The annual Global Media and Information Literacy (MIL) Week, initiated in 2012, is led by UNESCO in cooperation with the UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Alliance. It is a major occasion for stakeholders to review and celebrate the progress achieved towards “Media and Information Literacy for All”.
Official flyer of the Global Media and Information Literacy
The eleventh Global Media and Information Literacy Week will be commemorated from 24 to 31 October 2022 and will be hosted by Nigeria.
Global Media and Information Literacy Week 2022 highlights will include the twelfth Media and Information Literacy and Intercultural Dialogue Conference and the seventh Youth Agenda Forum.
Why Global Media and Information Literacy Week is important:
1. It helps build key skills
It provides key skills and competencies that enable people to effectively engage with the media and other sources of information. The observance also helps develop problem-solving skills and learning skills helping people to become productive citizens.
2. It fosters accountability
Media literacy enables students to become more informed media consumers as well as responsible media creators. In a similar vein, teaching media literacy encourages pupils to think creatively.
3. It provides access to all
Global Media and Information Literacy Week supports the distribution of accurate, relevant, multilingual, accessible, clear, and science-based information. The commemoration emphasizes that the huge digital divide and data imbalances that exist between and within countries can be resolved in part by increasing people’s abilities to search, collect, and distribute information in the digital space.
This year our session is entitled “Scientific method and science literacy made simple with Media and Information Literacy”
While media and information literacy can be viewed through numerous disciplinary lenses, we examine it as nested within the broader topics of green science and science literacy. A green science-literate citizen will benefit from foundational knowledge from environmental/sustainability education and science education to understand both the what and why of green science and ultimately how to engage in transformative green science practices. “Climate literacy” and “Science literacy” share the challenge of blurred boundaries between the physical sciences and socio-cultural themes.
Climate literacy is conceptualized as a combination of social and ecological forces, or overlap of ecological literacy with civics literacy, that attempts to thread together the complex relationships between human activity and ecosystem health. Likewise, for science literacy, the need to place science within applied contexts necessitates some level of systems thinking that engages disciplines outside the physical sciences, which stands in contrast to a formulation of science literacy that stays “within science”.
Global Media and Information Literacy for The Science Culture Construction (SCC) through Science Popularization to raise awareness of climate change
We believe that “for every interested practitioner to implement the Science Culture Construction (SCC) through Science Popularization to raise awareness of climate change, building awareness is the first step to engaging their community and ensuring action.”
Actions have to be taken today by putting commitments into practice through a culture of sustainability to accomplish net zero emissions by 2050 or sooner. A more systemic, industry-wide transformation necessitates changes in legislation that encourage society to adopt sustainability.
Science can lead the world on climate change. Out of any industry, science has the resources and the culture of innovation to meet the climate challenge head-on and inspire the rest of the world to follow in their footsteps. From lab managers to researchers, funding bodies, manufacturers, and everyone in between, we all have a critical role to play in transforming the industry into a global leader in sustainability.
The “South-South Biodiversity Science Project (SSBSP)” proposed by the “China Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF)”, in conjunction with the Green Science Project (GSP) proposed by the “Andean Road Countries for Science and Technology (ARCST)”, and the “Climate Change Awareness Project proposed by the Universidad Central del Valle del Cauca (UCEVA)” and the Journal of Latin American Sciences and Culture (JLASC), and Universidad Privada del Valle (UNIVALLE) have joined efforts to start the first of the four phases of the Science Culture Construction through Science Popularization to raise awareness of climate change in Latin America. This conjunction of projects is the first response to the declaration on science and climate literacy issued on November 27, 2021, as a conclusion of the first international annual meeting on science literacy held in the plurinational state of Bolivia. The event was celebrated at the Universidad Privada del Valle. The declaration counts on the support of professors, researchers, and academicians from different countries, including China.
Flyer of the first declaration on science and climate literature issued as a result of the first annual meeting on science literacy in Latin America, November 27, 2022.
The aforementioned institutions have created a framework of cooperation for the implementation of the Science Culture Construction (SCC) in Latin America as the foundation to develop the scientific cause to build a community with a shared future for mankind.