The Personal Development Circle was founded in 2011 and is a Non-Profit Civil Society with the aim of improving the conditions and quality of life as well as strengthening and enhancing the social fabric. It focuses its efforts on organizing activities for the general public as well as conducting specialized programs for Sensitive Social Groups. It promotes professionalism, particularly among young people, and supports efforts to find employment on the labour market. It designs and conducts research, in cooperation with university institutions, organisations and Collective Professional Bodies in Greece and abroad, with emphasis on interdisciplinarity and the synthesis of knowledge from fields of contemporary scientific knowledge and intellectual tradition.
Objective Action
The Psaroloco Media Literacy Project (www.psaroloco.org) supports the Sustainable Development Goals through its actions. The main objective is to enhance the level of awareness on sustainable development issues in society and to put these issues on the teachers' agenda.
We believe that films and educational activities are a great stimulus for introducing discussion and driving into action on issues related to the Sustainable Development Goals.
It offers children, teachers, and parents the opportunity to watch free films (animated, fiction, or documentaries) as well as to have free access to educational resources and educational programs (long-term, workshops, forums) that present a narrative that works on the biggest threats in the world and makes the Global Goals a reality.
Target Audience
Duration
In progress
Description
PSAROLOCO AUDIOVISUAL LITERACY INITIATIVE
It is run by the non-profit organization KYKLOS Please see: https://vimeo.com/423093420
The quality of information is (re)determined to a large extent by the new means of communication which are now offered on single platforms. Our choices and subsequent actions, the ability to self-identify personal development, and our civic identity are determined by the cataclysmic presence of the media. It is, therefore, a top challenge to cultivate skills of evaluation, analysis, and filtering of information in order to be able to exercise the right to information and free expression. This is where the need for media-educated citizens or otherwise audiovisual education with the skills of access to creative use and critical analysis of the content of the media enters. This is the need that the Psaroloco audiovisual literacy initiative - PSAROLOCO Media Literacy - seeks to meet by www.psaroloco.org promoting the movement of education of children - citizens and by integrating teachers as primary carriers of this new audiovisual literacy with free educational resources and educational programs (long-term, workshops, forums) for teachers and professionals as well as experiential workshops and film screenings selected films specially designed for children and adolescents. Giving priority to vulnerable groups of children and adolescents.
Psaroloco provides as a guide-prompt the question: What goals do you see in the film?
The platform's free pluralistic program includes films from all over the world that participated in or won distinctions in the largest world festivals (Cannes, Sundance, Rotterdam, Clermont- Ferrand Toronto, etc., and explores global goals such as clean energy, migration, gender discrimination, access to education and environmental sustainability, and so on through a variety of storytelling techniques, including comedy, fiction, animation and documentaries.
The free educational resources focus on the goal and offer the opportunity to both children and adolescents and adult escorts unlimited possibilities of social learning and aesthetic cultivation.
CINEMATIC EDUCATION Film education is one of the fundamental axes of audiovisual education and media literacy. Consequently, it obeys the same components concerning the ability to access (physical and technical) cognitive perception and critical analysis and the ability to create content by transforming viewers into active and autonomous media users. This objective is based on common values such as respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.
IN DETAIL Creation of educational resources of film education in Greek with accessible sources – films and accompanying material that functions complementary to the promotion of the cinematographic work, as a new type of metadata (e.g. posters, video preview, making of, interviews, etc.) for primary and secondary education and their use in the formal and informal educational environment. Teacher training. Teacher training is a central part as it allows for the direct transfer of knowledge, methodologies and resources created under the program. We develop educational programs in three different areas: Special programs for teachers participating in the workshops. Courses and special programs addressed to teachers who do not participate in the workshops. Training and counseling are aimed at those who want cinema to become a structural axis in their educational work. The educational programs are based on methodological proposals for the projection, analysis, and commentary of films and for the development of the main processes of film creation. They are complemented with resources to make cinema work in an interdisciplinary way as it contributes as an "other" content provider to a more realistic perception of reality in a social intelligence, socio-knowledge, bridging the knowledge of minors with the experiences of the extra-cinematic world. The educational programs are specifically addressed to the part of teachers as the primary carriers of this new audiovisual literacy, but they also attract viewers who do not belong to the educational body, such as librarians, parents, social scientists, health and mental health professionals, students, directors, visual artists.
Free online screenings - film archive of selected films in age categories (for children from two years old) that have been selected in such a way as to fulfill the educational objectives of the program. The number of films concerns short films that function like poems over literary texts: they contain intense, eloquent speech and polysemy, are densely written and multi-layered and therefore open to a variety of interpretations.
A program of film screenings (Psaroloco Children's and Adolescent International Film Festival) specially designed for children and adolescents that offers high quality creative films of all kinds (animation, documentaries, fiction) from all over the world, awarded at international festivals, by age group and themes. It is a question of children's contact with other species, apart from the commercial model, of the Hollywood type. The majority of researchers believe that it is preferable for students/ children to come into contact with other genres than world cinema, which under other circumstances they would not know or choose for personal projection.
Overall, the content of the films approaches a huge range of topics, from activism, politics, and religion to gender, tradition, migration and the local community, customs, ecology, and human rights, while it is used as a tool for anthropological study by students, academics and researchers.
Overall, the content of the films approaches a huge range of topics, from activism, politics, and religion to gender, tradition, migration and the local community, customs, ecology, and human rights, while it is used as a tool for anthropological study by students, academics and researchers.
It is our fundamental priority for the Psaroloco initiative to approach geographical points of Greece with limited or non-existent contact with the illiteracy of the media and information, whether we are referring to young people and children or to adult viewers in general, as it attracts at the same time young participants and family members. The creation of close and organic relationships with people in these societies is already being worked year after year and the goal is to strengthen it. So we aim at the fruits that will bring the education of people in these places and the absorption of actions and educational resources in the local culture and habits of the people there.
Initiative Location
Working with Organization
The Psaroloco Audiovisual Literacy initiative is a member of UNESCO's Media and Information Literacy (MIL) alliance a pioneering effort to promote international cooperation to ensure that all citizens have access to media and information. She is an active member of the "exchange office" (https://milunesco.unaoc.org/) initiative UNAOC in collaboration with UNESCO with the aim of supporting the global multilingual approach of information and resources on media literacy and information by providing resources to teachers who can include Media Information Literacy topics in their formal and informal educational environment. In the context of creating educational resources and actions on issues related to the Sustainable Development Goals and for film screenings and the free film archive, Psaroloco collaborates with institutions / educational organizations as well as with international producers and distributors.
