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Media Literacy Education Practices
Disparate culture, disparate education - a discussion on school workshops
about re-interpretations of war
Abstract. The basic assumption is that our culture is in the situation of a radical change driven by diverse processes of de-limitation which lead to disparate structures. Disparate structures means they do not fit together in the familiar traditional forms. Education has not just to react to disparate structures but education itself is becoming more disparate. Education is object of delimitation among others with consequences for traditionally institutionalized teaching and learning. Scholastic forms of formal learning especially are under pressure to be just an instrument of producing knowledge as an accountable economic resource. This connects school learning to economy, but alienates learning from personal development and the societal ideas of learners as aware citizens. De-limitation of media by digital and individualized mobility is another phenomenon which produces disparate structures. e.g. the mobile devices as integrated tools of everyday life are seen by the school to be in severe contradiction to established school learning. To identify concrete ideas on learning under the condition of disparateness three workshop in schools about the subject war should help to develop practical scenarios. These three workshops at schools in Great Britain and Germany tried to identify re-interpretation as an important form of learning under the condition of disparateness. Re-interpretation is the attempt to combine learner-centred and open forms of formal learning with trends of our recent cultural development.
This paper opens with a report about the practices of three school workshops on the subject war and then explains the mains structures of our disparate culture: the dynamic of detraditionalization and delimitation which leads among others to individualized, ubiquitous mobile devices and provisional, multimodal form of representation in user generated contexts. To see learning as the personal re-interpretation of pre-given scholastic subjects is one of the educational reactions to the disparate cultural transformation. Three key features are identified: provisionality and multimodality; individualisation and digital mobility; user generated contexts, to which educational scenarios of the three school workshops react. These scenarios use, among others, smartphone applications like Whatsapp or the photo application of the students' personal smartphone.
Prof. Dr. Ben Bachmair, UCL Institute of Education, University College London, University of London B.Bachmair@ioe. ac. uk
Keywords: De-limitation of culture, de-traditionalization, school workshops, learner centered learning, situated learning, collaborative learning, re-interpretation, war.
1. Introduction: Re-interpretation, an access to the subject war and its related learning.
War as an issue for workshops in schools arose from the date 2014, the centenary of the beginning of World War 1. The objective was how to deal with World War 1 in a way which reaches students from nowadays to whom it is an historical date, far from their lives and their relevant everyday issues or issues in youth culture and to engage them in issues of war? The leading idea was set around curricular impulses which activate personal and common processes of interpretations of war.
A further input to follow came from research discussions about the structure of wars. In Germany, the comparative politics, mainly Herfried Münkler (2013, 2015), speaks about "asymmetric wars" (Münkler 2015, p. 229) and "hybrid" and "fluid forms of wars" (Münkler 2015, p. 12; p. 279) in post-heroic societies. That means research offers a new scheme for interpreting what war was and is about. If the subject war is in the process of re-interpretation then war as part of the school subject history should be opened for the interpretation of the learners: the learner as interpreter of the curricular pre-given subject. This assumption meets a central point of what learning is about. Learning is essentially meaning making and therefore an interpretation of the curricular subject.
This interpretative approach to formal learning corresponds to the changing forms and modes of actual wars which young people have to experience today by media coverage or by authentic experiences. Furthermore, rather than being territorially materialized, today's wars are bound to digital resources (the internet or drones) and are not far away from the digital games on mobile devices of youth culture. An interpretative access to formal learning tries to combine the digital resources of everyday life e.g. mobile devices, the Internet and its multimodal and oral modes of representation (Kress, Bezemer 2015) like Whatsapp with diverse form of communication. These fluid forms of learning were partly integrated into the school workshops. Keywords are: collaborative knowledge building (Scardamelia, Bereiter 1999), multimodal texts, tablets and smartphones, learner centred learning which integrates the naive expertise of the students, opening the school to a variety of sites of learning (Kress, Bezemer 2015) including the digital sites of Internet. The three workshops on war variously related to instructive forms of formal, stabile learning or interpretative and liquid forms of informal learning. This depended on regulation of the specific participating schools, e.g. if personally owned smartphones or the school's tablets were accessible; how much multimodality of texts or how much situated learning were seen as acceptable in schools.
