My presentation in ECER 2005 conference in Dublin.
Network 16: ICT in Education and Training.
Chair Discussant: Ed Smeets, Radboud University, Nijmegen.
Class Teachers’ Evaluation – Media Education Perspective
Good afternoon! My name is Olli Vesterinen and I come from the Media Education Centre at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
Is media education a school subject in your country?
If it exists in your curriculum, it is then integrated to other school subjects, right?
My approach relates to the following question: if media education is not so much about ‘what’, it must be more to do with ‘how’, when it comes to integrating media – especially information and communication technologies – into teaching, studying and learning. My presentation will deal with this theoretical problem � the ‘what’ and ‘how’ in the media education framework.
I will deal with the media education perspective and network-based education. After that I will come to the values followed by the focuses of teachers’ evaluation. Finally we will see how I�m planning to proceed from here.
In my case study the special area of media education is network-based education. It would be something that combines face-to-face communication and mediated communication in teaching, studying and learning. The context in my first study was primary schools in the city area of Helsinki. The term class teacher refers to a teacher who teaches all school subjects.
The term evaluation does not mean ‘online assessment’ but rather teacher’s self-evaluation in this field of his/her profession. It refers to the teacher’s evaluation of his/her own work at school and the teaching-studying-learning process he/she conducts.
As I’m now working on my doctoral thesis, I will present some results and conclusions at this point of the research process. If you have any questions for example on research methods, please don’t hesitate to ask.
In Finland, teachers do a master’s degree. They have also had quite a lot of independence and freedom to think and evaluate their teaching and pupils studying and learning process as they like. This extends their pedagogical thinking, which I’m interested in. In beginning of this decade, the curriculum (or curricular guidelines) either didn’t follow the development in the amount of computers and internet connections in schools.
When reporting the straight answers of teachers, especially three areas were covered: 1) Independency and communal aspects, 2) Pupils equality in technical skills and social participation, 3) Teaching, studying and learning in accordance with teacher�s perception on a good learning.
After a deeper analysis of all the data, the findings of this case study suggest that there are two different types of values or two perspectives on those values. First set of values could be defined as methodological and result-oriented values of teaching�studying�learning. The second set instead is connected to what is in the interest of a person growing up in the society. The latter is also closer to values in the culture of the institution (e.g. school) concerned. These two sets can be simplified to method perspective and content perspective.
The two focuses of evaluation are then goal-oriented/purposive focus and technology focus. In class teacher’s evaluation of the teaching-studying-learning process s/he conducts, the goal-oriented/purposive focus leans on the general goals set for teaching, studying and learning with or without media/ICTs integration. Correspondingly, the technology focus is dominated by the concern for the pupil. Either the class teacher feels that every pupil should learn the basic skills in ICT or s/he sees that pupils should be protected from the media, computers and digital games.
Media education and ICT form three aspects in schools or curriculum.
Media education perspective covers ICT from (1) the �tools of learning� (2) to a �content of learning� and (3) to a �content to protect from�.
Different competences, skills and literacies, like media literacy, are analysed more and more. I have used the concept of media proficiency, which in addition covers proactive and also ethical perspectives, especially in teacher’s profession (Tella 2001). Media proficiency is very much related to modern definitions of media literacy, which nowadays include more active and participatory role than literacy as such would imply. Compared to media competence for example, media proficiency has unlimited potential. Tella (2000) sees that “competence is more and more often used to refer to some kind of basic or minimum level of expertise, while proficiency, for instance, implies a more dynamic, active and higher level of performance”.
To simplify, we have a model as in the slide 18. As far as teachers are concerned, media proficiency combines professional expertise of a teacher and his/her personal skills and ethical actions in a society and life in general.
Conclusions. In the class teacher’s pedagogical thinking, there is an interesting area between ‘what’ and ‘how’ when it comes to media education in primary school context. This could be called ‘the teacher’s pedagogical content knowledge’ which has been highlighted by Shulman (1987) for example.
This relates to the original question of how teacher reasons the use of ICT in his/her classroom practices and this is the direction where I’m planning to move on.
Thank you!