Training Experience in Denmark - second part - Media literacy: Critical thinking in youth work

This is the second article about my Training experience in Denmark, near Copenhagen. You can read the first one here.

At the training project I have found awesome people from all around Europe, there were participants from 14 European countries. 

The project days were structured very well, the time was always precious, so every moment was used to put our minds and ideas on work.

We worked as teams, we worked individually as well through non-formal education methods. The accent was on team, because, we as individuals are a part o community. Part of our neighborhood, of our teams at job, part of our countries, and of course part of European Community. 

We had group dynamics, games, workshops on different topics like: Media bias, Social representation definitions, Recognizing fallacies, Recognizing appeals on emotion, Text analysis workshop, Deconstructing images etc. 

One of my favorite workshops was the one with visuals. We had images from the Internet and social media spread all over the place we stayed. We had to pick some of those images or text and speak about them. 

I remember a satirical image with a big black text on it: “You weren’t born just to pay bills and die. You must also suffer. A lot.” And another one that said: “Some people will only love you if you fit into their box. Don’t be afraid to disappoint.”

These two ideas on the pictures stayed in my mind and made me think about our society and how it works and the way we struggle to fit in. 

The trainer had some cards with Pawel Kuczynski’s art work. We had also to pick some of these cards and speak about them. The visual artist is well known for creating thought-provoking illustrations that comment on social, economic, and political issues through satire. (more about the artist here) 

Pawel Kuczynski’s art work

We had to present our countries, some traditions and a small image of our culinary backgrounds. We got in touch with each other very well. 

The main language of the project was English, but during the project we realised how closed we are because some of the participants would speak different languages than mother’s tongue or English. 

We discovered each other’s backgrounds, roots, language, similarities, differences and traditions.

Another day we had the chance to visit the capital city of Denmark. During the day trip to Copenhagen we had the possibility to visit the city and explore some of the most known attractions there. 

I was fascinated about the number of bicycles that people in Copenhagen use. For me it was awesome to see that parents were riding bicycles with their children, friends would do that together, or there were people riding bicycles on their way to work. 

Another place that I’ve seen in Copenhagen and made me have mixed feelings about was the Freetown Christiania. I would probably write more about the subject, because it’s just to much to say about that colorful place. 

For me this training course was a way to discover more about social media and journalism. 

The trainer, Paul Smulski, was very skilled on explaining the topics. He had for every topic a wide number of examples, so we had the opportunity to  understand lot about history, social backgrounds and tensions, political issues and more. 

And also we had the chance to analyse texts with the same topics but different perspective – in this way we saw how journalists reports news on the same topic in different styles.

The time spent with the Trainer Paul Smulski, Project Manager Heresh Faraidon and the other participants was very precious for me and my knowledge on social media literacy. This training helped me improve the furniture of my mind. 

 You can watch a movie form the project here.