A morning in the Romanian Chamber of Deputies, and what it taught us about turning political goodwill into workable policy. How Mediawise Society brought Teachers 4.0 Digital expertise to the table in the Romanian Parliament.
By Nicoleta Fotiade
President of Mediawise Society and IAME.education
There are moments when years of quiet work in classrooms suddenly meet the room where decisions get made. For us at Mediawise Society, that moment came on 16 June 2026, in the Iuliu Maniu hall of the Romanian Chamber of Deputies.
We were invited by MP Ionuț Stroe, who back in February this year has initiated a draft law introducing Media and Digital Education as a compulsory subject in Romanian middle and high school starting with 2027–2028 academic year. The invitation was to present pur position on the bill. We came with a ten-page analysis, two of our Mediawise Teachers, and a group of organisational partners who have been promoting media education in Romania alongside us for years. High school students were in the room too, listening to a conversation about their own education, exactly as it should be.
We want to share how it went, because the story travels beyond Romania.
What the bill actually does and why we welcomed it
Let’s start with the good news.
The draft law does what media education advocates across Europe keep asking for: it turns political goodwill into legal obligation. It creates explicit duties for the Ministry of Education to develop the curriculum, certifies teacher training and allocates a distinct budget line, the kind of firm government commitment the Council of Europe’s CDMSI guidance (2025) calls essential.
It also makes the subject compulsory rather than optional, which matters more than it sounds. Optional media education classes reach the schools already doing well, and skips the ones that need it most, deepening exactly the gap it was meant to close. And it gets assessment as it should: digital portfolios and applied projects rather than memorised definitions.
So our answer was: yes, and here is how to make it work better.
What we brought to the table
Our analysis identified nine gaps. They cluster into four questions the law does not yet answer.
Who will teach this? This is the one that keeps us up at night. The bill says the subject will be taught. It does not say by whom, with what training profile, or whether a new teaching position is created. Nor does it say what the financial investment will be – and training thousands of teachers to a real standard costs real money. A budget line without a figure behind it is a promise, not a plan. A subject without a defined, qualified teaching body is a subject without real content, and September 2027 is not that far away.
What kind of media education? The competences in the bill lean heavily defensive: spot the disinformation, stay safe online, detect distortion. Necessary, but not sufficient. A curriculum built only around recognising manipulation risks producing generalised cynicism towards media, which, in the end, is a form of vulnerability, not resilience. MediawiseS argued for the constructive and civic dimensions of media education: students who reflect, analyse, create and participate. And one isolated hour a week will not build transferable critical thinking. A student who never applies media education to other academic texts has not learned to transfer anything.
Where is artificial intelligence? The phrase does not appear in the draft. A law adopted in 2026 with no reference to AI will be out of date on the day it enters into force.
Who is watching whether it works? The bill assesses students. It does not assess the system: no baseline study, no periodic national evaluation, no published progress reports, no dedicated body responsible or dedicated funds to invest. The Ministry of Education should be part of an intergovernmental body to implement and supervise. Without all that, Romania will not be able to demonstrate that it works, or fix what doesn’t. We flagged that primary school is left out entirely. Journalism as a democratic institution is absent. And school is only part of the picture: media education needs a whole-of-society approach reaching adults, parents, seniors and vulnerable groups through libraries, NGOs and non-formal learning.
We did not arrive at these questions last month. Mediawise Society has been making the case for media education in Romanian public policy for years through teacher training, classroom research and every consultation we could get into. What was different this time was the invitation. For once, we were not knocking on the door.
What we could add was European evidence. As a partner in the Teachers 4.0 Digital consortium building teacher capacity in digital media education across Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Poland and Romania, we have spent three years on precisely the questions this bill leaves open: teacher competence frameworks, media education as a transversal capability rather than an isolated timetable slot, a constructive rather than defensive response to disinformation. Those directions, tested in six countries with over 2,100 educators (majority of them Romanian educators), fed straight into what we put on the table. This is what European consortium work looks like at national level: not just a report filed in Brussels, but a seat at the policy table in Bucharest.
We were not the only ones with their homework done
One of the best things about that morning was that MediawiseS was not alone. At our invitation, several colleagues submitted their own written contributions, which we have gathered on our website.
Ciprian Cucu (West University of Timișoara) contributed the sharpest reading of system risks. Two points deserve European attention. First, the ‘crammed subject’issue: during exam years, anything without standardised assessment gets quietly sacrificed to exam pressure. So, he proposes embedding media education items into the national examinations. Second, territorial equity: well-resourced urban schools will implement the law properly while rural schools get a minimal version, so he wants an equity principle written into the law itself, not left to methodology.
ApTI (Association for Technology and Internet) put a number on the whole-of-society argument that the Mediawise analysis made: over 70% of Romanians lack basic digital skills, so a school-only approach addresses part of a much larger problem. They added a point we have not seen made this clearly elsewhere: media education should be delivered by public institutions and their expert partners rather than by private companies with commercial or data-harvesting interests. And it should teach principles, not products. For instance, students should learn about ‘search engines’ and not ‘Google search’.
And from Adriana Mihai, a teacher and Mediawise trainer who has done this work in an actual classroom, the sentence that summed up the room’s central worry: ‘It is impossible for teachers to teach this subject after just a few months of training. And indeed, competence takes years, not a crash course.
The openness was real
We want to say something about the tone of the discussion, because it shaped the day. The Ministry of Education, represented by State Secretary Sorin Ion, said that no further arguments were needed to convince them of the case for media education, calling it an urgent and top priority. That is not a sentence we expected to hear, and we are grateful for it. Alongside the Ministry came the National Centre for Curriculum and Assessment (Director General Bogdan Cristescu), the National Audiovisual Council representative, the West University of Timișoara and the Politehnica University of Bucharest, civil society colleagues from the Centre for Independent Journalism, ApTI, TechSoup and UNICEF, and Senator Monica Anisie, former minister of Education alongside MP Ionuț Stroe.
Education ministry, curriculum authority, media regulator, universities and NGOs, in the same room on the same morning, that is actually the multi-stakeholder architecture our analysis says the law still needs. It existed in that room. The task now is to write it into the text and afterwards putting into praactice with clear multi-year action plan, governmental ownership and financial investment in the teachers’ training.
What comes next
The draft law goes to debate in the Romanian Senate in September 2026. We will be following its path closely and reporting on it.
More than that: we are ready to join a working group on amending the bill, and to assisst whoever drafts the next version with the Mediawise Teacher programme’s experience. None of the gaps we identified are arguments against this law. They are arguments for a better one that could make Romania an European reference point for media education policy rather than a cautionary tale about good intentions.
We would rather do this properly than do it quickly. Happily, on 16 June, so would everyone else in the room.
Mediawise Society is one of the 16 partners in the Teachers 4.0 Digital consortium, co-funded by the European Union under Erasmus+ (project 101132893). The full analysis and all contributions cited here are available at mediawise.ro.
AI Transparency Disclosure:
The author of this article used AI assistant to read and cross-analyse the Mediawise analysis and the accompanying contributions submitted to the parliamentary debate and to produce a comparative synthesis of where they converge and differ. The English draft of this article was written with the same tool, working from the author’s brief on angle, structure and content. All facts, claims, attributions and the final text were verified and edited by the author.
Main source in Romanian: https://mediawise.ro/educatia-media-castiga-teren-la-masa-decidentilor-hai-s-o-facem-bine/
