Classroom Strategies in Teaching the Media

2012

Strumenti per la didattica e la ricerca, 2011

Media Education (ME) has come a long way. Today, it can no longer be considered a field of study reserved for semiotic and communication researchers. Nor can it be regarded as a privileged practice of those teachers, who for some reason consider media of fundamental importance. On one hand, ME is now part of the agenda of international organizations, which consider the development of media competences a necessary requisite to fully exercise citizenship in the current contemporary society. On the other, ME practices are becoming increasingly widespread in schools involving a growing number of teachers. Notwithstanding, teaching the media still seems to be a rather solipsistic task where «everything is fine». Indeed, in ME there is a tremendous lack of research concerning the educational practices' quality and effectiveness. This book tries to cope with these issues by providing a set of instruments to design, develop and evaluate ME activities in schools, and supporting the enhan...

This article is based on an extensive research project (Towards Future Literacy Pedagogies, ToLP1) that deals with the literacy practices of Finnish and immigrant pupils, mother tongue (MT) and foreign language (FL) teachers. The overall aim of the project is to explore and interpret literacy practices both in school and out-of-school contexts by employing large-scale quantitative research approaches as well as qualitative classroom observations and teacher and pupil interviews. In this article, we will report findings of the comprehensive survey, our specific focus being on the materials and media the teachers and pupils use in school and in their free time. We are interested in exploring in which ways the media landscapes are either similar or different and to what extent the digital worlds have reached the language classroom. The results show that there is a growing gap between the practices in school and the way in which pupils use the various media in their free time for informal learning and for social existence. It seems that textbooks and other print-based materials dominate at school, whereas a quite dynamic and multilayered digital world is the reality for pupils outside school. keywords literacy practices • language and mother tongue learning • media use • formal and informal learning • learning resources

Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, 2021

Media Education (ME) has come a long way. Today, it can no longer be considered a field of study reserved for semiotic and communication researchers. Nor can it be regarded as a privileged practice of those teachers, who for some reason consider media of fundamental importance. On one hand, ME is now part of the agenda of international organizations, which consider the development of media competences a necessary requisite to fully exercise citizenship in the current contemporary society. On the other, ME practices are becoming increasingly widespread in schools involving a growing number of teachers. Notwithstanding, teaching the media still seems to be a rather solipsistic task where «everything is fine». Indeed, in ME there is a tremendous lack of research concerning the educational practices' quality and effectiveness. This book tries to cope with these issues by providing a set of instruments to design, develop and evaluate ME activities in schools, and supporting the enhancement of media educators' knowledge and skills.

This article looks at the state of media education in Finland in the autumn of 2015 by answering the question: what is the definition of media education on the curriculum level in basic education and in the Master's Degree programs of universities? The focus is particularly on the media education in the Universities of Lapland and Tampere, and their international Master's programs and teacher education. In addition, we will be looking at the existing and the forthcoming National Core Curriculum for Basic Education (The Finnish National Board of Education (FNBE), 2014). We will look at the future of media education from the viewpoint of education in an increasingly international, multicultural and digital society. How should media education in universities respond to these challenges?

he present report addresses media education-related research conducted in Finland in recent years: what has been studied and where, how much research has been conducted and what kinds of methods have been used. The report is based on a literature review on Finnish doctoral dissertations, licentiate’s theses, master’s theses from universities and master’s level theses from universities of applied sciences, as well as peer-reviewed articles in academic journals published mostly electronically in Finland and dating from 2007 to 2012. No systematic literature review on media education-related research published in Finland has been undertaken before. Media education as a research area is quintessentially inter- and multidisciplinary, and, thus, many different types of research on media and education can be classified as media education-related research. The subject of media education research has oſten been approached from the perspective of what can be called division into “tribes”, each tribe representing different research perspectives and emphases. In addition, conceptualizations of media and education, i.e. how the concepts media and education are understood in relation to media education and to media education-related research, influence the way in which the scope of media ed teacher. The review indicates that the highest number of media education-related theses was produced at the University of Tampere, followed by the University of Jyväskylä in the second rank and the University of Lapland in the third rank. This literature review was produced as a joint project of Foundation for Cultural Policy Research Cupore and Finnish Centre for Media Education and Audiovisual Media MEKU. This review was undertaken as a part of the follow-up project for promoting national media education (2012–2013), and it aims at opening fresh discussion on media education research needs among researchers representing different universities and other institutes of higher learning, different disciplines and fields of research and among media education practitioners.

MedienPädagogik: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Medienbildung, 2014

Media-related rhetoric plays a remarkable role in the context of school (re)forms, whether the arguments are euphoric or skeptical about media. On the one hand, there are reminders of the need for sheltered spaces and developmental tasks for children and adolescents, for the detailed differentiation of literacy as an educational task, or for maximizing equal opportunities. In these cases, media are mostly seen as means of learning, education or development advancement. On the other hand, debates also deal with the development of adequate infrastructures for learning and teaching with more-or-less «new» media, media-based school development projects, or the implementation of e-learning strategies. Here it is striking that, on closer observation, innovative efforts frequently turn out to be structural-conservative administrative measures which fail to address the contemporary media-anthropological, media-epistemological and media-cultural challenges. The focus of the article is on sch...