Media Aware is an educational consultancy service conceived by Dr Ricardo Castellini da Silva to promote media literacy across Ireland through classes, workshops and other educational activities. The project was designed with two main goals:
– Assist and support post-primary students in Ireland to develop the necessary competencies to critically participate in the media culture as both consumers and producers of media, and to engage with digital technologies in their school in a more collaborative, creative and meaningful way. Even though the main focus is on Transition Year students, some workshops can be adapted to suit students from other years.
– Support teachers, in both formal and informal educational settings, in using the ICT resources available in their organisation – such as computers, tablets and other digital devices – to enhance their digital teaching skills and foster media literacy practices in their classroom.
Dr Ricardo Castellini da Silva is a media literacy educator with an interest in studies and practices at the interface between education and communications, especially in relation to digital media, multimodal learning and new literacy studies. His research investigates the many ways in which new digital media technologies can be used to promote media literacy for secondary students and enhance teachers’ practices in the use of technology in the classroom. Since 2015, Ricardo has been teaching on undergraduate and graduate programmes at both Dublin City University and Trinity College Dublin, where he is also a volunteer member of the Bridge21 team.
Ricardo has designed and delivered workshops on media literacy to both teachers and students in secondary schools in Ireland. He has also presented his research at various media literacy conferences nationally and internationally. Ricardo has a chapter with media education workshops published in the e-book ‘MICOOL Best-Practices’, which was the main output of the Erasmus Plus project MICOOL (Mobile Intercultural Cooperative Learning), involving partners from six different European countries. He is currently a member of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland’s Media Literacy Ireland network.
Ricardo holds a PhD in Media Literacy from Dublin City University, and a MA in Media, Culture and Education from the Institute of Education, University College London
mediaaware.ie 