TY Media Week a huge success with Students and Stations

TY Media Week a huge success with Students and Stations.

  • 2nd March, 2020

In September 2019, Learning Waves embarked on its TY Media Week Programme, a programme supported by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland under the Sound and Vision Funding Scheme.  The programme is funded under the Media Literacy theme of the Sound and Vision application.

Media Literacy is the key to empowering people with the skills and knowledge to understand how the media works in this changing environment.  It will allow people to interrogate the accuracy of information, to counter unfair and inaccurate representation, to challenge extremist views and, ultimately to make better informed media choices.


As such Learning Waves believes that Media Literacy skills are particularly relevant for teenagers, both in their ability to learn how content is sourced and how it is verified.  Such skills will form the cornerstone for future employees in the industry.  In a society where the public are bombarded with information from multiple sources, how do they discern between sources and content types. Media literacy skills will allow them to them to make those decisions.  Teenagers will become the future content creators, broadcasters and producers of media and the provision of media literacy skills to them will ensure that they will make informed choices and decisions about content they broadcast on a range of platforms.  

This programme provides an opportunity for teenagers to spend a week in a media organisation, and not just to see how it works, but to become involved in making those judgements themselves by working on a two-hour programme for broadcast at the end of the week. The teenagers will have the opportunity to learn and understand how the media works and to research, produce and broadcast content on a selected programme within the station.


The week will focus on imparting the skills and knowledge from radio station personnel to the students and give them the skills to research, produce and present their chosen topic for broadcast.  The TY week began in September 2019 and will run to March 2020 across 15 radio stations.   A Programme Presenter and Producer is assigned to work exclusively with the students for the week.  The programmes, which will be co-hosted by students themselves, will demonstrate the variety of projects they participate in, from science, the environment, enterprise, tourism, etc. and will showcase the topics that are of importance to them.  The topics are chosen by the students and are not prescribed, rather discussed and agreed with the station mentor.

To date the following topics have been brought to air by the TY students who have currently completed the programme :

  • Climate Change
  • Fast Fashion
  • Mental Health
  • Politics
  • Life as a Holocaust Survivor
  • Living with Disabilities
  • Interviews with new Irish Artists
  • Sport

To date the following stations have participated in the programme :

  • Beat 102-103
  • WLR FM
  • Radio Kerry
  • Newstalk
  • Tipp FM
  • Shannonside
  • FM104
  • Galway Bay FM
  • KCLR 96FM
  • Corks Red FM
  • Ocean FM

The programme is running Clare FM this week and Spin South West and LMFM will roll out the programme by the end of March 2020.  To date the number of students applying for the programme in each station has far exceeded the places available on the course in any one station.  Below is short video from the students who participated in the programme in Newstalk and we will bring you reaction from all the stations and the students when the programme is completed at the end of March 2020.

For more information on this programme email : teresah@learningwaves.ie

Monday 2nd March 2020.

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