School Wall News Paper, Pilot Project
Tehran-winter of 2010

Within the framework of UNESCO programmes on Education for All and to enhance Media and Information Literacy, UNESCO Tehran Cluster Office (UTCO) in line with its priority for improving the Quality Education, promotes initiatives to develop media education in Iran education system, building the skills and capacities which both teachers and students require for improving communication skills and team working spirit.

Learning basic journalistic skills develops many practical abilities, while also increasing students’ capacity to reflect upon their environment, to define points of interest and to engage in a dialogue within themselves, with their teachers and also in their communities. These capacities are key features of constructive social processes, and contribute to improve social life skills and problem solving.

Journalism is taught in Iran at universities and, to a limited degree, through some artistic and cultural foundations, mainly to train aspiring journalists with professional skills, preparing them to work for newspaper and other media. To ensure the development of media and information skills of the wider population, further emphasis is needed on media education within the school system.

Media and information literacy are cornerstones of education systems that prepare students to live and work in knowledge societies, developing students’ abilities to understand, evaluate and create information using various media.

Information literacy refers to the ability to competently navigate in today’s emerging and developing knowledge societies, knowing where and how to search, organize, analyze and evaluate information. It has become a key personal and social skill, empowering people to seek, use and create information to achieve their personal, social, occupational and educational goals.

Media literacy includes also skills and capacities required for both a critical understanding of the role and functioning of the media, and for active participation in the creation of media contents.

UTCO is committed to the long-term development of education for media and information literacy in Iran. To explore new approaches to media education and their application within Iranian school curricula, UTCO, in partnership with the Ministry of Education (MoE) of I. R. of Iran, has organized a Pilot Project on “School Wall Newspaper” in twelve primary and high schools for both boys and girls in Tehran.

Indeed many schools, every where in the world are used to have Wall Newspapers produced by the students. But never this activity has been approached in a systematic way as a tool for increasing the learning capacities and communication skills among students.

This pilot project will familiarize students of the selected schools, with basic journalistic concepts and practices, increasing media literacy among the participants, developing students’ technical reporting skills, and providing a forum encouraging discussion and participation. By the end of the project, an exercise in lessons learned will help to initiate a joint assessment on the best approaches to teaching media in the Iranian context and feed into the Ministry of Education, considerations for the reforms of school curricula.

Twelve schools in Tehran City have been appointed by Iran’s Ministry of Education to participate in the UNESCO Training on Basic Journalistic Skills and Concepts, conducted by a team of young professional journalists in the form of a course enabling students to create school newspapers on a topic of their choice, under the general theme of sustainable development. In each school a team of five students selected on voluntary basis as “editorial teams”.

The course has been carried out by consultants from Pendar Institute; a non-governmental organization focused on the development of media skills and media ethics in Iran.

The training has been conducted in February/March 2010, in cooperation with a teacher as a focal point and coach in each of twelve schools. Participants included:

- 3 secondary schools for girls
- 3 secondary schools for boys
- 3 primary schools for girls
- 3 primary schools for boys

The training workshops have been conducted in cooperation with school staff, ensuring involvement and feedback from each school’s faculty. By the end of the training, participating students will have learned basic reporting techniques and principles, they will have used and analyzed different information sources to produce journalistic contents, and they will have produced a school newspaper to present and discuss a topic with fellow students.

Students will also be offered an opportunity to continue working on journalism projects and to interact with other participating schools through an online platform created by Pendar Institute for this purpose.

After completion of the training, each student from the selected schools will provide UTCO and the Ministry of Education with their feedbacks as assessments and lessons learned in approaches and methods for media education.

The direct objective of the project is to expose students to understanding of journalism, building their technical capacities to use different media to report on topics of interest, and sensitizing them to the requirements of constructive communication and responsible narration.

In the longer term, the project will also help the UNESCO Education Unit, as well as the Ministry of Education, to discuss and develop tailored approaches to media education in Iran, and to use this information to contribute to the planning of Iranian reforms of school curricula.

At the end of the process, all the participant schools, coaches and students receive a Certificate jointly signed by UNESCO and the Ministry of Education of I. R. of Iran during a public presentation of the Wall Newspapers produced and the related out come. The Wall Newspapers produced will be accessible on-line in both, the Ministry of Education and UNESCO web-sites. In addition the Ministry of Education based on the success of this pilot project, decided to publish the present guidelines to be distributed widely cross the schools in Iran.