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
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