 Hi, today we talk about media literacy. How can it support people of diverse backgrounds to have equal chances of benefiting from the media? Cidem Bosda from the University of Bremen in Germany and University of Groningen in the Netherlands presents the findings of the research project called Included, focused on media education in a secondary school in Germany. I'm Bruderik Silva, let's talk about media and communication. Cidem, welcome to our episode. Hi, hello. A bit obvious to who's listening to us, but why is this topic, why is media literacy and in particular at the topic of your research so important? Thank you. I think looking at the society that we live in today, looking at the degree of digitalization, the importance of digital media technologies in our lives, we need to pay attention to existing and emerging inequalities that interfere with this digital society. So how are the chances of different groups, different communities for being able to participate within this digital society? Actually, this is the broader question that we need to address. And more specifically, my interest is looking at marginalized youth who are living in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods and culturally diverse neighborhoods whose families might have migration background or who themselves might have migrated to a new country, looking at these young people and how they are actually navigating in the digital society, how they are developing certain strategies to deal with digital society and digital communication and what their needs are. This is important to understand so that we can move from here to helping them, to improving their skills, to understanding also their strengths, not just looking at the deficits, but also the skills and the backgrounds that they can bring into the digital society, recognizing this as a potential as well. And the second question, of course, here is looking at the schools and what schools can do for digital inclusion and how they can help these marginalized young people for becoming better included in the digital society. And that's why also the project has acronym included as a title. And this project is actually a participatory action research designed as a participatory action research. And it is supported by the Mariska Kodowska Q-reactions of the Horizon 2020 program of the EU. And it has been continuing since August 2019. And the field research took place in Bremen in a secondary school, like you mentioned, which is located in a very diverse and poorer neighborhood of Bremen. And the project is based at the University of Bremen. And that's how I also have this double affiliation. Thank you. I think this context's background on the included project is important also for the conversation ahead. So when you started this research, what were you hoping to find? What was the research gap that you were trying to fill? As I was writing the proposal for this research project, I was looking at the literature on digital inclusion and digital inequalities. And I also realized here that there is really a gap. At least at that time point, there was a bigger gap on studies related to migration, migration background, cultural diversity, and digital inequalities. Various factors such as gender, socioeconomic background, education level were studied more than factors related to migration, ethnicity, cultural background. So that was one starting point. And also, I was really interested in understanding how schools can better support the people. Because what I see, especially in the context of Germany, but also looking at many other countries, is that schools are really lagging behind in terms of supporting young people, children, for developing their digital literacy. So these two ideas came together, in a sense, within this project, trying to understand how we can bring together the needs of the young people with diverse backgrounds and socioeconomic disadvantages together with what schools can do. And also, there are not many qualitative studies on digital inequalities. There are more and more nowadays. But as I started the project, I think that was more emerging. And I designed this project as a participatory action research, because I was not just interested in finding out what the young people in these diverse neighborhoods were doing with the digital media. That was the first aim of the project. But also going beyond that, trying to develop solutions, trying to develop interventions together with the people from the field, from the community. And what I did in a concrete sense throughout this project was I started with participatory observations in the school. I visited the school several times. And then I started doing teacher interviews and focus groups with the students. And then the pandemic started. The fieldwork continued throughout the pandemic through school closures, a hybrid education, online education, back to school, back to online. So it was an adventure in that sense for me as well. But I was really lucky to have teachers supporting me, supporting this project, really innovative, open-minded teachers working with me on this. So it ended up being a bit of a different project throughout the pandemic. But also, again, looking at the digital inequalities throughout the pandemic, which was a central topic, trying to understand how also these young people who are lacking material resources, partly, trying to adapt to online education, for example. Throughout this field research, with the analysis of the materials, we identified together with a teacher from the school, we identified topics that could be interested for teaching scenarios for media literacy education that could also help the students to develop their skills further and to bring the topic of digital media into the school curriculum. This whole field work took over a year, I think, around 15 months in 2019 and in 2020. And in the second half of the project, we developed selected, we selected certain topics and we developed teaching content and applied them in the school context, in one classroom in the eighth grade with young people who are 15 years old. And this particular article that we are discussing today that was published in media and communication, that also deals with one topic selected from these teaching modules as well as a case study. Of course, a good background. And with the pandemic, complexifying the study, let us know about the top findings of your research. Having mentioned that this article that we are discussing focuses on one subtopic within the whole project. I should also mention that the project included looks at several dimensions. For example, the general embedding of digital media in the everyday lives of young people, its importance in their leisure time, its importance in their studies, but also role of schools in integrating digital media education in the curriculum, teachers' perceptions