Welcome to a K3 seminar with Margareta Melin, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies, K3

The title of the seminar is Media didactics – Searching for a concept and best practices

This will be an online seminar, carried out through Zoom, and it will take place on Wednesday, October 14 at 10.15-12.00. Please join here:

Margareta writes this about the seminar:

I am working on an article for Media Education (possibly) i.e. this is a work-in-progress. From the seminar I would thus like constructive critique of how to move forward and what to change. I will be grateful for all comments.

Abstract:

In times when the media market is undergoing substantial changes, when the practices of media professionals are faced with finding new ways of employment or doing several jobs at the same time (print journalists filming, doing radio and taking photos as well as writing), it is time media education is re-valued and possibly re-thought.

Several concepts have been used for the teaching and learning practices involving media, e.g. media literacy, media education. However, these are more often used within a school context. In higher education this is not the case. In this article I therefore discuss and argue for the concept Media didactic as a potential tool with which to think and do media education. The article consists of two parts, the first is a theoretical discussion of the concept Media didactic and the second is an argumentation through practice, i.e. using some researched examples from media educations in order to emphasise my theoretical discussion.

Media didactics means facilitation of learning processes for a particular subject (here media- and communication studies) and is supposed to form a bridge between this subject on the one end, and a more general pedagogy on the other (Bergström & Ekström, 2015), i.e. it means ways of teaching students to analyse and interpret media, to produce media texts, and how media involvement can strengthen [subject] teaching in general (Toke Gissel, 2016:17).

Theoretically I frame the concept media didactic by theories found in the field of Scholarship of teaching and learning, e.g. relational pedagogy (Aspelin & Persson, 2011), didactic design and multimodal learning (Selander & Kress, 2010), reflective practitioner (Schön, 1987) and of course learning by doing (Dewey, 1916/1999). I am also inspired by Giert Biesta The Beautiful Risk of Education as well as Challenge Based Learning (Christersson et al, 2021).

Through these I will carry an argumentation in order to define media didactic, as well as argue for its necessity in higher media educations, thus bringing Scholarship of teaching and learning into the field of Media and Communication.

In the second part of the paper I will give three examples of researched experienced based best practices to illustrate the concept and to underline my final argument that, in the face of strong structural changes in the media industry, we need to re-think media education so that we are ahead of industry needs, rather than lagging behind. Us, media- and communication educators, need to create critical thinkers and doers, that will challenge the media industry and at the same time find work. This means that we need to acknowledge the spiral movements of learning processes through a series of theoretically driven practices and reflections. Our students (future media workers) need to learn media practices through understanding and reflecting over their structural and cultural contexts. And they should embody theoretical understanding of those media practices through multimodal experience-based learning.