The last local youth parliament session took place 27 May 2019 in Prague, Czech Republic. As a topic of this session we have chosen information and how to work with it and how to use critical thinking. The topic has been chosen because of our experience and feedback from different project concerning the active citizenship or EU topic. One of the issues of the youngsters is the quality of information (mainly online) about politics and connected topic – critical thinking. The youth parliament session has been organised in cooperation with student project Stuzak.
At the begging we have introduced the organisations – Change it and Stuzak, then we have been speaking about the project Clicking with voters, its activities, aims and ways how to be more engaged. We didn’t forget to mention the importance of voting and we talked also about the campaign #thistimeimvoting
Then, we have started with the activity. What is the goal? In the workshop on political marketing, youngsters will have the opportunity to create a political party, including the name, logo, election of a leader, preparation for a press conference on a specific topic. The whole activity is interleaved with entertaining or bizarre examples, especially related to online marketing and presentation on social networks.
At the end, we discussed fake news, media literacy, digital competencies and how media and disinformation are influencing political “fights” and campaigning. The youth parliament session was attended by 28 youngsters and 2 organisators (including volunteers).