Enhancing Resilience Against War-Related Disinformation: Insights from Diagnostic Studies and Interventions at Polish Schools

This paper reports on design and results of implementation of a series of diagnostic studies and interventions devoted to building up resilience against disinformation regarding the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, with a special focus on Polish teenagers. The initiative, called DisInfoResist, was conducted in the spring of 2024, and was motivated by the need to engage in co-creation with partner schools in order to propose a series of tailored actions given the ongoing hybrid war. However, adequate resilience-enhancing interventions can only be based on a thorough diagnosis of needs and competence gaps. Such diagnosis was undertaken in DisInfoResist with localized data collected through thematic analysis of 20 oral histories, 2 focus group sessions and 87 narrative auto-ethnographies. The subsequent piloted interventions addressed to a group of Polish secondary school students represented a way to boost their resilience against war-related disinformation by allowing them to practice their critical media literacy competences via a variety of specifically tailored activities related to critical language awareness, responding to fake news, overcoming disengagement, recognizing sensationalist media practices and algorithmic patterns.