|
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Dear friends (of EAVI), EAVI wishes you a Merry Christmas and thanks you for your support! We are delighted to have received many positive comments about our activities in 2011 and will continue building up on them next year!
The 2011 EAVI Conference in Budapest
 After the conferences held at the Italian Parliament in Rome and the Spanish Senate House in Madrid, Budapest represented just the right choice for our 2011 international forum for a number of reasons. Firstly, Hungary is one of the few countries in Europe where media education is included in the school curricula. In addition, the recently approved, and much contested, media law offered very pertinent grounds for discussion. We also wanted to go East and what better choice could there have been than Hungary, which just held the EU Presidency in 2011!
The EAVI’s conferences are meant to stimulate debate about full citizenship and media literacy among the international community. In Hungary, this role of ours was reinforced, as a mode of civic engagement and empowerment, to affect change.
The Hungarian Visual World Foundation assisted in organizing the event. We are very grateful to Zsuzsanna Kozák and her staff for the excellent results achieved.
The focal point of the two-day conference was media, education and citizens. For this reason, the EAVI conference was pleased to welcome distinguished representatives from the educational, the media, the political and the civil society’s fields.
 The conference was structured to include a variety of presentations to the large audience using different modalities to encourage interaction and debate: Panels, interviews, workshops and video screening.
There were submissions from national and international institutions, such as UNESCO. Countries represented included the UK, Romania, the Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, Belgium and, of course, Hungary. A wide range of stakeholders active in media literacy and education, media industry and journalism and active citizenship met the audience to discuss an intense and colourful two-day Programme in the prestigious venue of Hall Karoly, Csekonics Residence.
The results were indeed above expectations and the level of participation was very encouraging .
Among the many conclusions drawn from the Conference, the importance of media literacy was reinforced, as democracy depends on citizens who know where and how to look for information through the media, and who also understand what they are being told and why.
 More information about the conferences, including photos and videos will be published on our website as soon as they become available.
Please find here a first report and a selection of the media coverage (mainly in Hungarian) regarding the conference.
It was interesting to observe that, in line with the findings of EAVI’s studies, the general concepts about media literacy are now more widely shared.
In addition to the EAVI representatives, speakers included: Prof. David Buckingham, Professor of Education and Director of the Center for the Study of Children, Youth and Media; Lajos Aary-Tamas, Commissioner for Educational Rights, Prof. Peter Csermely, Hungary, and representatives of international institutions, such as Vladimir Gai, UNESCO.
The Fifth EAVI International Conference will be held in Florence in November 2012.
EYAG’s representatives in Budapest!
 The youth advisory group of EAVI, represented by David McCall and Luciana Grosu, participated actively in Budapest. Both EYAG members offered engaging presentations and echoed their passion to make young voices heard. They presented a collection of best practices concerning media literacy initiatives that were collected among all members of the advisory group. The conference was a great opportunity for them to meet and talk to policy-makers, researchers, teachers, media makers and representatives of the nonprofit media sector. EAVI greatly values EYAG ideas and initiatives and we hope to continue to actively collaborate together in the future.
|
