Tag: media education

Some thoughts about media literacy

20131101-080550.jpg
(Photo from the conference. Venue was Cinema House. The hall ceiling was amazing.)

I was invited to give a keynote in Practical Media Literacy Education Conference in Kiev, Ukraine. My keynote (titled Media Education in Finland) slides are available here:
http://bit.ly/me_in_finland

The conference has been very thought provoking. There are two thoughts that have strike me during my trip and which I want to share.

First, the aim of media education is not only in the individual level i.e. in literacy, competence, etc. It concerns also the level of society i.e. media culture. Hence each of us making better media culture is an informal mode of media education.

Second, media literacy is not a list of areas to be mastered. It is a rhizome of learnings within lived experiences with and through media. With support, i.e. media education, individual slowly learns to reflect on these experiences and learnings, and that way the rhizome is revealed.

“медіаосвіта”

Defending PhD

I will defend my PhD at the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences on April 29, 2011. What will I defend then? I think there are some important thoughts that are already presented by other (media) educationalists, too. Here are my ideas about these issues.

First, the concept of media education should not be confined any longer to ‘learning about media’ only. A wider understanding is needed and other media contextual aspects must be taken into account, too. This relates to the problem of using information and communication technologies (ICTs) in school. This area should not be left to technological examination only. The focus should be in better study processes and people’s non-institutional media use, too.

Second, media literacy is not just measurable knowledge and skills that can be acquired in institutional settings of education. With the current social media scene, media literacy is most of all about attitude, sometimes critical, towards learning and experiencing the world with and through media. Media literacy should be seen as a process of active involvement with a volition to produce, construct, share and categorize knowledge, opinions and experiences.

Third, media educational situations in school are manifold. A student is using his cell phone during the lesson and what is teacher saying to that? What if the student was using it for his learning task? It is important to gain a wider insight into the levels and aspects that are involved in suddenly emerging but typical situations that involve media educational aspects. It is crucial to understand the complexity of the circumstances as well as teachers’ thinking and reasoning involved media educational situations. This is, what I would call, Episodic Media Education. It can be seen in every situation where media content or tools are present.

The place for the public examination is Psykologia Sali 1, Siltavuorenpenger 1A. PhD summary will be published in ethesis.helsinki.fi. The PhD articles are:

Vesterinen, O., Vahtivuori-Hänninen, S., Oksanen, U., Uusitalo, A., & Kynäslahti, H. (2006). Mediakasvatus median ja kasvatuksen alueena: Deskriptiivisen mediakasvatuksen ja didaktiikan näkökulmia. Kasvatus, 37(2), 148–161.

Kynäslahti, H., Vesterinen, O., Lipponen, L., Vahtivuori-Hänninen, S., & Tella, S. (2008). Towards Volitional Media Literacy through Web 2.0. Educational Technology, 48(5), 3–9.

Vesterinen, O., Toom, A., & Patrikainen, S. (2010). The stimulated recall method and ICTs in research on the reasoning of teachers. International Journal of Research and Method in Education, 33(2), 183–197.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2010.484605

Vesterinen, O, Kynäslahti, H., & Tella, S. (2010). Media educational situations and two primary school teachers’ practical reasoning. International Journal of Learning and Media, 2(2–3), 123–139.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/ijlm_a_00047

The dimension of subject didactics revisited

I presented the dimension of subject didactics in the beginning of my PhD project. After five years, it is time to revisit these ideas.

I presented the dimension of subject didactics (in Finnish here) in the beginning of my PhD project. The concept of subject didactics originates from German educational research tradition and it means the subject-specific pedagogy. In the Anglo-American research, the pedagogical content knowledge (some background in Wikipedia) is often used instead of subject didactics. After five years and some more empirical research on schools’ media education, I think it is time to revisit the ideas presented in 2006.

There are many ways to theorize media education. It may have various forms in primary school such as arts education, social studies, child protection or learning technologies. Schools may call their media educational activities among other things magazine time, film education or, for example, learning with social media in which case the used medium is the defining principle.

What I have found important is to have a view based on educational sciences, too. In school context and from the teacher’s point of view, subject didactics covers a large area of what is behind the concept of teaching. The dimension of subject didactics presented in 2006 had two types of approaches, namely ‘subject didactics I’ and ‘subject didactics II’. In addition, the moral form of media education appearing especially in situational ways is opened.

Subject didactics I (media-based approach)

The approach can be seen as traditional subject didactics where the goal is to learn some entity of content, in this case about media. The pedagogical question is: how this subject-like content can be taught “effectively” or “well”. Since in Finland, there is no school subject of media education, the content of learning is usually a small entity in one of the existing schools subjects: in arts education it can be visual communication, in Finnish language types and genres of text, for example.

Subject didactics II (cross-curricular media education)

The second area of subject didactics relates to the integrative role of media education. It is part of learning and teaching of other school subjects. The focus of the media education is in the pedagogical approach and mainly the content to learn is not anymore media educational: for example, playing mathematical online game to learn algebra or watching a movie about climate change in environmental studies. These activities should be seen as substantial elements of media education when there are rarely dedicated lessons for media education.

Moral dilemmas

Many difficult moments of being a media educator relate to general thoughts of children growing up. The German concept of Bildung describes the aims which are in connection with this third form of media education. However, this should not be mixed with the moral defensiveness (Buckingham, 1998) since teachers are not necessarily blaming the media for inculcating “false beliefs or behaviors and for encouraging children to believe that all their problems can be solved through violence or through the acquisition of material goods.” Teachers can reason their actions in these situations multiply and without terror of world falling apart. This came out during the empirical period of my research.

