Media Education: Perspective-Training of Professors and Educators

Pier Cesare Rivoltella – Catholic University of Sacred Heart (UCSC), Milan

[in Educational Innovation: Perspectives of Internationalization, Zhejhang University Press, Hang-

Zo 2007, pp. 17-25]

Summary – 1. Media Educator: a new professional identity for the Information Society – 2. Media educator: identity
and position – 3.

1. MEDIA EDUCATOR: A NEW PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY FOR THE INFORMATION SOCIETY

Many books and articles have already studied Communication Society and its characteristics. Their
principal aim is the indication of the main differences between this Society and the previous ones,
i.e. the Literary Society (Eisenstein, 1983) - structured upon writing and press - and the Oral
Society (Ong, 1982), whose specificity is the centrality of speaking and the importance of memory.
Synthetically, we can outline almost three aspects:
a) first, we define Communication Society a new sort of Society whose environment is made by
electronic and digital media. This new media environment produces some important effects on our
cognition, whose peculiarity is the new role of mediation. In this media environment, are mediated
our experience of the world, our knowledge of history, our interaction with others (Thompson,
1995). This doesn’t imply, like as technological determinism says, that technology set our cognition
creating a new brain frame (de Kerkhove, 1991)), but surely means that most of our social activity
isn’t impossible even if through media and information technologies;
b) this involvement of our social activity with technologies is characterized by a new articulation
of our senses. From this point of view, we can say that if Orality was a culture of the ear (because
listen is in that culture the main social activity) and Literary was a culture of the eye (reading, in
this case, is the most common access to knowledge and shared cultural data), Communication
Society is more particularly characterized by tactile dimension: and this is true both in the case of
music and television (whose language, made of vibrations, talk to our all body and not only to the
ears) than in that of computers, where each cognitive activity is mediated by the manipulation of an
interface device (mouse, touch-screen, and so on);
c) finally, in this society, virtuality and actuality are often overlapped and confused. As well
explained by Levy (1995), it is wrong to oppose virtuality and reality, because in this case it seems
that virtuality doesn’t exist. On the contrary, virtual environments and simulated landscapes inside
them are absolutely real: when we’re playing with videogames Arcade, moving our avatar through
the different levels of the game, we’re doing a real experience; that world isn’t imaginary, it exists
on the screen of my computer and so are real the emotions I feel playing with it. This and other
similar experiences are typical of a new logic, a logic of simulation, that is perfectly concerned with
digital media and take part to the definition of the environment these media are building up.
These and other similar characteristics call for education asking for new competencies both in
pupils and educators. The same mission of the school and other educational institutions is forced to
change.
From the point of view of this paper, that is professors and educators training, the real question is:
What it means to educate in this new environment? Do we need new educative figures? Or it’s
enough to update the traditional ones? And which competencies must they have?
Our proposal is the introduction of a new type of educator, able to work with and about media; we
can name this educator “media educator” and preview his presence in the schools near to teachers
and traditional educators. In the next paragraphs let’s we talk about his role, competencies and
training.

2. MEDIA EDUCATOR: ROLE AND POSITION

We can represent role and position of the media educator like a Cartesian plane into which put, on
the horizontal line, its role (between two extremes, “specialist” and “non specialist”) and, on the
vertical line, its position into the organization with which it is working (cfr. Fig. 1).
 Inside

Specialist Non specialist

Outside

Fig 1 – The role of the media educator

Let’s imagine to apply this schema to the school. It’s easy to individualize where media educator
can position itself.
1) inside the school, the most common situation is that of teachers don’t having any competencies
about media and technologies (non specialists). To accept to have only this kind of teachers fro the
schools means to be unable to give to the students an instruction habilitating them to live into the
Communication Society;
2) this is the reason why, through training on the job and other forms of professional education
(long life learning, masters), schools need to update the media competence of these teachers (non
specialists → specialists). This updating has two main goals: a) to provide all teachers a sufficient
media competence so they can become “media literates”, able to interact with students and with
technologies to be used in the classrooms; b) to provide some teachers a high level formation so
they can coordinate other teachers, becoming leaders in their own institutions;
3) outside the school, often there is people offering his media competencies to the schools. This is
the case of shameless persons that, without real educative or communicative competencies, simulate
to be experts for being contracted by the schools (non specialists);
4) it’s very important distinguish between this so-call experts and real experts able to bring to the
schools their experience and expertness (specialists). This is the case of animators, photographs,
video-makers, proposing to the schools projects and activities whose integration into curricula is
quite easy.
These four cases allow to us to understand what is a media educator recognizing two different roles
for him:
- is not a media educator nor the teacher non specialist inside the school (1), neither the so-
call expert without real competencies outside the school (3);
- we can talk about a “low-profile media educator” in the case of a teacher becoming media
literate and able to make media activities in his classroom (1);
- finally, we talk about a “high-profile media educator” in the case of a teacher specialist
inside the school, or of an expert outside.
A good media education activity probably needs:
- almost a media educator specialist inside the school;
- a great part of media literate teachers;
- some media educators specialist collaborating with school from outside.

3. WHICH COMPETENCIES FOR A MEDIA EDUCATOR?

Once again it is possible to represent graphically the area of competencies that is important the
media educator is able to develop (Fig. 2).

