Making sense of students' media literacy and civic agency across media analysis and production

This chapter focuses on the action research process on media education, discrimination and engagement, carried out within the e-EAV project and involving seven European countries (Slovenia, Bulgaria, the UK, France, Italy, Austria and Belgium). In this context, media analysis and production have been adopted as strategies to enable young people’s critical thinking and their democratic engagement against different forms of discrimination in the school community and in society at large. Using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, this chapter investigates how students make sense of the teaching and learning processes, including the media contents they analysed and produced in the classroom, and discusses how and to what extent the challenging educational objectives named ‘critical thinking’ and ‘anti-discriminatory/democratic engagement’ can be reached through media education. It concludes that, despite some limitations, the study has proven to be successful in providing young people critical means to express themselves.