Teacher just faces difficulties in media education with, for example, inappropriate media content. These situations form an area of media education which is surrounding the two earlier forms of media education. There are several issues in media, such as age-limited material, copyrights or child marketing, which can be taught during the dedicated lessons of media education or within other school subjects but mainly just come into play as a matter that needs to be handled outside of lesson plan. Schools also have many rules which create norms for media use and content in school.

>> a draft figure for these three forms of media education in school

In Finland, the boiling discussion around the distribution of lessons in basic education has created a huge competition between existing school subjects and large push from different interest groups to get (their) new school subjects into curriculum. There are rarely winners in this competition. The distribution of lessons haven’t changed too much during the last 100 years. I wouldn’t advice to fight for a subject status for media education. But the problem is that the subject teaching comes first and the rest is rather haphazard.

The relevance of media education is still built in the pedagogical moments that happen in ordinary activities. If the frontier must be set somewhere, the struggle with the strong subject-division-based school system should not be forgotten. There must be space for values, aims and (learning) methods that are set outside of school subjects. The actual life for children is inevitably outside of the Lehrplan and the media literacy is often practiced in the meaning-making and social interaction. All three forms of media education are needed. Only then it can fulfil its place in school education.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/judybaxter/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Meediahariduse seminar Tallinnas

Tallinn University had a media education seminar

Tallinn University had a media education seminar in September 3–4, 2009. Interesting that Estonia is following the way our National Core Curriculum in Basic Education (2004) is taking the cross-curricular themes in.

I participated the sessions on both days. The following presentations (actually first Mac OS X Keynote presentations I’ve done!) are available on SlideShare.

Media Education and Curriculum Design

View more presentations from retsev.
Learning about and Use of Media in Schools

View more presentations from retsev.

JURE conference in Amsterdam

Presentation @ Junior Researchers of EARLI conference (JURE)

First time in Junior Researchers of EARLI conference (JURE). I have a round-table presentation on Monday. The title is ‘Media Education in School Context.’

>> vesterinen_JURE2009_handout

Should be nice and warm in Amsterdam – a lovely city altogether. Expecting a lot from this week.

Biking in Amsterdam

(photo from the previous trip to Amsterdam)

An update on my PhD research

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.

>> see figure

We’ll see if I’ll find those.

Where does media education go wrong

(image from s2art)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/s2art/

We – children, parents, students, teachers, adults, schools, society – would need more and better media education. The problems emerge when it comes to discussing about resources and attitudes. The field of media education is also dispersed and people find it difficult to discuss about same questions.

However, many other fields of education face the same problems. What I find particular to media education – and public debate around it – is mixing the goals, context and level of education. Nobody is actually wrong but somewhere there is confusion about roles where an educator and the one who should be educated are placed.

>> see figure ‘the roles of an educator and the one to be educated‘

The educational interface is a challenging one because we tend to place actors to certain roles, which might not be natural ones. Still, all the roles are somehow present in the media educational interface. One or two just come first. In a public debate the fruitfulness of the discussion decreases if one sees school children as small journalists and another one as children to protect from dubious content in media.

As long as the educational interface is crossed vertically straight, no huge problems occur. As soon as e.g. in a school context an educator is merely seen as an artistic manager, we are facing a problem. The experience gained in our school-based media education research project (i.e. my PhD project) is that the school context is not easily changed to a context which supports all the other roles in the figure above. That explains why e.g. schools’ afternoon club activities have a lot to offer in media education. The curriculum-driven teacher–pupil interaction can be switched to more mentor–learner or even political interaction, which in a classroom usually takes second place to teacher–class interaction.

Two articles

Two new publications include contributions by me and my colleagues.

Kynäslahti, H., Vesterinen, O. & Tella, S. 2007. Mediakasvatuksen näkökulma informaatiolukutaitoon (Information Literacy from the Perspective of Media Education). In A. Nevgi (Ed.) Informaatiolukutaito yliopisto-opetuksessa. (Information Literacy in Higher Education.) Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 71–80.
>> orders bookplus.fi

The other one is available online.

Vesterinen, O. 2007. Mediakasvatus oppilaitosinstituution yhte(nä)isenä alueena. (Media Education as a Shared/Wholistic Area of School Institution.) In H. Kynäslahti, R. Kupiainen & M. Lehtonen (Eds.) Näkökulmia mediakasvatukseen (Points of View of Media Education). The Finnish Society on Media Education, 73–85.
www.mediaeducation.fi/publications/

MedSt@r – Media Education Research Using Stimulated Recall Method

Stimulated Recall Method (Str) has been used to investigate teacher’s pedagogical thinking. Method is used to revive memories after the lesson in order to determine the thoughts which occurred during the lesson. The idea is that an interviewee “may be enabled to relive an original situation with vividness and accuracy if he [or she] is presented with a large number of the cues or stimuli which occurred during the original situation” (Bloom, 1953, p. 161).

These cues can be e.g. books used or a video recording of the lesson. In media education reseach there is a need for summoning up the virtual elements of a class too. E.g. in our MedSt@r Project the class was using CmapTools. After the lesson, we have used CmapTools recorder function with the teacher to follow step by step how each pupil has created his/her cmap (i.e. a concept map file).

The project in whole investigates
a) features of using Stimulated Recall Method in media education research, and
b) on a meta-level – what decisions researcher does and how is s/he reasoning those.

>> to cmaps of my presentation in a post-graduate seminar Oct 29th (in Finnish).