The work with the teachers took the form of introductory activities as a whole group, working with each other away from school, and then in small school-based teams preparing activities for their classes. This page includes an outline of the introductory activities and some of the work the teachers produced in schools.
Introductory Activities
In the initial workshops, teachers engaged in activities reflecting on the importance of out-of-school media use and some of the difficulties of bringing the students’ out-of-school media use into the curriculum. The aim here was to get teachers to reflect on their own media use, and to look at the ways in which popular discussion is often framed by media as a series of contradictory hopes and fears, scares, panics and dreams. The activities were designed to encourage teachers to reflect on the importance of out-of-school media use and the difficulties of bringing these topics into the curriculum. An overview of the activities is presented below.
- Me and My Media
Each teacher – speaking as a person – shares:
- a day of media use – build a list of
device -use/time/place - intimate/personal and/or unpleasant/scary experience – build a list of concerns/pleasures
- positive and negative views on a family members’ media use & their interpretation of how media affects the other – build a group list of patterns
- how much they and their family spend on devices/platforms etc.
- My Students’ media
Each teacher – speaking as a person – shares:
- a surprising/awkward/disciplinary experience with media use in school
- an account from a parent about difficult/problematic media use out-of-school
- parents’ positive and tale of “digital learning”
- best use of media in your teaching experience and why
The Research
After the initial activities, the teachers began working in small school based groups to design ways of researching students’ digital media usage outside of school. This became the basis of the rest of the workshops and teachers shared and reflected upon the research they had conducted, the results and the ways it had already begun to inform policy and curriculum in their schools and classrooms.
- Researching digital cultures and practices
Teachers working in pairs plan activities using the following prompts:
- Survey of a class’s use of media: what would you want to know and why?
- Meaningful platforms: what media do individual students really invest in and why
- How to get students to think about questions of ownership, use of personal data? What student centred activities can help this?
- How to get students to think about media and society? How do they imagine other people are affected by the media? What are they think it’s important to know and how to behave?
Below are some examples of the data that some of the teachers collected
Raw Data Regional PS survey Form Responses
- Reflections:
Group discussion around key questions:
- What should teachers know about their student’s digital lives?
- How can we go about researching it?
- What ethical considerations need to underpin the work in this area?
Researching the everyday digital 