media literacy in the curriculum
Media literacy is one of the integrating principles in Austrian education. It is specifically named in the media education policy decree of the Federal Ministry for Education, the Arts and Culture. As a part of media pedagogy, media education has been an educational principle since 1973. The goal of the current decree (2001) is to generate measures that critically and analytically integrate both the traditional mass media and the new media, particularly the Internet, into education.
ORDINANCE GOVERNING THE PRINCIPLES OF MEDIA EDUCATION
Media rule our private sphere as much as our working life. The
technical facilities for multiplication, transfer and networking
are gaining ever greater influence on the “natural”
environment of pupils and students; they are part of their reality,
their world. Education should accompany and encourage the children
and adolescents in their relations to the world/reality.
The share that the media have in our experience of the world/reality
is constantly growing – a new dimension of reality has been
created by the emergence of highly developed technologies. Considering
that a reflective encounter and discourse with realities is a
fundamental part of the science of education, the conclusion is
that media pedagogy should become a much more integrated part
of pedagogy. Pedagogy must double as media pedagogy.
Media experience by way of language, images, drawings, books,
theatre plays, etc. has indeed long contributed to shaping human
reality. The sheer extent to which these media helped to form
our reality/view of the world has, however, been virtually ignored
in the teacher training system. The fact that and the means how
“language” as a basic medium is instrumental in the
establishment of reality, is only now entering subject-specific
didactics. Similar considerations apply to the audio-visual media.
The process of mass communication through mass media has made
it possible to transmit the same message to an infinite number
of recipients over a geographical and/or temporal distance. With
this, the media open up opportunities for global communication,
a cosmopolitan outlook and the ongoing development of democracy,
yet they also harbour the danger of greater manipulation. The
reality changed by and changing through the media is a challenge
and an opportunity at the same time. Within the meaning of media
policy knowledge, media education is a discourse not only on the
causes, effects and types of media communication, but also on
the various interests which determine the choice and content of
information and the method of its communication.
In view of the challenge posed by the electronic media, school
needs even more to face up to the need to contribute to educating
human beings who are able to communicate and to arrive at a judgment
of their own, to enkindle creativity and pleasure in own creations,
and – within the scope of the “media education”
educational principle – to encourage individuals in finding
their focus in society and a constructive-critical approach to
experiences to which they are exposed.
In order to clearly identify these objectives of media education,
it is necessary to define all terms used for media in a school
environment as well as customary names for subjects linked with
media work.
2.1. Media pedagogy includes all issues
concerning the pedagogical importance of media in education, leisure
and work. It looks into the contents and functions of media, their
forms of utilisation in these areas and their individual as well
as social impact. In view of the complexity of the term, it is
useful to subdivide the complex of media pedagogy as follows:
2.1.1. Media didactics: covers
the functions and effects of media in teaching and learning processes.
The use of audio-visual media in their role as teaching materials
should be decided with due account given to the educational and
teaching task, the curriculum, and the didactic principles of
the respective subject.
Media are tools to achieve subject-specific objectives (education
by media).
2.1.2. Media education: a
type of pedagogical utilisation of the media intended to teach
the critical-reflective use of all media. Where media become important
for human socialisation as a means of information, entertainment,
education and day-to-day organisation, they become the subject
of media education – the media are the subject and object
of education (education on media).
Media education concerns all communication media and their combinations
made possible by the so-called New Media. These communication
media are constituent parts of all texts, regardless of the technology:
the word, printed/spoken, graphics, sound, stills and moving pictures.
The so-called New Media (including the Internet), being developments
and combinations of the above modules, are essentially technologies
that serve their distribution and have an effect on several social
dimensions. Critical reflection on the possible effects is also
included in media education.
The potential to combine data of all kinds into gigantic information
networks and to make use of these both in a working and a domestic
environment, i.e. to obtain, access and process them, causes the
boundaries to be blurred between individual and mass communication,
between the book and newspaper markets, between entertainment
and business communication. It is especially in the New Media
segment that media education is confronted with new issues concerning
its autonomous critical use.
3. OBJECTIVES OF MEDIA EDUCATION
Before launching
into a discussion of some fields of media education, it seems
necessary to define the term “media
competence” within the meaning of this Ordinance:
Media competence as an objective of media-pedagogical work includes
not just the skills to handle the technical side but, even more,
skills such as the ability to select, differentiate, structurise
and recognise own needs, etc. It is in particular when using the
so-called New Media that issues of individual and social relevance
emerge in a media-education context which range beyond the mere
use of the media for a specific field.
Examples: What does the sheer volume of information mean for the
human capacity to process information? What processes of selection,
structurisation and professionalisation need to be put in place?
