Responsible and Sustainable Transmediation Through Journalism and Film: A Teaching Experience

Abstract

UNESCO’s 2030 Agenda recognises education as a strategic pillar for sustainability, underlining the fundamental role that educational institutions need to play in equipping students with theoretical and practical skills geared towards developing best practices in today’s media ecosystem. However, recent technological transformations have not only failed to guarantee the responsible use of media but have also highlighted new challenges that need to be addressed from a media literacy perspective. This paper proposes a methodology that, applied in the fourth and final year of a journalism degree course, is based on relating the filmography of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne to news content through transmedia strategies. This methodology, employing a tool called Transmedia Quest, aims to foster students’ application of critical reading of reality that leads to an awareness of threats in terms of inequality and the lack of guarantees for fundamental rights. Several conclusions can be drawn from the results, which not only help to understand the tool’s usefulness in this specific study, but also highlight the opportunities it offers for its use in future projects that incorporate similar content, approaches, and methods, in line with both transmedia strategies and the Sustainable Development Goals.