(New) challenges for a (new) media education

Media education, as a frame of children’s empowerment, and media literacy, as a result of\r\nmedia education practices, are –together with «Protection» and «Provisions»– means to\r\naccomplish children’s rights in the media. New «convergence culture» forces, nowadays,\r\nMedia education to abandon a media-specific linguistic approach and to adopt the idea of a\r\nbroader «media culture», involving not only contents and languages, but the so-called «latent\r\ncurriculum» too: that set of rules by which the educational space is ultimately shaped as a\r\nframe of shared values, legitimate behaviour and common expectations about the personal\r\nand social life embodied in the institution itself. At the core of such a media literacy should\r\nbe also the possibility of a new form of subjectivity, really capable of using all the communication\r\ntechnologies as «technologies of the self» which facilitate the processes of social relations\r\nand self-fulfilment. The main challenge to the Media education is thus the possibility of\r\ncontributing to the building of a human type which we can define as the inhabitant of the\r\nMediapolis, as homo civicus