Mediated Pedagogies (MERJ Conversation)
Authors: Readman
Conference: Media Education Summit
Dates: 19-20 September 2013
Journal: http://www.cemp.ac.uk/summit/2013/Summit_Programme_2013.pdf
Abstract:Television has always been a place where learning is supposed to place: on-screen through the narrative arcs of particular characters and off-screen in the audience. Despite the existence of a multiplatform media ecology, television continues to function as a public sphere in which our fears, fantasies and anxieties are played out in fictional and non-fictional forms.
And education continues to be a key area of concern, with standards, curriculum reform and ‘NEETS’ all being adduced as evidence of a crisis. On TV we have seen a recent spate of programmes that are explicitly or implicitly concerned with pedagogy, shown in part through titles that include words such as ‘school’, ‘academy’ and ‘scholarship’ and in which the activity of teaching and learning is central.
This MERJ conversation is intended to elicit and develop thoughts around the following questions:
• How are particular pedagogic models and principles represented on television? • What is at stake in these representations? • In what ways do they engage with/respond to recent government ‘reforms’? • What characterises the discursive responses to these programmes? • What is implied about future directions for pedagogy?
Preparatory material will consist of a short paper on Jamie’s Dream School, together with a extract (accessible via Box of Broadcasts), and delegates will be invited to come prepared with comments and talking points about any other relevant programmes.
Areas of focus could include (but are not restricted to):
• Non-fiction programmes in which ‘broken’ learning is ‘fixed’; • Fictional programmes in which ‘learning relationships’ are dramatised; • Instructional programmes which ‘teach’.
Source: Manual