The Wisdom Against Manipulation programme for people aged 60+ was developed by the Ukrainian Institute of Media and Communication (UIMC) with the support of DW Akademie based on a large-scale study of the needs of this age group.
This Workshop is an educational initiative for older people who lost their homes due to the war. It is aimed at restoring psychological resilience, developing skills in navigating the information space, recognising fake news, and improving digital literacy. The training is experimental, as no one has ever used such a comprehensive approach to media literacy for this age group.
To implement this ambitious and undoubtedly important project, in 2024, UIMC trained a team of 17 trainers to work with the 60+ audience. These are experienced professionals from different parts of Ukraine: Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, Lviv, Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv, and Khmelnytskyi regions.
One of the certified trainers is Inna Yermakova, a researcher at our Museum. For a group of older people, the museum worker organised a two-part class:
- A short excursion, during which the guide Ihor Buchma introduced the participants to the Time Capsule exhibition and told them about key events in the history of Ukraine during the Second World War.
- A workshop led by Inna Yermakova, during which the guests acquired the skills of reasoned refutation of Soviet propaganda narratives about the Second World War, which russia is still actively spreading.
The participants actively worked on the tasks, studied documents and testimonies, asked questions and shared the stories of their parents, victims of both Nazi crimes and Soviet repression. It was especially touching to see the guests share their own family stories – these are the people who keep the memory of the Second World War not from books, but from family stories.
Diana Dutsyk, an Executive Director of the UIMC, said: “Our organisation is very grateful to the Museum for agreeing to such an experiment – learning right in the exhibition. I saw that it really had a great impact on our ‘students’.”
