Media and Bildung

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Media and Bildung

• Norm Friesen
• Oulu, May 26, 2009
• nfriesen_at_tru.caw

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• Thompson Rivers University
• Open Learning
• 16,000 students a year
• 52 degree, diploma and certificate programs
  
• 400 courses offered

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• a refereed and free Web-based human science
  journal dedicated to the study of the lived
  experience of human practices, including the
  professional practices of pedagogy, design,
  counseling, psychology, social work and health
  science.
• www.phandpr.org
• Co-editors Norm Friesen Tone Saevi

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Overview

• Rousseaus 3 kinds of Education
• Mollenhauer and presentation
• Media and presentation, socialization, education
  of things
• School and Media media literacy movement
• McLuhan and media Figure and Ground
• unlearning as a media strategy

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Presuppositions Rousseau on Education

• Education comes to us from 1) nature, 2) from
  men, or 3) from things.
• The inner growth of our organs and faculties is
  the education of nature,
• the use we learn to make of this growth is the
  education of men,
• and what we gain by our experience of our
  surroundings is the education of things.

nature
man
things
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Rousseau, continued

• Now of these three factors in education, the
  education of nature is wholly beyond our control
  that of things is only partly in our power the
  education of men is the only one of which we are
  truly the master. And even here our power is
  largely illusory, for who can hope to direct
  every word and action of all those who surround a
  child?

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Rousseau 3 Kinds of Education

• Thus we are each taught by three masters. The
  pupil in whom their diverse lessons conflict is
  poorly raised and will never be in harmony with
  himself he in whom they all agree on the same
  points and tend towards the same ends goes
  straight to his goal and lives consistently. The
  latter is well raised.

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Mollenhauer on Presentation

• Adults are simply "presenting" to children their
  grown-up "behavioural image" unsystematically
  unreflectively.
• this continues today through the way in which we
  habitually "present" ourselves in our most
  frequent but unintended and unreflected
  activities
• This is magnified and distorted in significant
  ways through media

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Media as Socialization

• Media socialize in differentways over time
• Meidation is something thatmakes us human, a
  part of humansociety

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How is Socialization Occuring through these Media?
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Media as Socialization Vygotsky

• The sign represents the paradigmatic tool The
  use of signs leads humans to a specific structure
  of behavior that breaks away from biological
  development and creates new forms of a
  culturally-based psychological process (p. 40).
• Its mediating function is most important
• the central fact about our psychology is the
  fact of mediation
• Media are the means by which children develop or
  are socialized.

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Media, schooling and socialization

• Mollenhauer the groundrules through which
  reality is constructed for children are not
  simply transformed instead, a whole new system
  of rules emerges. The culture is no longer
  presented to the child in its entirety, but only
  in part namely, via a kind of pedagogical
  rehearsal or practise, as it would be for someone
  from a foreign land. This makes certain
  institutions necessary such as schools
  orphanages and kindergartens. (p. 50)

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School as Institution for Print

• The mastery of the alphabet and then mastery of
  all the skills and knowledge that were arranged
  to follow constituted not merely a curriculum but
  a definition of child development. By creating a
  concept of a hierarchy of knowledge and skills,
  adults invented the structure of child
  development And since the school curriculum the
  school curriculum was entirely designed to
  accommodate the demands of literacy
• Education of Man (human education) as a form
  based on print media

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McLuhan on School Media

• The youngster today, stepping out of hisTV
  environment, goes to school and enters a world
  where the information is scarce but is ordered
  and structured by fragmented, classified
  patterns, subjects, schedules. He is utterly
  bewildered because he comes out of this intricate
  and complex integral world of electric
  information and goes into this nineteenth-century
  world of classified information that still
  characterizes the educational establishment The
  young today are baffled because of this
  extraordinary gap between the two worlds.
  (McLuhan 1995, p. 222)

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Student academic learning model Molenda, 2007
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Current Approaches to Media for Pedagogy

• media literacy the terminology and the
  critical arsenal of a previous era of mediality
  (literacy) is directed against what is
  interpreted as a forces in need of active and
  vigorous critique and deconstruction (media).
• Kellner Share contemporary media literacy
  movement which attempts to teach students to
  read, analyze, and decode media texts, in a
  fashion parallel to the advancement of print
  literacy (Media Literacy in the US)

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Current Approaches to Media for Pedagogy

• Giroux the messages and codes that are produced
  by media form a public pedagogy that operates
  in the service of dominant elites and corporate
  ruling interests.
• schooling is fighting the on the side of
  literacy, using the critical resources of print
  as a beachhead in a field otherwise dominated by
  corporatized electronic or digital mass media.

