 Hello, everyone. Let's talk about media and communication. Comics and graphic novels show us the stories of superheroes. They also tear down cultural or language barriers. They encourage critical thinking and creativity, but they can also promote media literacy. Our guest today, Lidia Tsene, from the Open University of Cyprus, will tell us about how comics can become an efficient media literacy tool, especially for children. She will tell us more about the Athens Comics Library and how it uses comics to provide a more inclusive media literacy education to refugee populations. Hi, Lidia. Welcome to our episode. Hi, and thank you for the invitation. Well, probably a question that is too obvious, but why is this topic so important? So, we are living in a very challenging era where misinformation and disinformation and fake news are all around us, making marginalized groups such as refugee populations more and more vulnerable. At the same time, the pandemic brought upon us not only an infodemic, but also digital inequalities, as several communities were excluded by the digital transformation. Therefore, I think it is crucial to find new innovative ways to teach media literacy and create more inclusive educational environments. And comics can be the case here, and also a good example of how non-formal education programming can contribute to the problems. Of course, when you started this research, what were you hoping to find? So, as you already told in your introduction, comics and graphic novels not only have the power to narrate the stories of superheroes, but they also have the superpower to transfer knowledge. So, teaching pictures and images is a great means to overcome cultural or language barriers, and at the same time, cultivate critical thinking, creativity, and empathy. And of course, among their superpowers is also the ability to teach media literacy. So, discussing this multimodal literacy that comics offer us, we can claim that comics can become an efficient media literacy tool, especially for children focused on diversity. So, in my research, we tried to present and discuss examples of how the Athens Comics Library is using comics in order to provide a more inclusive media literacy education to refugee populations, highlighting the correspondence between comic storytelling and media literacy abilities. Fantastic. Let us know and our listeners about the findings then. Mm-hmm. So, comics is a kind of call and response in which the artist gives you something to see within the panels and then gives you something to imagine between the panels. Scott McLeod states at his famous book Understanding Comics, indexing comics into the interactive cool media. So, according to our study, comics have certain powers that make them an efficient educational learning tool. So, skills such as storytelling, visual literacy, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, empathy, thinking and synthesis of information, understanding of reality and also multimedia and trans-media content productions are encouraged during the process of reading or creating a comic story. And at the same time, according to Henry Jenkins, experimentation in problem solving, mixing media content, evaluating the sources, searching and synthesizing information and following trans-media stories are some of the characteristics and skills gained within the context of collaborative intelligence and participation. So, those elements are similar to synthesis, decoding, interpretation and trans-media navigation that comics reading or creating also suggest. And this is something proved by our case study where children with refugee background participated to our workshops. So, the main funding of this study indicates that comics can be used as a platform for teaching media literacy and mostly multimodal literacy and especially to children. It's, I think, a very interesting findings. I think the impact is quite obvious, but can we go a little further or can that impact the life of real people, of the refugee children and the groups that surround them? So, our research draws from real-life situations based on a case study. In Athens Comics Library, we have been designing and implementing inclusive workshops in multiple communities using comics as a platform. So, the impact in the communities we engage with is more than obvious. Making us think that our risk and fast-changing society demands more flexible and more inclusive educational systems in order to equip all citizens with media literacy skills and maybe we need more arts-based teaching programs who are also gaining ground as they teach us to judge in absence of rules to appraise the consequences of one's choices and to revise and to make other choices. The children living from our workshops they come home with a toolkit, let's say, of skills that could be used in their real life when they start engaging, for example, with social media and they have their own Facebook or TikTok or Instagram channels, they know better what they want to produce, they want to disseminate and they also can distinguish better between fake news and real news. Of course, you revealed that a bit, but let us know a bit about the research gaps of your work. So, what's next to find on this topic? So, of course, there is always room for extra research and of course we need more data because this is an ongoing project so we will continue to measure the impact of comics to include the education and to media literacy with the ultimate goal to create a curriculum with certain lesson plans that can be applied in a formal or not formal classrooms and of course we would like to expand the research to other kind of marginalized populations. Still a lot to find then. You have already mentioned some references before, but can you provide some additional resources of any format on the topic discussed today? As there is a very vivid conversation on media literacy today, there is a variety of resources regarding the topic, but if we attend to look further on how comics can teach literacy, we will not find so many. However, I have two books that might seem interesting, not only to scholars but also to educators, journalists, other media professionals, but also citizens which are the following. The first one is called Lessons Drone, a series on the pedagogy of comics and graphic novels edited by David Silo, which is a collective volume highlighting the dynamics of the use of comics as an educational tool. And the second one is a beautiful book by Erin Stoiter with the title Won't Get Filled Again, a Graphic Guide to Fake News, discussing all the misinformation, disinformation disorder, but in a comics format. Perfect. And I'd like to finish our episode. So for someone who wants to know the punchline of the talk today, so anything you want our audience to remember from this talk, what would it be? I would like to ask everyone to give comics a second chance to try and see more than meets the eye and to let communities experiment and interact with cool comics and discover on their own the capabilities that will allow them to become more active citizens. A very interesting perspective. This episode is available on the Let's Talk about Media and Communication websites on Koji Tartu's YouTube channel as well as in podcast directories such as Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, etc. Pleta, it was a pleasure. Thank you.