Even though our project has ended, we will still continue to share interesting resources for you and share some glimpses of our project with you! So, stay tuned! Today, we bring you one workshop from our Curriculum which we invite you to test with your learners!
Influencer culture is already part of students’ everyday lives. Young people follow content creators, watch career advice online, compare themselves with digital lifestyles and often receive messages about success, work and money through social media. For VET teachers and experts, this creates a new challenge: how can we guide students to think critically about influencer content and digital careers?
The InfluVET Curriculum “Empowering VET teachers and experts on career management in the influencer era” offers practical training activities for VET educators, pedagogues, psychologists, career guidance counsellors, youth workers and other professionals supporting students’ career development. One especially useful workshop from the Curriculum is “Promoting critical media literacy skills.”
This 120-minute workshop is designed as part of teacher training. Its aim is to equip VET experts with knowledge and tools they can later use when working with students. The workshop helps participants understand the five core concepts of media literacy, identify persuasion techniques used in influencer marketing, analyse influencer content and develop activities for teaching media literacy in VET settings.
During the training, VET experts explore how influencer content is created, what messages it sends, what values or lifestyles it promotes, and why such content is being shared. The Curriculum also includes a practical worksheet for media deconstruction, asking participants to examine who created a message, which techniques are used to attract attention, how different people may understand the message, what values are represented or omitted, and why the message is being sent.
This workshop is important because critical media literacy is not only about recognising advertisements. It is also about helping students ask deeper questions: Is this content realistic? Is someone trying to sell me something? What kind of career image is being promoted? What is missing from the story? How does this influence my expectations about work, success and identity?
We invite VET teachers, trainers, school support staff, counsellors and other VET experts to test this workshop in their professional development activities. It can be used in teacher training sessions, school development workshops, career guidance training, non-formal education programmes or Erasmus+ follow-up activities.
By testing this workshop, VET experts can strengthen their own confidence in discussing influencer culture with students. They can also develop practical ideas for integrating media literacy, digital responsibility and career guidance into their everyday work.
The InfluVET Curriculum was created to support educators in a changing labour market, where digital professions and online identities increasingly shape young people’s career choices. The project may have ended, but its materials remain available for continued use, adaptation and dissemination.
Try out the “Promoting critical media literacy skills” workshop, adapt it to your own context, and help students become more critical, responsible and informed when navigating the influencer era.
Find the Curriculum here: https://influvet.eu/library/