Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group Newsletter 6 2016 | Page 14

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2016 Newsletter -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------For both critical thinking skills and creative production skills teachers can resort to an inquirybased pedagogy for effective teaching since being “critically autonomous” doesn’t represent an accumulation and reproduction of facts, ideas and information about media. Kuhn, Black, Keselman, and Kaplan (2000) define inquiry learning as “an educational activity in which students individually or collectively investigate a set of phenomena—virtual or real—and draw conclusions about it.” Banchi and Bell (2008) suggest that there are four forms of inquiry-based learning in science education: confirmation inquiry, structured inquiry, guided inquiry and open inquiry. Rogow (2011) describes inquiry as using “relevant questions to evaluate and analyze media messages and to reflect on the media they create.” She also considers that in order for students to ask questions about media messages and to engage in discussions, teachers have to model media messages deconstruction by asking questions. Media literacy scholars and organizations have compiled sets of questions that can be used in the inquiry process. The Centre for Media Literacy has developed five key concept questions that can be expanded by adding guiding questions and adapted for different age groups. NAMLE (National Association for Media Literacy Education in the USA) has designed another set of questions that can be used when analyzing media messages. Media literacy perfectly lends itself to an inquirybased approach and learning activities can be tailored to all the forms of inquiry listed by Bianchi and Bell. The approach can be implemented for media analysis tasks, but also for production-based activities since students have to ask and answer questions before embarking on the creation of a certain media product. Students could be provided with a set of questions when deconstruction a media text, could be asked to design their own questions, could be offer a list of topics for investigation or they could come up with their own topics. Some sug gestions of topics that could be the starting point for investigative endeavours are: media institutions, ownership and control in the media, media regulation (self-regulation, statutory regulation), economic determinants (advertisers, audience-maximizing programs), media and audiences, media personnel. Furthermore, students could probe into the social constructions of race, gender, ability, social groups in different media products, they could analyze articles from various sources, look into the codes used by different media genres, compare how the same news/event is reported by different media, storyboard an advertisement or video. The nature of inquiry learning changes the relationship between teacher and students. Students are not passive recipients of knowledge any longer, they actively create and construct meaning and knowledge. This entails a redesign of the educational approaches and classroom strategies. Teachers should build on the students’ existing knowledge and experience of the media, both of which are to be valued in the classroom. The teacher’s role shifts from the authority, the sage on the stage, to the one of facilitator, guide, the teacher taking part in the exchange of ideas, learning together with the students. Multiple perspectives are to be encouraged and the race for only one correct answer is to be replaced by a variety of answers that are valid as long as they are supported by arguments. Postman and Weingartner (1969) illustrated the ways in which inquiry-based learning has impacted the classroom dynamics: 1) the teacher rarely tells students a personal opinion about a particular social or political issue; (2) does not accept a single statement as an answer to a question; (3) encourages student-student interaction as opposed to student-teacher interaction, and generally avoids acting as a mediator or judging the quality of ideas expressed; (4) lessons develop from the responses of students and not from a previously determined “logical” structure. Fostering a learning environment that is conducive to the acquisition of the critical analytical and creative skills needed to function in a media-infused society will empower students to build their own knowledge constructs and not to take media messages at their face value. In order for education to be relevant for the challenges of contemporary life, teachers must embrace new pedagogies and develop a curriculum that responds to the needs of their students. Adopting a different mindset and role in the classroom might prove demanding for teachers and they may experience difficulties, but promoting healthy skepticism and encouraging the habit of questioning all media messages (not only those we disagree with) will pave the way for students to incorporate this new way of thinking into their lives not just when they interpret or produce media 14