WAVES – Working on Accessibility and Vision for Education in the South is the project through which Marea Media chose to bring media education into schools and neighborhoods across Naples, offering young people tools to navigate today’s information landscape while imagining new narratives about the South and the Mediterranean. The goal is simple yet ambitious: to make new generations protagonists of their own perspective, capable of critically reading what they receive and producing stories that reflect the complexity of the world they inhabit.
A critical lens on our world
At a time when disinformation spreads rapidly and representations tend to oversimplify, WAVES opens up a space for dialogue, listening, and experimentation. Through lessons, practical exercises, and workshop-based activities, the project guided students along a path that starts from the most essential question: how is a story built? From there, we explored together the role of the media, how digital platforms function, the weight of images and words, and the responsibilities each person assumes when telling or sharing something.
This journey took place in the classrooms of Liceo Casanova, in central Naples, and Liceo Labriola, in Bagnoli. In both schools, we followed the same approach: narrative analysis, the deconstruction of stereotypes, critical reading of content, exercises in observing the local territory, and moments dedicated to the active analysis of concrete case studies rooted in everyday practices.
Telling stories, telling ourselves
WAVES also extends into the public sphere through Lighthouse, Marea Media’s podcast dedicated to media literacy, critical thinking, participation, and representation in digital spaces. Lighthouse is a series of 22 episodes released in installments on Marea Media’s YouTube channel, conceived as a space for open dialogue between research, journalism, and activism.
Hosted by Ciro Giso and Savin Mattozzi, the podcast connects WAVES’ educational experiences with contributions from researcher and lecturer Arianna Grasso and journalist and activist Gaia Russo, to examine how information circulates, how it is interpreted, and how it affects democratic participation. Lighthouse is not a side project, but a natural continuation of WAVES: the topics addressed – from representations of the South to the role of the media in shaping reality, including territorial memory and the mechanisms of disinformation – reflect what new generations want to understand, change, and tell.
The project reached a key moment of public sharing with Aperimedia, a day open to the city dedicated to presenting the materials produced, the podcasts, and the reflections developed throughout the process. Aperimedia was an informal gathering designed to bring schools, educational communities, and active citizens into conversation, and to place at the center the importance of a media education that is participatory, inclusive, and capable of generating new forms of awareness.
WAVES continues in the questions and stories it has generated, and represents for Marea Media a concrete step toward building a more open, more critical information space, one that is more attentive to the stories emerging from the territory.
WAVES – Working on Accessibility and Vision for Education in the South is a project organized within the framework of the European Solidarity Corps, co-funded by the European Union. The views expressed are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union; neither the European Union nor the funding bodies can be held responsible for them.