BITISI has sent 5 Georgian participants to Siauliai, Lithuania where they attended a youth exchange “InfoWars – Young Citizens Strike back” funded by Erasmus +.

Dates: July 27 – August 3, 2021

Place: Siauliai, Lithuania

Participating countries: Lithuania, Georgia, Greece, Armenia, Ukraine, Hungary and Turkey.

Project Description

We create this project proposal with three main priorities:
1) To Impact the direct target group consisting of young people from 7 countries by creating conditions and implementing activities which can be beneficial for them, make them more aware, equip with specific knowledge and tools about misinformation, fake news and media literacy.
2) To inspire young people to become leaders in their own backgrounds and influence others to become more aware about the media and the press. Our goal is to make our project participants into active citizens who are ready to make a change.
3) To implement an exchange project in Lithuania, where youngsters from 7 European countries will meet and experience being a part of multinational, multicultural, multilingual and multi religious environment. As well as becoming a part of Erasmus+ and doing worthwhile, creative or even challenging activities.

Actions

37 participants from 7 different countries took part in this youth exchange. Active, innovative and brave young people, including the ones with economical or geographical difficulties from the representative organizations and partnering countries took part in the project “InfoWars – Young Citizens Strike Back”.

Our planned youth exchange consisted of practical and theoretical blocks about media literacy and fake news. Participants collected, presented and received the information about the topics mentioned above. Through implementing activities on their own, through group-work, research, games, debates and etc participants gained a set of new skills. Partner organizations have together created a project program consisting of various indoor and outdoor activities, games, debates, presentations, online media workshops and much more.

By taking part in the exchange participants had the chance to:
-Become more aware of the intercultural and interreligious context.
-Get a better knowledge about the topics involved, better insight in practical applications of the subject, better insight on the local, country-wide and European-wide context of this problem.
-Get the ability (skills and tools) to recognize fake news and to raise awareness about it.
-Become active citizens with a deeper understanding of news and social media content.
-Have a better understanding of the power of freedom and the importance of human rights.
-Analyze European laws and institutions which are combating misinformation. Marking the main problems and offering new solutions to their work.
-Create a workshop on the topic of media literacy and implementing it in their own community.
-Collect the data about fake news and misinformation in their country, region and city or village.
-Evaluate the workshops implemented during the project.
-Improve their language skills. The main project language will be English, but during the research and multilingual conversations the participants will also be able to improve their mother tongue.
-Improve media literacy skills. Participants will gain the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create media in a variety of forms.
-Improve social skills by co-working with other people from different European nations.

You can read stories of Georgian participants to know more about the project: Liza Tsotsoria, Mariam Giguashvili, Lado Gabechava, Ekaterine Kvirkvelia and Kalda Tsiklauri.