Digital Media Literacy And Innovation Teaching Skill Among Communication Educators In Ebony State
[A CASE STUDY OF EBSU AND FUNAI]

INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Immersing into the digitalize environment becomes a common feature for and individual who live in 21st century. Comparing to the previous decade that internet connects people around the world, individual nowadays couldn’t live without digital gadgets. In fact, digitalize environment not only affect to the lifestyle of individual, but it also shapes human’s mindset. In order to fully participate into contemporary society, consuming the message is merely insufficient but create and share the information via the process of analyze, evaluate, and reflect (Hobbs, 2010). This is because media is determined by a set of societal and economic factors. Culture, race, socioeconomic status, gender, age, or mobility are the variables which affect to the development of media, as well as the impact of media content to an individual. Besides, the landing of new media allows an individual to share the content they created to other through new media tools. It has changed the status of audience from passive to active recipients in processing the information (Eristi & Erdem, 2017; Literat, 2014; Martens, 2010).

The emergency remote teaching, brought about by the recent COVID-19 pandemic, produced numerous issues due to the lack of readiness to respond to the unprecedented need for students in the Greek educational context to shift to online learning. According to EuropeanCommission (2020), facilitating the flexible distance learning of all pupils in a way that functions as a coherent pedagogical approach requires a high level of competence and innovation by lecturers and school leaders. Accordingly, educators need to make optimum use of available tools and provide targeted support to learners with diverse needs. These challenges need to be taken seriously and the crisis has proven that change and flexibility are of high priority. In light of this current situation that has affected students both emotionally and psychologically (Miller, 2020), there is a necessity to develop an effective competence development process and respond to learners’ affective needs that would enhance their motivation, engagement, and satisfaction while alleviating their frustration and discouragement.

In its 1996 report to UNESCO, the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century stressed the importance of promoting education as “one of the principal means available to foster a deeper and more harmonious form of human development and thereby to reduce poverty, exclusion, ignorance, oppression and war” (Delors et al., 1996b, p. 11). To achieve this, it was identified that, as moving into the 21st Century, a critical rethink of the purpose of education was necessary. As the commission argued, education should be based on four fundamental pillars of learning, namely, learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together, and learning to be, to help “provide maps of a complex world in constant turmoil” as well as “the compass that will enable people to find their way in it” (Delors et al., 1996a, p. 85). In 2011, in response to the ever-evolving need for educational innovation in the digital era, UNESCO created a curriculum with the goal of enabling the educational community to better understand the role of media. It focused on the acquisition of media literacy as “a set of essential competencies (knowledge, skills, and attitudes) that allow citizens to engage with media and other information providers effectively and develop critical thinking and lifelong learning skills for socializing and becoming active citizens” (Wilson, 2012, p. 16). Hobbs and Jensen (2013) note that students may be resistant to the process of interrogating and examining their media literacy practices; as such, it is the media literacy educators’ responsibility to shift the interest from students’ “tool competence” – that is their ability to use sophisticated technology – to “digital citizenship,” a concept closely related to media literacy that focuses not only on the necessity of internet safety but also on the rights and responsibilities of students as communicators on the internet and real life.