of young people's media use. So these are other topics that the project is dealing with. But in this particular article, I looked at the topic of influencers, social media influencers, which came out to be a very central topic for the young people that I was doing the focus groups with. So over and over again, they were coming back to this topic, discussing what different influencers were posting on Instagram, on TikTok, for example, what they were going through, discussing their lifestyles, discussing their life stories, for example, in relation to several topics, using words that were used by these influencers and so on and so forth. So having seen this, I suggested to the teacher that we were developing the teaching content with that we take this as a central topic for one of the teaching modules. And I think that influencers can be a central topic for discussing, for example, the political economy of social media, the algorithmic curation, the power relations, the representations and also the cultural diversity because looking at the influencers that the different students in the school were mentioning, you could already see that they were really following closely the influencers who had similar cultural backgrounds. For example, the German Turkish youngsters, they were mentioning this very famous influencer Frant Elvito, among other influencers as a very important figure in their lives. And it was interesting to see, they also chose him as part of their assignment. So what we did as we were developing the teaching module was, we wanted to design it in a bottom-up manner so that this diversity could be included in the class discussions. And we wanted to give room to the students for explaining why they find influencers so interesting, what they find very interesting here. And we gave them the task of doing a presentation using also the iPads that were distributed through the pandemic. So that's another chapter within the research project. I will not go into the detail of, but we also wanted them to use these devices, these new devices for developing their skills further, but also at the same time, they were asked to present their favorite influencers, showing us why these people are important, what they find interesting about them. And we gave them some guiding questions and they were free to choose the influencer that they were interested in. This already created interesting discussions about who an influencer is. That was not part of their jargon, for example, that they were not using the word influencer. So it was already this discussion about what we were trying to make them, what we are trying to do with this assignment was already very interesting and showed that we use different vocabulary with these young people. And also the teachers did not know. And the teachers partly did not know who the influencers were. I think this is also a matter of age partly, but also this Frat Elvito, for example, with German-Turkish background. He is very well known in certain communities, but I think also not very well known when you look at the mainstream media scape in Germany. So it's an important alternative in that sense for these young people as an alternative representation of identity, for example, alternative representations about gender roles, cultural background, family relationships. And these were all discussions that went on throughout the focus groups. So what we did is take this topic and do these presentations. And based on these presentations in the classroom, we opened the space for discussions about influencers, about social media, a critical discussion could take place. What maybe did not, what could take place a bit more was really discussing why they chose these particular influencers over the others. That was one thing that we didn't deepen. But I think this also again links to a broader topic of how cultural diversity is generally addressed within the school context. So the teachers and also generally the schools mostly go either to cultural blindness, not discussing the topic at all, or sometimes over-culturalizing the topic, thinking that or arguing that everything is related to culture. It's very difficult to find a position that is in between. And I think although the schools, especially in the European context, but in many other countries are so diverse. We can say that they are very, they are super diverse. They are super diverse, especially in urban context. We still do not know how we should handle this situation in the school context, in the education field. And the teachers often feel that they don't have tools, pedagogical tools, and also methodological tools to deal with this. So they tend to be careful about this. In this context, we were also limited by the pandemic, the online education, of course, but at least we could show the diversity of the media content that the young people were using. There is a linguistic diversity. There is a cultural diversity. And this was very much represented in their assignments. And I think adopting a bottom-up approach like this, a project-based approach to media literacy education really enables the bringing in of this diversity by the students. It allows them to also bring in their own life growth, their own media patterns into the school context and opening up a discussion about this. Of course, there is an interesting approach to media literacy. And you indicated several times that schools, so the system was lagging in terms of keeping up with media literacy for your young students. And you started to touch this topic that I would like for you to talk a bit. Can you let us know about the impact of this research, of these findings in society? For example, in terms of public policy or educational policy, can you go a little bit further on that? So this can be seen as one study, one pilot study for really trying to understand the perspectives of the young people and designing media education starting from their perspectives in a bottom-up manner. I think this is a more effective approach than identifying important topics that should be relevant for the young people and trying to, in a sense, teach them in a top-down manner. So more important is to make them to take the topics that are central for them and try to encourage them to critically deal with this. Coming back to the influencer topic, for example, we had discussions about the economic background of the influencer market, for example. We had discussions about what they represent there and how they also profit from sponsorship relationships and so on and so forth. So it is not about just bringing in their perspectives but also encouraging them to develop these critical skills because media literacy, education should not just be about learning certain technical skills. It should go beyond that. It should make students question the media environments that they live in and their position within it and