Fostering news literacy Awareness and Critical Thinking on Sustainability

The FACTS project fosters civic engagement by augmenting news literacy on sustainability and environmental issues in teacher education. It empowers student teachers and educators to critically engage with news, counteract fake news, and comprehend the significance of reliable reporting in democracy. Based on thorough research, FACTS encompasses designing and disseminating a news literacy course integrated into the teacher education curriculum, ensuring a lasting impact on news literacy in schools.

We identify best practices for teaching news literacy on sustainability issues in teacher education. We design, test, implement, and share a web-based news literacy course, comprising tutorial videos, interactive tasks, educational news games, and philosophical dialogue. We evaluate the intervention to enhance prevailing best practices in news literacy. We disseminate findings through curriculum integrations, publications, local and national workshops, and a Europe-wide FACTS Festival.

Long-term, we aim to enhance news literacy among student teachers and, consequently, school students across Europe. The tangible outcomes include a comprehensive mapping of best practices, a web-based news literacy course for teacher education, an exhaustive evaluation of the intervention, dissemination of project findings through policy recommendations and curriculum integration, easy-to-read and research articles, local and national impact workshops, and a Europe-wide FACTS Festival.

FACTS is funded by EU's Erasmus+ programme.