Learning how to think independently empowers everyone. Maybe the answer is not leaving the subject of media literacy in the dark – for fear of who transfers this knowledge. Instead, maybe the answer is to always work with the other person’s interest in mind, and not your own.

Productive dialogue: Friends from my university in Berlin

This is my last entry before we will all be writing from the Global Media Forum in Bonn (Germany). I was shocked to hear that Hellgurd’s entries will not be published any more due to the severe threats he received. It made me go back to the very beginning of the project and look at Hellgurd’s video presentation. He speaks of music as a universal language that can bridge the differences among people.
I believe that the chance to take part in an international dialogue is, in a way, trying to find a shared code. This doesn’t always have to do with speaking the same language, but, rather, building a dialectical context in which each element can express ideas and be understood in its individuality. Values like tolerance, empathy and modesty are a must. Violence should be out of the question.

The problem is when we grow so acclimated to violence that we are not sensitive to it any more. This touches me because Argentina is going through a very difficult process of social change right now. The current administration is taking radical action in the areas of business and economics, and ever since the beginning of Kirchner’s presidency there has been a divide in society. Nowadays, aggression storms the sky like bullets, and you are either on one side or the other.

Participants in the Salzburg conference

Sharp words are aimed at people’s feelings, their identities, their day to day worries, but the discussion never seems to focus on ideas. This is the main problem: We are not discussing ideas for a developed society; we are stuck in the small talk of prejudices and, in most cases, uniformed opinion. As I said in my second entry, our society has gone through a lot, and its wounds will take years to heal. This kind of violence in public discourse is nothing but detrimental.

One of the reasons I’m so excited to attend the GMF is that this international dialogue will be expanded and take on new life. I have had chances to experience exchanges like this before. In 2008, I won a scholarship to attend the Salzburg Global Seminar on Media and Global Change, and I spent three weeks discussing the main areas of journalistic ethics together with students from different parts of the world. Then, in 2009, I spent a year studying liberal arts in an international college in Berlin. Those experiences help you develop an attitude towards the other that has to do with listening, understanding more deeply, and comprehending your own reality from a different perspective.

We could use a different approach to technical education

At the beginning of the week I was talking to my coworker Patricia about how education is approached in our country. She coordinates a regional program aiming to strengthen technical education in different fields, like math, science, industry-applied technology and school management. The program’s various groups in different regions of the country do not work directly with students; they work with teachers and school principals. The aim is to train educators and hence improve technical education by setting higher standards.Patricia was telling me how Gabriel and Alejandro, the head tutors in the school management area, have a liberal approach to education, and what a challenge it was to introduce these principles in technical education.

“They want to empower the student, work with the previous knowledge they have. You say this to an engineer, and he will frown and shake his head. Engineers think of their science as hard knowledge that cannot be approached through discussion. The problem goes even deeper: It originates in the conception of one perfect student that all alumni should try to live up to. This is not just a viewpoint from engineers, but from almost all actors in the educational system. Nowadays we are trying to uproot the concept of the model student, and we are working to introduce subjectivity into educational approaches,” she told me.

I knew what she was talking about.

Sergiu, a classmate from Berlin, gives a presentation on a sculpture in Florence

Doing my master’s in Berlin was the first time I encountered liberal education. It has many principles, but in general terms, we could put it this way: There are no professors, there are only classical texts; knowledge is gained through discussion and questions. A typical day started with a lecture from a faculty member, who gave his or her interpretation of the chapters we had previously read, and opened the field for questions and discussion. Then we would go on to our seminar group and discuss the text and our ideas on it. This was the method for core courses. For electives, we only had seminar groups. Furthermore, there were no exams – only essays.

This approach to education really changed me irreversibly. I strongly believe it develops critical thinking in students, a capacity to question everything (with a proper argument), and not just take in anything from whoever is saying it. It is about building skills for having rich discussion with well-developed ideas. And it appeals above all else to the students’ creativity, while at the same time it empowers them by valuing their capacity to reason and their previous knowledge.

Thinking of what Emmy said in her entry, that education in Kenya kills creativity, I believe it could strongly be related to how theoretical learning is approached. This is, I believe, similar to the challenge I was talking about with Patricia: How to introduce a liberal approach to education in hard science teaching. I think it’s not about denying the value and strength of theories, but, rather, finding a way to make the student aware of his or her own capacities and encourage them to use these as the principal motive to acquire knowledge.

