Zoom Local Workshops!

Fins from MEHFA long-term project.

Seila and Tanja kept one online workshop (80 minutes) for college students of Turun klassinen lukio (Turku classical upper secondary school) in Zoom. The participants were around 17 years old. In total 22 pupils + one teacher participated in the workshop. Badges were included, and participants filled badge tasks during the class (10 minutes). In the first 10 minutes we introduced the hate speech topic and gave examples of strategies to use against it. Then we spent another 10 minutes introducing disinformation and misinformation.

We discussed disinformation of coronavirus. We divided people into groups (separate rooms in Zoom) where they planned counter narratives (30 minutes). We gave them one article (about hate speech against one sami activist) and they made a meme using a meme generator to be represented as a counter narrative. We got good feedback from our workshop (reflection part 10 minutes). Some participants were already aware of the hate speech topic and were quite active commentators.

The counter narrative task was difficult for some of the pupils, because it is not easy to use accurate humor for showing the illogic of hate speech. Another workshop for the same people would be interesting to deepen the understanding.

Two of our workshops that were originally planned to be kept in that same school (Turku classical upper secondary school) in March are postponed to Autumn season. These two workshops will be kept to new participants in a classroom with different participatory rehearsals than in the online workshop.