Effective advocacy for adult education requires media literacy from adult educators – namely the skill to communicate about adult education (its content and impact) to the media on the media’s own terms. Dr Michael Sommer told us about LEK – a European project that produced a media skills curriculum for adult educators and put it to use in webinars and seminars across the continent. The legacy of the project is a free online learning resource.

Adult education breaking into mainstream media

It all started with a very bold confession: ‘I was not able to read properly’. The confession was all the more startling as it came from an author – Tim-Thilo Fellmer.

The German writer had not only made a journey from an illiterate to a writer of children’s books, he had also journeyed from shame to confess his former problem. To fight against illiteracy includes also a public battle against a taboo: some 7.5 million individuals in Germany are estimated to be functionally illiterate. When Hamburg-based professor Anke Grotlüschen went public with this revelation in 2011, she achieved something unprecedented: mainstream media in Germany paid attention to an adult education topic.

The trick and how it was done

Grotlüschen’s success in garnering media attention to the adult education cause has a lot to do with her team having prepared their results in a manner appropriate to the media, using a “press kit”. They had taken into account the mechanisms that lie behind media attention and effectiveness: high news value, large group of persons affected, clear message, recency and topicality. Having an author confess to a past of illiteracy was one of many astute media moves. In short, Grotlüschen’s team possessed relevant media literacy skills as media agents in their own right.

LEK project – learning to beat the drum about adult education

To make use of exactly these kinds of media skills on a large scale in the adult education field was the goal of the European Erasmus + project LEK (Let Europe Know about Adult education). The project was coordinated by the Catholic Adult Education of Germany (KEB), and it finished in September 2018 after operating for three years. The idea was to bring media professionals and curriculum designers together with experts in the field of basic skills training to develop teaching and learning materials for upskilling adult educators in media skills.

The project first designed and then arranged open seminars and webinars for adult educators and AE NGO workers across Europe. The overall objective was to enhance the participants’ applied journalistic and media competence. This way, topics such as basic skills provision, literacy or adult education in general, which are often overlooked in the public media discourse, would be made visible in local and regional media.

Hands-on learning

The curriculum, written by project partners CONEDU, Austria and Akademie Klausenhof, Germany, consists of six modules and gives a good picture of the scope and themes of the material: ‘Journalistic news value’, ‘Collection of relevant information’, ‘Writing as a construction/constructive process – between reality, stereotypes and PR’, ‘Using and writing for online media’, ‘Making adult education more visible in media’, and ‘Writing good PR texts’.

Within the modules, participants learned, for example, how to write short and effective press releases that start with an interesting hook sentence containing all the necessary information. They also learned how to find a good story within the seemingly ‘uneventful’ field of basic skills provision. Using an illustrative example or creating special events are both means of drawing attention to a topic.

Media skills kit for all to use!

The learning modules were all evaluated in the seven different partner countries (Norway, Finland, Denmark, Belgium, Germany, Austria), using a scientific evaluation approach by the Free University of Berlin. The evaluation results were used to further improve the specific modules.

A distinctive feature of the curriculum is an experimental game, which simulates how to create a regional campaign on basic skills provision. This method is especially useful for taking into account regional conditions that reflect different realities across Europe – from Romania to Norway.

Other outcomes of the project include recorded webinars that come with a corresponding handbook, developed by the Norwegian Network for Adult Education, as well as a brochure compiling the most important journalistic principles for adult educators, written by the Danish Association of Adult Education.

One of the objectives of the project from the outset was to better equip adult educators to write to European AE media and portals, such as EPALE. LEK has developed a handout containing practical tips for using EPALE as a part of its curriculum.

The project was concluded at the Conference of the European Basic Skills Network in Berlin in June 2018. The material – gradually completed – can be accessed and downloaded in different languages through the homepage as an Open Educational Resource (OER).

www.let-europe-know.eu

Dr Michael Sommer of Akademie Klausenhof is a journalist, editor of Zeitschrift Erwachsenenbildung and coordinator of the LEK Project.