Theory

Communication

Education
Praxis

Fig. 2 – Competencies of the media educator

How it is possible to see, the media educator is a border figure, with an hybrid identity both on the
methodological and disciplinary side.
Methodologically it is very important that a media educator doesn’t exaggerate nor his vocation for
intervention and animation, neither his correct orientation to reflexivity and criticism. According to
me it should be not so good if a media educator were only an animator without a theoric
background about media and education; similarly a media educator only able to make theoric
research and absolutely unable to practice shouldn’t be the professional to which we are thinking
about.
From the disciplinary point of view, it should be very important that media educator knows either
media and education, synthesizing competencies owned since nowadays by communicators or
educators.
Let’s see in particular these competencies:
1) competencies in theory of communication. At this level media educator must know the
conceptual framework of Communication Research, particularly the effects theories and the
reception theories. Moreover he must study media languages and process paying attention to
aesthetics, economy and politics of the media;
2) competencies in communication practice. Here the main competence of the media educator
concerns analysis and its methodology. This means to develop almost two kind of skills: a) textual
analysis (from the different point of view: semiotic, narrative, pragmatic, content, etc.); b) reception
analysis (in this case the methodology is centered on audience and its practices of consumption and
not on text and its characters). Moreover is very important that media educator is also able to work
with media, producing texts and messages (such s in video making or in multimedia production);
3) competencies in theory of education. Belong to this area methodology and didactics. On the first
side is very important for a media educator to be able to develop a research (particularly an action-
research) and to build a project. Didactics is important on the other side because it suggests to
media educator tools and strategies for working into the classrooms, particularly: group-work,
collaborative and cooperative strategies, image-based activities;
4) competencies in education practice. Finally here we must have three areas of competencies:
project making, tutoring and evaluation. Particularly this last activity is very important and quite
difficult in the case of media education because the traditional assessment tools are insufficient and
it is important to develop new tools and new situation (authentic assessment. check-lists,
portfolios).
Finally here we have a wide-range area of competencies that makes really difficult to imagine a
training for such figures like these.
4. A TRAINING FOR MEDIA EDUCATORS: GUIDELINES FROM AN EXPERIENCE
According to the observations we already made in the previous paragraphs, it is now possible to
imagine a proposal for media educators training. This proposal is built upon a seven years
experience developed at the Catholic University of Milan where since 1998 we organize an
academic Master in Media Education. Culture and Profession for Multimedia Education. The new
edition of this Master (a..a. 2006/07) is going to be recognized by European Union becoming more
international with the participation of Universidad Libera de Catalunya (Barcelona, Spain) and
Universidade do Minho (Braga, Portugal). This option will make possible mobility of students and
teachers in the different universities and will allow the participation to the Maser also to latino-
american students through two conventions with the Catholic University of Santiago (Chile) and the
federal Universitu of Santa Catarina (Florianopolis, Brazil).
The proposal of the Master is based on three main focuses.
The first is concerning the contents of the training; in this case the attention is to the aspects we talk
about in the previous paragraph taking care to communication and education framework and, on the
other side, to theory and practice.
Second, I think it’s important that training concerns both research and animation. Educating a media
educator always means giving to him methodologies and tools for research; among these
methodologies and tools we think particularly to ethnographic methodologies (focus group,
interview, field observation), action-research (Elliott, 1991), visual analysis (such as projective
analysis of draws and images). But this training research-centered shouldn’t be exclusive; it is also
very important that a media educator is able to work in the classroom and in this case he needs of
some animation techniques: story-telling, role-playing, simulation, group-work.
Finally, it is very important to think about didactics (Fig 3).

Cinque aule dell’e-learning Tre modelli di Valiathan

aula Vdc Corso OL community Virtual group Skill-driven Attitude-driven Competency-

driven

Situazione

Modalità
Obiettivo

Fig 3 – Didactics for media educator training

In our master we choose to focus on three main indicators: situation, modalities, objectives.
Situation, in didactics, concerns the setting of educative action. Particularly, in a blended education
perspective, it means to split teaching and learning through almost two contexts: the classroom, in
intensive week-ends (Friday p.m., Saturday), with lessons and group activities; an on line course,
with the availability of contents and activities into a Learning Management System (Blackboard in
the case of our University) allowing people to be connected and working about contents between
one intensive week end and the other.
Naturally we can “fill” each didactical situation with different teaching/learning modalities. In the
case of the Master these modalities are almost three:
a) videoconference, for connecting students in different sites (each lesson in videoconference is
edited in Show-and-tell and available in Blackboard);
b) community, that means the discussion among students and teachers is one of the main learning
sources when we talk about adult training, particularly about media education;
c) virtual group, allowing the discussion among students is becoming a real space of elaboration and
production, particularly papers and final project works.
The objective, in the case of media educators, is developing a competency-driven training system.
According to Valiathan (2002), it is possible to distinguish almost three models in blended learning,
whose difference depends from the objective of teacher/learning action:

• skill-driven learning, which combines self-paced learning with instructor or facilitator support to develop
specific knowledge and skills
• attitude-driven learning, which mixes various events and delivery media to develop specific behaviors
• competency-driven learning, which blends performance support tools with knowledge management resources
and mentoring to develop workplace competencies.

The third model, as it is possible understand, is the better if we pretend to develop a reflective
competence such as media educator competence; this means to pay attention to three main
processes: explicititation and problematization of tacit competencies; development of reflection;
development of competence of competencies (that means to know when and why use one of them).
These three processes make possible the student is elaborating his knowledge developing Critical
thinking and meta-competencies and gradually passing from skills to competencies and from a tacit
to an explicit knowledge. This is also the road to a reflective learning (Fig. 3).
 competence

Critical
thinking

reflective learning

skill
Implicit learning

tacit Metacompetencies explicit

Fig. 3 – Competence-driven model

Bibliography

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