their own media consumption habits, for example. I think generally, more needs to be, like this research shows, like many other researchers, more needs to be done for integrating the topic of digital media into the school context. Germany might be also a bit of a special case here because the integration of digital media education started a bit later or now there is much more support, many more projects supporting this but it is a bit more lagging behind. I think there is also a recognition at the policy level about this but also other countries that we observe, like I think there is a gap between the lifers of the students and what is happening at the school and this gap is growing as schools are lagging behind and technologies are advancing and becoming even more central. And last but not least, I think, again, coming back to the topic of cultural diversity, looking at what these young people were telling me in the focus groups, I can't tell, I can't say that. There is really a complex linguistic and cultural diversity in their media reporters. It's such a multi-layered system and they are very skilled in terms of navigating between different media systems, between different media outlets. They have this knowledge of comparing different systems, for example. Also using media in multiple languages within a few minutes, just changing from one medium to another, one language to another, which should be recognized actually within the whole school system but also generally. Like it is not just, even when we look at these people who are disadvantaged in a sense through their migration background, through their socioeconomic background, they still have the skills to deal with the digital society in very efficient ways. And there is even something that we can learn from this. We need to recognize these skills as well, not just look at what they are lacking, what they are needing, but also looking at this and understand, we need to understand how we can also make use of this, how we can support them in these skills as well. Great. Let's focus on the now what. And you have given us a couple of hints for the future. So can you indicate to the researchers out there what comes next when it comes to studying this topic? More qualitative studies, as you said before, for example, or different methodologies other than focus groups, or as you said now in the last question, different comparisons between countries. So what's now? What next? I think this research focusing on one school could be broadened indeed, like by comparative studies, like you already mentioned, comparing different neighborhoods, comparing different cities, comparing different countries. I think these could be ways of looking at diversities within this field as well, and trying to understand what are here the patterns, what are the commonalities, and what are the diverging patterns here that needs to be taken into account. But also generally, adopting also more innovative methods, also engaged methods like participatory action research, for example, we can learn a lot from trying things together, co-developing projects, interventions, together with the people from the field. I really benefited from adapting such approach, and I think future studies can do this even more for informing policies, for informing educational curricular development, for example. This can be some of the things that we can take away from this project. Of course, Cidem, you have studied this topic before, so can you provide some additional resources about the topic that was discussed today? Articles, books, podcasts, videos, so any material that you find relevant to explore this topic further? I think it's a very rich field indeed, but I just made a few selections of articles for this. One is one article that I worked together with Kuhn Lers and Anna-Marie Anak, and we indeed tried to capture this idea of dealing with media education from a more inclusive perspective, bringing together issues related to diversity, cultural diversity, with concerns related to media education. And that paper is called Inclusive Media Education for Diverse Societies, was published in Oxford Research and Scalabadia of Communication. That could be interesting for following up on this debate for inclusive media education, and we also published this special issue, so looking at other articles within this issue, special issue where my article was placed in, that is also something that we co-edited together with Anna-Marie and Kuhn, because we care about this topic and we want to continue this discussion. And I think this compilation of various case studies could be an interesting point to start, but I also want to give a further reference to another study for people who are interested in ethnographic studies, for example, in schools and on young people, or for people who are interested in the role of schools for digital age and supporting young people. That is the book, The Class, Living and Learning in Digital Age, by Sonja Livingston and Julian Sefton-Green. I think it's generally a really good read, but also very insightful on the school context and lives of young people and how they relate to each other and how they also sometimes miss each other, in a sense, because the school is not always successful in terms of addressing what young people are going through. So I think this is also a very good book in that regard for understanding schools in the digital age. Perfect. Shidem, if there is anything that you want our audience to remember about this talk, so the punchline of this conversation, the simplest way you could provide it to us, what would it be? Tough job, but I will try. So I think important is that we need, we continue this conversation about schools, understanding the life roles of young people in terms of what they do with digital media, what is important in relation to the digital media, because otherwise the gap between the students, young people's life roles, and what is going on in the school is going to grow and grow. There is going to be even more disconnection between the two roles. And also same is true for cultural diversity. We are living in very diverse cities, very diverse neighborhoods. Schools are becoming increasingly diverse, but we just don't yet know how to deal with this, how to integrate this in the school curriculum. This isn't a general thing that we need to consider, but also in relation to media education, we need to keep this in mind. How do we address diversity within media education, the diversity of media repertoires of these young people? It was a pleasure, Shidem, thank you. Oh, sorry, that's okay. I'll, for Andy who was editing this before the punchline by Chidem. Thank you, Chidem. It was a pleasure. Yeah, this was also my pleasure, thank you. This podcast, sorry, again, Andy. This podcast is powered by Koji Tatyuprez. 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