Last year I was gathering data from a school in eastern part of Helsinki. I visited two parallel classes whenever they had some media related activities. In my research sense, the class projects I followed were in three topics:
- Analysing a movie and creating digital stories
- Reading newspapers and writing an own issue
- Analysing and constructing conceptions and knowledge with collaborative concept mapping software (CmapTools)
I video recorded the lessons and gathered other prompt material (such as recorded processes of concept map creation and finished digital stories) for stimulated recall interviews which took place later that same day. In the interview, teacher and I went through the lesson and media education related topics with the cues from the video and other prompt material.
I’ve been hearing and reading fairly long time about the problem in Finnish (and other countries’) media education: teachers, schools and teacher education. I am interested in learning what teachers and schools suggest is the reasoning around the school-based media education and the absence of all the things that media educationalists cry out for. From my perspective the meaningfulness of our school system doesn’t seem to be in the up-to-date fashionable roles and topics but in the continuity of something which still remains strong in our (citizens’, parents’, school administratives’, etc.) minds, i.e. school institution and its social practices.
As I’m starting to analyse the interview data, I’m trying to find following types of arguments.
We’ll see if I’ll find those.