How can the credibility and reliability of information be safeguarded?
What are the implications of media convergence? How does content
convergence, i.e. the mixture of games and movies, objective information
and emotive elements, etc. mean for processing? What is the reference
frame that we use for computer simulation? What are the consequences
of mixing borderlines and blurring the contents of the terms “real–virtual–fictional”?
3.1. Media use: By offering critical
insights into the phenomena of communication, media education
should guide pupils/students to media activities that are both
conscious and participatory to the extent possible within the
relevant life situation. Media activities require that people
are active in any communication situation involving media. This
means that they negotiate their own importance in a given interaction
during their media use. Accordingly, media education, starting
out from the pupil’s/student’s personal disposition
and with due regard to his/her linguistic abilities, should include
not only the cognitive but also the affective field. It should
help the pupil/student to rethink his/her own role expectations
and recognise his/her own communication needs and deficits.
Pupils/students should also realise and experience that the mass
media intentionally arouse the need for consumer-oriented behaviour.
They should realise that new types of individual and mass communication
extend their options for active participation in economic, political
and cultural life. And they should realise and experience that
the electronic media have a substantial contributive impact on
the personal leisure time organisation and behaviour. In this
respect, reference should be made to the close links between the
leisure-time and entertainment industry and the mass media with
a view to the development of typical behavioural patterns.
3.2. Communication with and through the media: Media education
should enable pupils/students to manage in a world about which
they are mostly informed by the media. They should be made to
realise that the media contribute significantly to their political
judgement. They should realise that the expansion of communication
technologies provides more opportunities for humans to express
themselves and participate in political life by “direct”
democracy through the pressing of a button, and provides better
political information, better information from government authorities,
while at the same time they should find out that the communication
media, through encouraging passivity, keep people from direct
participation in political life, distract them from political
conflicts and expose them to political manipulation from well-financed
interest groups. They should learn how to use media to arrive
at a critical judgement and thus strengthen their own competence
for action. They should experience that the media create their
own reality, not just as a mediator of fictitious worlds, but
also in projecting an image of reality. Yet the pupils/students
should realise that this managed reality cannot be neutral in
its values. They should recognise the structure, design and effect
of the various types of media, such as movies, transparencies,
etc., and they should understand which content is chiefly transported
by which media. They should be made aware that identical contents
are presented differently and thus have different effects.
Media education should raise awareness for the frequently biased
and cliché-ridden presentation of social and gender roles
by the media. Pupils/students should become sensitised to the
issue of the extent to which the media are realistic in their
presentation of every-day life situations (e.g. relations between
women and men, between employees and bosses, between young and
old, etc.). They should realise that social- and gender-specific
roles are subject to stereotyping.
Even though the media cannot on their own effect a change in the
understanding of the role distribution prevailing in our society,
they are still important in influencing and enlightening the public.
By reflecting certain values, they contribute to maintaining mainstream
value conceptions and may either strengthen or weaken ideas, models
and views.
3.3. Media as an economic factor or mass
media as an institution:
The pupils/students should realise that economic, technical, social
and ideological prerequisites as well as different organisational
structures (under public law or as private enterprises) necessitate
certain types of production or distribution, as well as certain
criteria for the selection and representation of the contents
disseminated. In this context, reference can be made to the types
of procurement of news items, to the financing by user fees and
advertising, and to the tension between imported and local media
products. Similarly, treatment should also be accorded to the
role of advanced public relations activities as a partner and
supplier of information to the media. Modern public relations
activities provide, i.a., an open and long-term dialogue between
fractions in society (business, politics, science, social affairs,
sports, etc.) and the media. In this context, concepts such as
independence, objectivity, credibility, plurality of opinions,
manipulation, etc. should be critically analysed.
3.4. Own media creations:
Within the context of learning to act and to experience, the pupils/students
should be encouraged to work on their own media products within
the scope of media education. Yet regardless of the merits of
own productions for a variety of learning objectives, they do
not yet constitute media education. It is only when practical
work is combined with critical reflection on the production process
that we can talk about media-pedagogical work. Such reflection
may, i.a., refer to the experience collected in social matters,
the creation of a momentousness that underlies media work, etc.
This is to ensure that media work will lead to the conscious gain
of insights.
4.1. General
Considering that the topics discussed in the
media touch upon all fields of understanding and action, media
education is not limited to individual subjects or age groups.
Rather, each teacher is obliged to consider them as an educational
principle in all subjects with due regard to the relevant subject,
as is provided for in the curricula.
For this, project-oriented teaching methods are recommended.
In doing so, integrating the mass media in teaching must not be
seen as simply using the media as an impulse for teaching a specific
subject or as an illustration of the presentation of a subject.