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Balance teaching complimentary things

• Make education of man consonant with this new
  education of things
• Engage in a kind of education of things
• This is not an education either in thesense of
  propelling learning or as aformal pedagogy
  of man

nature
man
things
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Need a way of understanding Media and Bildung

• not an explicit pedagogical critique
• counter the powerful socializing force of
  broadcast media through of a kind of
  counter-socialization.
• not explicitly political and conceptual
• aesthetic and experiential in nature.
• a kind of training of the senses to help
  students get a feel for the more general
  structure and properties of situations.

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McLuhan on Media Education

• Let us begin by wondering just what you are doing
  sitting there at your desk. Here are some
  questions for you to explore. We suggest that you
  divide yourselves into research teams of not more
  than four people, and when you have worked out
  answers to the questions, present your findings
  to the other teams for general discussion. The
  questions and experiments you will find in this
  book are all concerned with important, relatively
  unexplored areas of our social environment. The
  research you choose to do will be important and
  original. (1)

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• The book begins by training students awareness of
  figure and ground, attempting to focus students
  awareness on their pivotal interrelationship
  The interplay between figure and ground is
  'where the action is'. This interplay requires an
  interval or a gap, like the space between the
  wheel and the axle.

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Figure Ground in McLuhan

• focus almost exclusively on cultural, perceptual
  and intellectual manifestations of figure and
  ground.
• Can explain how a communications technology, the
  medium or figure, necessarily operates through
  its context, or ground.
• examine figure (medium) and ground (context)
  together
• Neither is completely intelligible without the
  other

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Figure Ground

• There is no logical connection between figure and
  ground, but there is always a relationship, since
  ground always provides the terms on which a
  figure is experienced. In that relationship,
  meaning (the effect on you) is generated. figure
  and ground are not categories they are tools
  that will help you to discover the structure and
  properties of situations. (21, 31)

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Questions for Students

• As students in a school, do you think you have
  come to work? Or, has schoolwork become a part
  of the work of the community? Or focusing
  specifically on the mediality of the classroom
  How do classrooms affect your learning
  experience?

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An Experiment

• try holding a class in another room. For example,
  go to the teachers lounge where you can arrange
  yourselves in a circle in comfortable chairs.
  Hold a regular class. Towards the end of the
  class period, take a few minutes to talk about
  the differences between your experience in the
  lounge and your experience in a regular classroom.

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Simultaneous Perception of Figure Ground

• This simultaneous perception is, at first, easier
  for some people than for others, because it
  requires a certain amount of 'un-learning' When
  you see all the figures at once, you are
  experiencing the sense of configuration this is
  the sense that an artist brings to bear on
  painting, a satirist on situations...

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• Begin your investigation of any medium by
  making a list of all its forms. Then choose one
  item from your list and experiment with it to get
  a deeper understanding of its characteristics. A
  study of the newspaper, for example, should
  include a number of scissors-and-paste
  experiments to determine how flexible a form the
  newspaper is, which of its elements are essential
  and which can be left out, and what different
  effects it can be made to have on its readers.
  Using similar techniques you can in some
  sense, manipulate any medium to vary the effects
  it produces. (32).

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How is this different than media literacy /
pedagogy?

• solutions not really scholastic or pedagogical
  are do not understanding newer media as
  presenting a kind of coporatist public
  pedagogy to be opposed via critical classroom
  pedagogy.
• address these mediatic forms at the level at
  which they natively operate implicitly, as parts
  of the hidden environment, and as means or
  mechanisms of development and socialization.

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Unlearning

• counter-socialization, its training of the
  senses to give students tools that will help
  them get a feel for the more general structure
  and properties of situations.
• works a level immanent to the opposition/
  interplay of figure and ground
• has as its goal a kind of unlearning in order
  to achieve moments of simultaneous perception.

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Balance teaching complimentary things

• Make education of man consonant with this new
  education of things
• Engage in a kind of education of things
• This is not an education either in thesense of
  propelling learning or aconventional
  pedagogy of man

nature
man
things
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Conclusion?

• Arguably, such an approach is both more feasible
  and more urgent in todays context, with its
  greater manipulability of mediatic elements, and
  its significantly higher degrees of media use and
  penetration.