2. Overview of the design of the two British and the German workshops about war and peace.
2.1 (text box): Overview of the three workshops War and Peace Subject: War and peace.
Great Britain and Germany in Spring and Summer 2014 and in Winter and Spring 2016.
Research target: To raise experiences around the educational concept of learning as interpretation.
Workshop: "We went to war" Archbishop Tenison's School. London
Participants: 7 students, Post-16 on the school level KS 5, teacher, teaching assistant, IoE-
facilitator, film producer, school chaplain;
Responsible teacher: Lxxx Mxxx
Main sequences of the journey over 5 weeks:
- To enable students to understand main themes of the film: Narrative, Juxtaposition and Grace
and forgiveness.
- Students develop audio material for their workshop. Students link themes back to own experiences, and become stakeholders in the project. Students get support from the school pastor to develop their project.
- Students collect written and audio material to use for their film. They will use this to produce a cinquain - a five line poem. This will form the basis of their narrative for their films.
- Students meet film producer and learn about storyboarding techniques and editing techniques.
- Two workshops provide the skills they need to develop their outcome.
- Students collect digital images to create their film outcome.
- Students edit their films.
Workshop: Animals In War Lansdowne School for Special Educational Needs (SEN), London
Participants: 9 students, teacher, 2 teaching assistants, IOE-facilitator Students are 12 to 13 years
old. Age is Key Stage 3, they learn on Key Stage1/2.
Responsible teacher: Jxxx Pxxxx
Main sequences of the journey over 5 weeks:
- Personal theory about war and writing a story (doing) (1. narration): My favourite animal (4 sessions).
- One day excursion (exploring) working horses at the Changing of the Guard and The Household Cavalry Museum, in Whitehall; Vulnerable animals at the Animals in War Memorial
- Report (2. narration) about excursion (2 sessions).
- Reflection and planning with peer assessment and student-led collaborative learning (2 sessions)
- Public presentation of workshop and outcomes in school (3rd narration) (2 sessions) Rap-workshop on creative writing: traces of war and peace Kerschensteiner-Mittelschule, Augsburg, Germany
Participants: 15 student in "Klasse 9" / grade 9, (Klasse 9 is comparable with the British KS3). 1 teacher, 1 teaching assistant and additionally at times a second teaching assistant. Responsible Teacher: Txxx Sxxx Main sequences of the journey over 12 weeks:
- 3 short planning meetings with teachers and students in December 2014 and January 2015.
- 3 sessions in the school to develop ideas about writing and performing rap texts
- 4 sessions of 3 hours each: production of 2 raps in the sound studio of a youth centre
- Students prepare and perform their final raps to a big audience of teachers, students and friends in the youth centre and some weeks later to the participants of a theatre workshop in a centre for fine arts.
The motivation for the issue war and peace was the centenary of World War 1 in 2014. School curricula in the UK and Germany locate the issue of war and peace to the subject of history and ethics mainly with teacher-guided instruction, on the basis of a textbook and episodes of discussion. Rarely do teachers invite representatives of the army or the peace movement into schools for discussions. The two British school workshops on re-interpretation of war and peace ran from May to July 2014, the German one from December 14 to March 15. All three workshops offered the opportunity for Situated Learning (Laver, Wenger 1991). The participating students investigated their everyday life by means of their personal media resources, mainly mobile devices, with the intention of finding and considering remains and artifacts of war in their life environment. This is an integrative approach by assimilating everyday life with new cultural resources (mobile devices, user generated contexts) into the school curriculum. Beside the school subject of history, the British curriculum is open for this in the "Art and Design Programme" (www.qca.org.uk/curriculum. p. 20) on "Cultural understanding" ("Pupils could explore the culture of their society, the groups in which they participate and questions of local and national identity.") and in the "History Programme" (www.qca.org.uk/curriculum; p. 113) e.g. "Evaluating a range of interpretations of the past to assess their validity".