Rather, in using and examining the media, awareness should be
raised on how they influence our view of the world and how this
impacts on social and political decision-making.
It is especially because the media appear to depict the world
so spontaneously and naturally that the following should always
be included in our thoughts:
Media are never neutral vessels of information. The images, which
we think are depictions of reality, are actually shaped, professionally
constructed – and this is why their decoding requires a
high potential of media competence. Similarly in the natural sciences
– which are assigned a high degree of objectiveness in the
traditional discourse – the key questions (who informs whom
of what, and with what intention?), which we use to dissect media
texts, are of eminent importance – and they should be applied
just the same as in media texts which are clearly and obviously
“made”.
Critical media analysis does not obstruct – as is often
feared by practitioners of didactics – the subject-specific
information content of the media. Quite on the contrary: dealing
with the interfaces between the subject-specific contents and
the mediation share contributed by the medium adds significantly
to the degree of media competence as well as to the subject-specific
knowledge yield. The insight that even those audio-visual media
that are specially designed for teaching cannot be objective,
shakes the belief in the rightness and truth of other media (such
as e.g. school textbooks). Thinking of concepts such as truth
or rightness will lead to the questioning of the seemingly naturalness
and obviousness of many images which suggest an authentic truth.
Similarly, the use of audio-visual teaching aids, which is absolutely
necessary to ensure modern and effective teaching, cannot be accounted
for as media education, unless their media-specific properties
are discussed beyond the technical side of their use. Thus, next
and in addition to the technical content of the medium, consideration
should be given to whether and to what extent interests pursued
by the media producers will affect the content and arrangement
of what is offered.
Media education shall, as a rule, be offered to all age groups,
in line with the intellectual development of the pupils/students.
4.2. Examples of implementation
4.2.1. Combination with the curriculum
The 99 curriculum (for the Hauptschule or general
secondary school) considers the importance of the media in today’s
world already in its preamble: “Innovative technologies
of information and communication and the mass media increasingly
penetrate all spheres of life.”
In addition, the division into education sectors, emphasis on
cross-linked and cross-disciplinary teaching and the importance
of references to the “lifeworlds” offer a number of
approaches to implementing media education:
“Pursuant to Section 17 of the School Teaching Act, teaching
shall be based on scientific insights as well as on the experience
and capabilities that the pupils/students provide from their own
life.” and
“Considering that all subjects are intended to have a common
educational effect, teaching shall take into account the subject-specific
of individual subjects and cross-disciplinary and cross-linked
aspects networked with them. This corresponds to the networking
and mutual complementing of disciplines and aims to help pupils/students
in handling the challenges of day-to-day life.”
With regard to the educational subjects, explicit reference should
be made to the fields of “language and communication”
and “creativity and creation”:
“In each subject, the pupils/students shall be enabled to
use and extend their cognitive, emotional, social and creative
capacities by and through the language – including, without
limitation, image language.” and “Expressing, verbally
and nonverbally, ideas and emotions is an essential life form
of human beings. Pupils/students shall be given opportunities
to gather creative experience themselves and to associate it with
cognitive insights through approaches that make use of the senses.”
4.2.2. Exemplary proposals
4.2.2.1. Pre-school education, primary school
(1st to 4th forms)
In addition to the core areas of the subjects
“German”, “Art Education” and “Technical
Education”, the entire curriculum is suitable for integrating
the educational principle. Discussing and comparing the children’s
own observations and experience with secondary experience obtained
from the media leads to greater awareness of the specific properties
of individual media and the resulting effects. Subject areas to
be considered will be both media products that specifically address
children of primary school age (e.g. kid programmes on TV, magazines
for kids, “kid pages” in magazines, comic strips,
Internet pages for kids, computer games and educational software)
and media products which, while not produced specifically for
children of that age group, are actually consumed by them. Through
encouraging self-action and insights into the characteristic properties
of the media, the pupils/students should be enabled to acquire
experience of their own in producing media.
4.2.2.2. Special school for the handicapped
(1st to 9th forms)
Media education is of particular importance
in the special schools: on the one hand, disabilities frequently
restrict the children in collecting direct experience, which should
be at least partly compensated by the use of media. On the other
hand, for many types of disabilities, the media have an important
role in bridging communication barriers (e.g. in physically or
mentally impaired children). Media education in this wider sense
of the word thus links special-needs-related tasks and objectives
with those concerns of media education which are addressed to
disabled pupils/students in their role as media consumers.
The curricula of special schools include numerous concrete approaches
to considering both aspects. These range from subfields of subjects
(e.g. photography and film/video in Art Education) to a detailed
syllabus (e.g. newspaper, film and TV in History and Sociology).
