2025 AGM PRESIDENT’S REPORT

With Covid settling down to be the ‘new norm,’ the 2024 AGM was once more held online and as our number of actual members remains low; we were still quorate and able to form a small Executive.  The year proved to be our quietest year yet for SAAME, with only one Executive meeting needing to be held during the year.  This correlated with the amount of business we had to deal with.  One task we did undertake was transferring our Constitution from a paper document to a digital form.  In doing this we also made some minor adjustments that better reflect our actual practice.  Importantly this included broadening our definition of a ‘meeting’ to include electronic forms (such as Zoom), which we had to employ during the pandemic.

Unfortunately, a professional development activity was not run in October for UNESCO's Global Media & Information Literacy Week.  Evidently the SA Education Department may have publicized the event in the singular newsletter platform that reaches all staff and schools.  This was after we supplied them with some information as they thought that the UNESCO GMIL site was not “the most appropriate” and “that few of the resources provided are suitable for school level education.”  They also “need to be very careful about promoting sites that have not been properly investigated and endorsed by the department.”  Obviously they had not properly investigated beyond a cursory glance of the conference page and failed to find the many resources that are indeed available.

This reply was received at the start of October last year after I had enquired in November 2023 and again in March 2024.  Also contained in this letter was, “With regards to your proposal that the department joins the UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Alliance, there are significant political sensitivities regarding participating in an international alliance from a state government level.  At this time, we have been advised not to join.”  So what had appeared to be a promising response from the Chief Executive Professor Martin Westwell in July 2023 about the Department investigating UNESCO's work on Media and Information Literacy, had turned into a fizzler revealing a risk-averse bureaucracy with ineffectual staff.  There are still some options we can pursue this year.

Once more we relied on email, our monthly radio program, our website and our Facebook page for communicating with members.

SAAME maintained our Facebook group, MEET (Media Educators Engaging Together) and its membership has increased to 195.  This site remains a very useful way to communicate with Media educators.  We again broadcast Media Moves each month on 5PBA-FM (sponsored by Valley View Secondary School) although we missed one program due to a power outage.  Thank you to member Linda Belcher for supplying regular movie reviews.  Once more, thanks to Steven Watt from Picture This!, we had some free movie passes to give away.

Our Association continues its journey being less based on running workshops and more offering one-to-one support, resources and being the lobby group for more explicit inclusion of Media & Information Literacy programs in our curricula.

Again, Tim ably filled the role of Secretary, polishing our revised, ‘digital’ Constitution and maintaining our website.  I extend my thanks to him for his efforts.

To the Executive members of the outgoing committee, thank you for helping yet again maintain the Association during this changing time.