First online professional development conference in film and media literacy for education taking place at Latvian Academy of Culture within the Nordplus project

From September 17 to September 22, 2020 the Latvian Academy of Culture was organizing the second professional development conference for teachers of general education ‘Film and Media for Education. Take 2’ and this time due to COVID-19 restrictions, it took place online with live webinars and digital hands-on workshops.

The target audience of the conference were teachers of general education representing all disciplines and fields of study and in total it gathered 70 highly motivated teachers from countries such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Denmark, Japan and Iceland.

Unlike other similar conferences and seminars, the main advantage of this conference was the great share of its contents devoted to very practical hands-on tasks developed by experienced professionals of film and media literacy and education, thus enabling teachers to acquire the most current teaching methods related to and incorporating film and media literacy. Participants of the conference had the opportunity to learn the basics of filmmaking and animation, as well as to acquire innovative lesson design tips using gaming and storytelling techniques. A significant role in the conference was allocated to teachers themselves giving presentations on their achievement in integrating film and media literacy into their teaching subjects. Teachers from all five project partner countries, who have already been part of the FAME project in the previous conference among others included Kristine Kornijanova, a Social Sience studies teachers from Ventspils Secondary school No. 4, who shared her experience in using film analyses as part of her class, and Irina Šaripova from Klaipeda Progymnasium, who asks her students aged 8 to 12 to do animation in her English classes.

The project “Film and Media for Education. Take 2” is being implemented with the financial support of Nordplus Horizontal programme, together with partners: the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Latvia (LV), Riga Film Museum (LV), Baltic Film and Media School of Tallinn University (EE); Estonian Film Institute (EE), Lithuanian Centre for Journalism (LT); Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas (LT), School Cinema Association - Koulukino (FI) and Animation Workshop VIA University College in Viborg (DK). The digital environment for the online conference were created with the technical support of the team behind the social learning platform ’11 HUMANS’, who are experts in the field of creating and organizing online and face-to-face training courses for educational institutions and to the employees of public and private companies.

The aim of the project is to provide in-depth knowledge and skills on media and film literacy to teachers of general education from Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Denmark and Finland and to encourage and inspire them to integrate these skills and knowledge in their own classes. The project is also a continuation of the Nordplus Horizontal project „Media Literacy, Reuse and Heritage in Education”, which was successful in organizing an extensive competence development conference in Tallinn in January, 2019. The project will see its further developed in 2021, when the project management will be taken over by the Baltic Film and Media School of Tallinn University.