4.2.2.3. General secondary school, academic
secondary school (5th to 8th forms)
The syllabus for German and Art Education (general
secondary school, academic secondary school) explicitly makes
reference to media education. Additional ways to approach the
field are observations on the expressive values of linguistic
and non-linguistic forms of expression, training in the ability
to obtain information on facts for oneself and provide it to others,
and role playing.
At this occasion it should be pointed out again that media education
should start out, especially and particularly in this age group,
from personal media experience, observations and habits of the
pupils/students, and should lead to self-reflection.
4.2.2.4. Medium- and higher-level schools,
pre-vocational school and vocational school (9th to 12th/13th
forms)
Pre-vocational schools include media education
in their syllabuses for the subjects of Vocational Information
and Life Guidance, German, Project Work and in subjects chosen
from a compulsory group. The syllabuses in the curriculum of medium-
and higher-level schools contain numerous mentions of key subjects
of media education. The role and value of the media may be discussed
in the various subjects, chiefly in (cross-disciplinary) project
work (e.g. media as an economic factor, advertising as an economic
factor, the aesthetics of advertising, the language of advertising,
public relations activities as a tool for dialogue, economic and
social policy functions and the role of p.r. activities, opportunities
and risks of strategic p.r. activities for shaping the published
and public opinion, concepts and tools of p.r. activities) for
the subjects of German, Art Education and Economics. In the teaching
of German, a comparative discussion of literary works and the
movies made of them may indicate the possibilities and limits
of the two art categories. In the teaching of History, Sociology
and Contemporary History, audio-visual media may be considered
in terms of their role as source material, but also in their development
and impact on society. In the teaching of Psychology and Philosophy,
issues of journalistic ethics, the psychology of mass communication,
perception-psychological issues, or opinion-forming and manipulating
processes may be discussed. In the teaching of Physics and Chemistry,
the technical basis of phonography and photography, of radio and
TV broadcasting and problems of communications engineering may
be dealt with.
4.3. Media knowledge in
the stricter sense of the word covers that part of media education
which informs about media, their development, organisation and
structures. In terms of the school, it is the name given to a
non-mandatory practical course held, e.g., at academic secondary
schools. For more details on its contents see the relevant curricula
as amended.
4.4. Media didactics is
a term also used, within the meaning of the plans of studies for
the teacher training colleges, technical and vocational teacher
training colleges and colleges to train religious instructors,
to name a subject that unites the objectives of media didactics
(cf. 2.1.1.) and media education (cf. 2.1.2.).
4.5. Teaching technology is
applied, according to the plan of studies at the teacher training
colleges, to teaching the skills and basic technical know-how
to handle audio-visual equipment and systems, combined with information
on the proper use of media hard- and software in teaching. The
skills thus taught are a prerequisite for creative work with the
media.
4.6. The custodian
entrusted with managing the audio-visual teaching materials should,
in addition to bearing responsibility for, taking the initiative
on and making proposals for the collection and expansion of the
materials under his/her custody (Section 52 of the School Teaching
Act SchUG), provide technical support to media education projects.
4.7. Within the
meaning of Section 62 of the SchUG (close co-operation between
teachers and parents in all issues of education and school), the
parents should be invited to participate in the educational work,
especially with regard to media education. Media consumption,
habits and effects should be discussed at parents’ evenings;
further activities (school events, etc.) may be proposed at the
school community committee.
4.8. Outside school,
guiding pupils/students toward responsible media consumption is
a critical task in the collaboration between educators and pupils/students.
4.9. School events
may be organised, also with the participation of non-school organisations,
in accordance with the Ordinance governing school events. The
costs accruing to the pupils/students from such school events
(e.g. entrance tickets, travel costs) must be both economical
and reasonable. Financial considerations must always take second
place to pedagogical considerations: thus, financial considerations
must not lead to showing movies suitable for certain age groups
also to other (usually younger) pupils/students for cost reasons.
4.10. Within the
scope of continuous teacher training, the responsible school authority
shall make provision for workshops and lectures (shows) both on
the use of audio-visual teaching materials and on the problems
of media education to be offered to the teachers of all subjects
and types of schools. In order to achieve the most intense training
of teachers, it is recommended to establish a focus on media education
at the teacher training colleges.
This Ordinance shall become effective on 20 November 2001.
Upon this Ordinance entering into force, the Ordinance
ZL 33.223/14-V/13b/94 of 20 April 1994 shall become neffective.
Vienna, 20 November 2001
The Federal Minister: Gehrer
Ordinance of the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Culture
GZ 48.223/14-Präs. 10/01, Circular no. 64/01
Responsible for the content: Susanne Krucsay