The workshops' intention was to support the interpretative approach to war and peace within and by young people's specific modes of representation and their expertise in youth culture and informal learning. The three focal points below lead the discussion for planning the three workshops. In addition, the analysis of the workshops' results (section 2.4) follows the theoretical benchmarks of our disparate culture by, among others, the categories of provisionality and meaning making, delimitation of mass communication (section 4):
- Dominance of everyday life and the learner's personal expertise: students develop expertise in discussing war and peace from the perspective of their everyday lives
- Personal cultural resources instead of standardized textbooks: the investigation of students' everyday lives and the subsequent discussion in school follows explicitly the typical modes of appropriation of children and young people within youth culture. This includes explicitly mobile devices like smartphones.
- Widening the site of learning from the school precinct to neighbourhood to web sites and investigation of traditional war related sites, like the local war memorial. Collaborative investigation of life world: students go outside of the school and search with their own everyday media for a variety of artifacts regarding war and peace, with the educational aim of emphasizing context awareness.
2.2 Selected scenarios of the school workshops on: everyday life, learner's personal expertise, personal cultural resources, sites of learning
A traditional procedure to widen the site of learning is to leave the school area and investigate relevant fields. The London School for Special Educational Needs organized an excursion to the London Horseguard Parade, a typical tourist event, and to the London memorial Animals in War. The educational intention was to give impulses to interpret the tourist event and its military mis-en-scène as related to war. With the four tablets of the class students took photos of the Horseguard Parade and of the memorial Animals in War and combined both sites in their report
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At the memorial Animals in War and during the lunch picnic, some students used the tablets to play games. If one sees the picnic, memorial, tablets and digital games as part of the everyday, then playing on the tablets is not an educational faux pas but correlates new digital cultural resource from everyday life with a variety of sites and their specific activities. Therefore the tablets were used for cooperative work, as well as for having a detailed look at the memorial.
Figures 1 and 2
Figures 3 and 4
The film and video workshop in the grammar school explicitly invited the students to bring their smartphones plus whatever they consider as linked to the issue of war to the fine art performance ("language and media storm") at the local war memorial and the talks afterwards in a coffee shop and the theatre lounge on the way back to school. In this way, Everyday life appeared among others by the coffee shop and the use of mobile devices. The school sites were opened up to the churchyard and its war memorial as a site of performance; a coffee shop and theatre lounge contributed their site specific forms of communication. The project's brief was issued at the start in the school with the student acting as facilitator, combined with a common discussion of the site for the performance, making collaborative knowledge production plausible.
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Figure 5
In the theatre lounge students widened the context of war to include sports, family history, poetic texts and entertainment. For example one student presented the printed photo of his Algerian grandfather who was active in the Algerian Independent War in the 1950s and 60s. Another student presented on his smartphone a video of a gun sport club, another one presented a gunner app by performing with his smartphone a gunner. The variety of cultural resources and contexts enhanced a broad debate about war related students.
In the German school and during the Rap workshop, students were invited to organize their work in groups. Workgroups were necessary because students developed their ideas for Raps inside of the school but produced their Raps as self organized in the local youth centre. As tool for their organization, students used Whatsapp e.g. for the exchanging proposal for the Lyrics and debated by Whatsapp e.g. if the loop, the refrain of the Rap, was already fine. They opened a digital communication context by their personal cultural resources, the smartphone, which amalgamated with everyday life.
Shortly after the 5th event of the workshop had finished two students, a girl and a boy, both bilingual in German and Russian, discussed in detail the Russian and the German version of the rap lyric Russian Grandma.
Discussion by 2 students, a boy and a girl, about the relation of Russian and the German version of a sentence:
Boy: Mi protef wajni nasha jedinstwinja orschija eta musika Teachers asks for a translation: ... Was heißt der Satz oben?
Boy: Wir sind gegen krieg , unser einzige Waffe ist Musik. (We are against war, our only wappon is music.)
Boy: Blos was oben in der lyrik ist , ist falsh geschrieben hh (but above in the lyrics it is misspelled haha)
Girl: Keine sorgen das hab ich selbst übersetzt ist schon richtig! ! (Don't worry I translated it myself it's all right! !)
