Are students allowed to be active producers?

In Finnish schools, students are more than learners; they are active producers of texts. Textual understanding is multi-modal. In other words, students not only need to know how to read and write texts, they also need to be able to produce and understand images, audio and video content, for example. The curricula that set obligations for providers of education to make this versatility clear. In addition to the content of many different subjects, multiliteracy must be improved as a broad and transversal competence in all education.

Date 2018-02-20 Author Finnish Safer Internet Centre
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Based on the Opeka survey conducted at the University of Tampere for teachers, this is not what the reality looks like. Only 17 percent of the nearly 12,000 teachers who responded to the survey agreed at least partially with the claim that "students often produce different types of media contents (such as audio, video and images) in my classes."  Nearly 4,000 respondents fully disagreed, while only 300 fully agreed with this claim. Teachers working with children younger than eight years of age agreed more rarely than all teachers on average. This is startling, considering that especially early education should integrate different subjects.

"It's difficult to know what ‘often' means to different teachers, but how would you react if only less than 20 percent of all teachers said that students often have a pencil in their hand in the classroom?" asks Saara Salomaa, senior advisor at the National Audiovisual Institute (KAVI).

This cannot be fully explained by a lack of equipment, as most Finnish schools are reasonably stocked with ICT equipment. In addition, 70 percent of all teachers who responded to the Opeka survey allow students to use their own devices. This is no rocket science – photos, audio and video can easily be recorded using a mobile phone, which the majority of first-graders own in Finland.

"Teachers may consider it more natural to do everything themselves rather than let their students do it," Salomaa says. After all, most teachers agreed with teacher-driven media education claims, such as "I teach my students to understand and interpret different digital media content" and "I actively guide my students to use digital information services (e.g. Google, Wikipedia, Wolfram|Alpha)." With regard to these two claims, 65 percent of all teachers agreed with the former and 75 percent agreed with the latter claim. There is quite a difference compared to the claim about children's own media production which considers a situation in which students are allowed to work on their own.

However, the sole use of ready-made media content places students only in the role of media consumers. This is a role in which most children and young people are more than enough outside the school. Being a conscious and analytical consumer and audience member is important, but it is not enough. As is stated in the curricula: Study, working life and active citizenship require a command of different types of  knowledge and skills, as well as competence in combining these. "Skills do not improve automatically, and there is no shortcut to learning," says Salomaa. Students can only learn how to write by writing, whether they are writing a conventional or multimodal text.

The exercise bank of the Media Literacy School offers ideas on how working with media can be implemented as a learning tool in schools. The Media Literacy School is maintained by KAVI that is also Finland's Safer Internet Centre coordinator.

Find out more abotu the Finnish Safer Internet Centre on the Better Internet for Kids (BIK) portal.
 

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