Teachers protesting in front of government offices in Buenos Aires

In March this year, there was a huge strike from the teachers’ union in which they demanded a salary raise. Every year, the timing works out almost identically: the academic year in Argentina starts in March, and some three weeks to a month before that, negotiations with the union take place. There was the threat that classes would not actually start because no agreement had been reached. Teachers in Argentina have some of the lowest wages in society, so it’s very common that they have to overwork themselves to make a decent living.

Teachers’ demands for better wages was in the public agenda this year when congressional representatives voted themselves a raise of 100 percent. The deputies and senators involved already had a very good salary before this increase. However, the teachers’ claim was turned down. On top of that, on Opening Sessions Day in the Senate, President Kirchner disregarded the educators’ claim, saying they only work four hours a day and have three months holiday. A national teachers’ strike followed the next day, and it lasted for two full weeks.

Why would our president make such a dismissive statement and openly break bonds with such a key sector? I didn’t get it… There must be another explanation, a hidden purpose, I thought to myself.

So when I was visiting my friend Maria Eva in the province of La Pampa, I asked her mother about all of this. I value her opinion a lot: She supports the current administration and is a teacher herself. I asked her about this big fall out between the union and the president. She didn’t see much significance in the things Kirchner said: “What she said… well, is a very commonplace idea, as old as the sky.” Ultimately, I interpreted the president’s remarks as a way of trying to side with the ordinary citizen, who has just a basic education and a lot of economic worries.

Netbooks were widely distributed, but computer literacy is another thing...

Our current administration is clearly a populist one. However, I think this kind of public discourse usually just gets in the way of what really needs to be done, and Argentina is facing an emergency situation. The teachers’ union has been an ally of the ruling political party ever since it took control of the government in 2003. We are now going through our ninth year with this government, and the economic situation for teachers has not changed much. Money is not only about personal enrichment: it is recognition to you as a professional. A good wage means you can let go of some material problems give thought to other concerns that might help you develop your vocation further.

A very concrete example is the program “Conectar Igualdad” (Link up Equality). Through this action, the government has distributed more than three million netbooks to kids and teens of primary and secondary schools in Argentina. It happens often that the kids have a new computer, but there is no Internet in the school, or the teacher does not know how to work with it inside the classroom. An alarming proportion of educators don’t even know how to use a computer. When I ask about the learning spaces that complete this initiative, the training for teachers, I am told this takes place on Saturdays. Why would any already under paid professional volunteer for work on a free day?

The government’s actions seem only to touch the surface of problems. When you remove that layer, the actions do not really go as deep as they should.

At one of the training days in Potenciar Comunidades

Apart from my work at the NGO, I have time to freelance as a journalist from time to time. Last week I interviewed Silvio, the director of Los Grobo Foundation. We talked about the role of NGOs in society, the different actors in a community and how to present them to benefit social development. I thought it was worth sharing some of his ideas here!

I need to provide a bit of context. In Argentina, for the last 10 to 15 years, NGOs focusing on a variety of areas (housing, education, social inclusion of disabled people, environment, etc) have flourished. These organizations come about by way of different initiatives: by people in society or by a private company, for instance. In the first case, professionals with an entrepreneurial side take the lead. These NGOs dedicate a lot of efforts to fundraising and attracting donors. Most of these organizations manage to carry out all of their actions with very little money of their own. In the second case, the NGO is an example of Private Social Investment from a particular company. This is true of Los Grobo Foundation: Los Grobo Agropecuaria is a private company (one of the most successful in town), and its NGO has a percentage of the company’s income at their disposal.

Most programs point at developing skills that are core to local economies

One of the programs Los Grobo Foundation runs is called Potenciar Comunidades (“Empowering Communities”). I found it most delightful, and I thought it was worth sharing this initiative here because their work involves a very interesting viewpoint on social inclusion. They evaluate projects that come from different communities and seek out private companies that are willing to support these projects with money and also management know-how. Silvio told me how they generate a context where they bring together the different actors of society (everyday people, company employees, NGOs, and sometimes also government officials) and try to take the best from each sphere.

You can hear more about it in Silvio’s own words here: http://youtu.be/QUG4iAltIO8