Age-Friendly Media Literacy Education for Older People

Dear Colleagues,

Societies today are in the process of digitalization, which affects public administration, educational services, healthcare and welfare services, and private commercial services. In addition, government bodies, media, businesses, as well as citizens communicate and transmit information to a growing extent through digital media such as the Internet and social media. Media literacies are conceived as core competences for citizens of all ages living in today’s digitalized societies and are in this Special Issue understood broadly as the abilities to use, understand, critically evaluate, and create media contents in a variety of contexts. Media literacies include numerous dimensions such as news literacy, advertising literacy, game literacy, and health media literacy and partly overlap with concepts such as digital competences, ICT skills, and ICT literacies.

Despite the diversity within older people’s media literacies, a large number of people who are over 60 years of age lack adequate media literacies to support their learning, wellbeing, everyday life, and participation in the digitalized society. Older people’s Internet non-use and limited media literacies or digital competences may present challenges to the ongoing digitalization of society: digitalization may also have exclusionary effects. The need for media literacies is further augmented by the present COVID-19 pandemic, and possible future pandemics.

Presently, there is scant research literature on effective, meaningful, and age-friendly pedagogical approaches and instructional methods for promoting media literacy in older people. Most often, media literacy interventions target older people’s ICT skills in using digital devices, technologies, and media for various purposes such as news, health, learning, entertainment, and social interaction. By contrast, there is limited research on interventions which target older people’s abilities to understand, critically evaluate, and create media content. Furthermore, research has typically reported on interventions based on teacher-centered face-to-face pedagogy, while creative pedagogy and blended and online pedagogy have been rarely discussed. 

The aim of this Special Issue is to present and discuss recent advances in age-friendly media literacy education for older people. The call is open to papers that address the issue of age-friendly media literacy education in relation to pedagogical approaches and instructional methods, such as peer-to-peer teaching, intergenerational approaches, blended and online pedagogy, and approaches based on participants’ creative processes. The Special Issue welcomes research papers, reviews of studies, or theoretical discussions.

Dr. Päivi Rasi-Heikkinen
Dr. Hanna Vuojärvi
Dr. Susanna Rivinen
Guest Editors

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