Syllabus
Evaluation:Active participation in the sessions as well as a completion of an independent small-scale research submitted as a research poster are required in order to pass the unit and earn the credits. The research project-based evaluation will ask the students to demonstrate their creative, critical and reflective thinking rather than their knowledge and skills of research theory and practice. The students will be encouraged to explore a part of children’s media experience, which they themselves choose, without prejudice and subsequently share with their fellow colleagues what they have discovered through designing and exhibiting a research poster.
The examples of posters are available here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4qpdvgbuopkt1j3/AACMcLYDMhhodA-M7SUNdiWra?dl=0
Unit content and organisation: The eighty-minute sessions are organised as seminars with a great emphasis on active participation. The discussions are being fuelled by cross-cultural academic and industry research examples, as well as by the students’ own experience and discovery.The draft outline of the unit content includes themes such as: * Interdisciplinary construction of ‘child’, ‘childhood’, and ‘media’ * Child Labour in media industry * Sociocultural role and media play in children’s lives * Children’s emotional involvement with media and their fantasy worlds * Relevance of children’s cognitive and physical development to media experience * Children as media producers and programmers * Being and becoming a citizen in mediated worlds * Learning with, from, and in media * Media literacy and media education * Looking at the past and future of children and the media * Guest talks
Annotation
This truly interdisciplinary unit touches upon philosophy, history, art, education, anthropology, psychology, sociology, biology, law, human rights, economy, politology, linguistics, as well as religious, cultural, childhood, literacy and media studies, when on a quest towards understanding the contemporary child's media experience. Mirroring the inconclusive debates about children, media, and technology, the collective beliefs and public myths will be put into question and in-depth evaluation.
By the end of semester students will acquire valuable self-reflexive methodological approaches for the inquiry of, and conceptual frameworks for thinking critically and reflectively about, the issues related to children and media as well as their current and potential role within these and related fields.