Making Media Visible in Teacher Education

The ability to create and read different kinds of media products is seen as an important skill for citizenship. In Finland media education (in communicational education) has been taken into the official curriculum as a cross-curriculum subject in 1994 at the primary school level, after the first finnish dissortation in media education had been published (Härkönen 1994). At the same time finnish schools got more authority to make their own curriculums. Since then media education has played bigger and bigger part in these curriculums. In primary school teacher education, it was quite silent in this theme area until 1995, when visual media education begun as an experiment with ministerial funding in the University of Tampere. To evaluate this course is now current, when developing media education in Finland. The experimental course, 35 credit points of visual media education, was organized co-operatively with the Department of Primary school teacher education and the Department of Journalism and Masscommunication in the University of Tampere. 15 student teachers and in-service teachers attended the course. The focus of my research is on evaluating the experimental course: what kind of understanding do these student teachers acquire about media education? Media broadens the learning environment out of the university to the personal environment concerning also the childhood and thoughts about the future. I am focusing on the development of the students as media consumers and as media teachers. Media educational course needs evaluation which can take account both private and public factors and the communicative nature of action which it emphasizes. That means also new kinds of evaluative techniques (see also Buckinham & SeftonGreen 1994). In this case the critical evaluative approach in teacher education is communicative evaluation (more Niemi 1996) and the method is educational media lifestudy. In media education, visual and written autobiographies has been used also as a method in learning (for ex. Buckingham & Sefton-Green 1994). Educational media lifestudy is the main means to evaluate the student teachers’ and in-service teachers’ development during the course. Here I have examples from two lifestudies, a male student teacher and a female in-service teacher. It is also interesting, what kind of evaluative knowledge can educational media lifestudy provide?