Georgia Evans
Senior Editorial Officer , Europeana Foundation
The Watching Videos like a Historian project has recently published a Toolkit which supports educators to use audiovisual cultural heritage materials in their classrooms. Discover the Toolkit and give your feedback on its first version!
Watching Videos like a Historian is an Erasmus+ funded project which aims to equip European educators with the tools to teach media literacy and critical thinking skills through audiovisual resources. It is working to help students take an informed and critical approach to media, by developing a range of resources in collaboration with educators and experts from audiovisual archives.
The main resource developed by the project’s expert partners is a Toolkit designed to enrich students’ historical understanding and critical thinking through the use of audiovisual resources. On behalf of the project consortium, we are proud to present the first version of this Toolkit today! Read on to find out more about what it contains and why you should use it.
The Toolkit aims to provide all the resources that an educator would need to incorporate audiovisual materials into their classroom - and motivation to do so. It offers ready-made teaching strategies, eLearning activities and online audiovisual galleries which teachers can use in their lessons. Topics range from evaluating how historical periods are presented in film, to 1989 in Czechoslovakia, to the climate crisis and more.
These activities are complemented by a series of detailed classroom guides, which offer tips on approaches that educators can take when using audiovisual materials in a classroom. The guides range advice on how to search for audiovisual materials to wider context on the background of media literacy, classroom dynamics approaches and fostering active citizenship in students.
The Toolkit supports and aligns with The WATCH Media Literacy Competence Framework developed by project partner EuroClio and further enriched as part of the project. The Framework offers a structured approach to developing key competencies in students when teaching media literacy from a historical perspective, and the resources within the Toolkit aim to take students and teachers from the basic skills needed to find audiovisual material to critically evaluate and assess them.
Read and download the Toolkit on the EuroClio website.
In the coming months, the Toolkit will be shared with teachers and experts through workshops, event series and residencies organised by the Watching Videos Like a Historian project. We will use the feedback gathered in these sessions to iterate and improve the Toolkit even further. By the end of the project, we will release a second version of the Toolkit which has been directly reviewed and improved by educators, and with even more resources.
If you are an educator, or work with audiovisual heritage, we would love to get your thoughts and input on the Toolkit. Share your feedback.
Would you like to learn more about the Toolkit and the Watching Videos Like a Historian project? Then join the project’s webinars on 6 November and 3 December which will provide guidance on how to effectively integrate audiovisual materials into the teaching process.
