Media education as a key discipline?!
Due to digitalisation, life worlds are now subject to ever greater dynamics. Under such conditions of constant change, educational and participation opportunities in school and training, study and employment as well as in everyday leisure are closely linked to the ability to understand, select, use and - again using suitable media - communicate and process information conveyed by the media. On the one hand, media education as a science of reflection and action is required to assess mediatisation processes with regard to determining factors, current effects and emerging future developments on an individual and societal level and to discuss them from an educational point of view (reflection aspect). On the other hand, it is important to actively shape pedagogically relevant structures and processes in connection with media (action aspect) (Pietraß 2018, 12; DGfE Sektion Medienpädagogik Deutsche Gesellschaft für Erziehungswissenschaft 2017, 2). Media education, according to the leading thesis of the volume, has the role of a key discipline within an increasingly digitalised and mediatised world.
Reason for the publication of the book
The anthology was written on the occasion of the 60th birthday of Prof. Dr. Dorothee M. Meister, who heads the Department of Media Education and Empirical Media Research at the University of Paderborn. A central concern of her academic work is to advance media education both through theory development and empirical research and through the further development of media education practice. To this end, she combines educational science and specifically media education perspectives with those of educational practice and educational policy in her projects and publications. Dorothee M. Meister's commitment is reflected in her extensive activities in research and teaching at all her places of work - Bielefeld, Halle a. d. Saale, Tübingen and Paderborn. She has always taken up and continues to take up highly topical areas of discussion in order to develop and work on new questions relevant to media education against this background. Recent examples include the education policy debate on refugees (Meister 2017) and most recently the discussion on distance education in the wake of the Corona pandemic (Gerhardts et al. 2020). Furthermore, the professionalisation of media education is close to Dorothee M. Meister's heart: Thus, she repeatedly draws attention to the special significance of media education expertise and pleads for media education to be systematically anchored in degree programmes as well as in the training and further education of educational professionals (Meister 2018; Knaus, Meister, and Tulodziecki 2018; Kamin and Meister 2019). Her academic work is also flanked by extensive professional-political activities: for example, her work on the board and as chair of the Gesellschaft für Medienpädagogik und Kommunikationskultur (GMK) e.V. (Society for Media Education and Communication Culture), her membership in the Deutscher Kulturrat (German Cultural Council), her collaboration in the initiative "Keine Bildung ohne Medien" (No Education without Media) and her work on the board of the DGfE's Media Education Section. Important and lasting impulses for the digitisation of studies and teaching came from her work as Vice-President of the University of Paderborn as well as her collaboration in the Higher Education Forum on Digitisation. The contributions in this book reflect Dorothee M. Meister's research and other focal points in terms of content and methodology.
The editors have been associated with Dorothee M. Meister for a long time and in a very special way: be it through their supervision in the context of dissertation projects, through writing joint publications or collaboration in research projects. She shows her guidance, support and appreciation in these contexts in many ways. We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere thanks to Dorothee M. Meister.
Structure of the book
The book is divided into four thematic sections:
Six contributions are grouped under the heading "Theoretical Discourses and Theory Development in Media Education". The first contribution is by Christian Swertz on the value of media in media pedagogical biographies. The contributions by Horst Niesyto as well as Sonja Ganguin, Johannes Gemkow and Rebecca Haubold deal with the concept of media criticism, which is constitutional for media education. Bianca Burgfeld-Meise deals with the change of media education cultures. Theo Hug's contribution is an examination of mobile learning. The block concludes with an essay by Renate Möller and Uwe Sander on myths in film and youth.
In the following section, "Current Tasks of Media Education", Henrike Friedrichs-Liesenkötter and Friederike von Gross (Social Media in the Transition from Childhood to Youth), Johannes Magenheim (Big Data) and Charlotte Echterhoff and Sonja Kröger (OER) address current social phenomena and phenomena relevant to media education.
The third section, "Media Education Professionalisation and Quality Assurance in Media Education Practice and Research", comprises six contributions: Thomas Kurtz deals with the professional development of media education. Anna-Maria Kamin deals with the further development of development and design-oriented research. Another methodological contribution is provided by Lara Gerhardts, who presents empirical procedures for recording ways of dealing with the Internet and compares them with regard to their knowledge potential for media education research. Lukas Dehmel's contribution deals with the professionalisation of adult education staff in media education. Gerhard Tulodziecki and Silke Grafe address the field of teacher education in their contribution on competence expectations for teachers; as do Bardo Herzig and Alexander Martin, who deal with the relationship between media education and subject didactics.
The last section of the book comprises three contributions that deal with media pedagogy and higher education development. Diana Bücker and Iris Neiske outline perspectives on the connection between e-learning and higher education didactics. The field of e-teaching competences is taken up by Niclas Schaper. The final contribution is by Marcel Graf-Schlattmann, Gudrun Oevel and Melanie Wilde, who present the results of the E-Assessment NRW project co-initiated and led by Dorothee M. Meister.
A more detailed summary of the contributions can be found in the respective abstracts and the video statements.
We would like to thank all authors for their committed participation and successful contributions to this commemorative publication. The authors include many of Dorothee M. Meister's companions. All contributions underwent a peer coaching process in the sense of quality assurance.
Last but not least, we wish all readers a stimulating read - especially Dorothee M. Meister, of course, together with best wishes for her birthday!
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)