Girl: Jaa alsop ich das mit rusischen Buchstaben schreiben würde (Yes, although I would write it with Russian letters)
Boy: Mu nie ho4im waynu , paetamu mi delaim etu musiku Boy: Mu nie ho4im waynu , paetamu mi delaim etu musiku
Wir wollen kein krieg , deshalb machen wir diese Musik. (We don't want war, therefore we make this music.)
Girl: Jaa klingt besser auf rusisch (Yea sounds better in Russian) Boy: Da ist sogar ein reim drin (there is also a rhyme)
Jaaa (Yeaa)
Boy: Also verwendet besser die zeile : (Therefore it is better to use this line :) Mu nie ho4im waynu , paetamu mi delaim etu musiku
Wir wollen kein krieg , deshalb machen wir diese Musik. (We don't want war , therefore we make this music.)
Such a reflection on languages in this kind of school is extraordinary. It is a result of the context which is individually constructed by means of the ubiquitous, personally owned smartphone with Whatsapp. The educational task is to get this kind of language reflection in a continuous, steady form. Whatsapp is a provisional form of communication (see below section 4.1).
2.3 Outline of the three workshops.
As part of the European project to innovate learning in schools "We.learn.it. Everyone can be an explorer" the first approach to a design idea for a war+peace workshop was a traditional media educational one: to discuss with a film producer her newly released anti-war film "We went to war". The restriction was obvious: students were invited just as critical film viewers. Therefore the students aged around 16 to 17 years got the additional option to produce one short video about war, which is also a familiar media educational way. But additional offerings to the students opened fields to think about the video production rather far away from an anti-war film: to write a short poem as a basis for the video's storyboard; to have a fine art performance at the local war memorial; to bring a smartphone or other object from outside into school. The fine art performance was the result of a discussion with the school subject Religious Education and the issue of grace. The
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performance - a media storm - was planned with one student who acted as the guiding host for the performance. On the way back to school there were two stops for reflection and discussion in a coffee shop and a theatre lounge. These stops extended the performance at the local war memorial to life contexts of the students. A result of this widening of context was, among others, a video with Arabic sound and text about one student's Algerian grandfather's "Martyrdom" during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62). Another video was about an urban street gang and further, a video based on drawings of playing football.
But what could be the opportunities of the video game players among the students and their expertise on war games? Should they split into a school oriented and competent critical film viewer inside the school, while outside it being an expert on war games in the entertainment sphere of youth culture? The conclusion was to see youth culture as a design element for learning in schools. Therefore the German school workshop was fully embedded in youth culture. Students aged 15 to 16 were invited to present their computer war games in the school, especially Call of Duty. This presentation led to interviews of students by students which were recorded by students' smartphones. One student's verbal input "Nemezki Faschist" (немецкие фашисты) was the impulse to invite the students from Russian migration families to introduce Russian into the workshop's communication. Finally one of the two composed and wrote raps about the war experiences of a Russian grandmother in World War 2, which opened to deal with the biography of Lena Muchina fand the German besiege and starvation of St. Petersburg.
A rather influencial design idea came from the British "The First World War Centenary Battlefield Tours Project", to travel e.g. to the war sites in France and explore what happened there. This project is on opening sites of learning beyond and outside of the school precinct. During the workshop with the anti-war film and the students' own video production, one scenario of half a day, already mentioned above, was a walk from the local war memorial via a coffee shop for discussion and a stop in a local theatre lounge back to school. In the coffee shop the experiences with the fine art performance at the war memorial were reflected on and combined with personal ideas about war. A video recording of the spontaneous statements brought formality into the associative talk. At the theatre lounge, students presented their investigations about war in their life world. Among others one student presented a photo of his Algerian grandfather and talked about the cruelty of this war. Another student showed on his smartphone a short documentary about a shooting club. Two students used their Gunner App on their smartphones and performed a virtual shooting. This widening of the war related contexts from the war memorial to the family history and entertainment in clubs or with smartphones reached beyond the territorial concept of site and led to the
concept of contexts - especially of user generated contexts, which will be discussed below (section 4.3).
The workshop in the British School for Special Educational Needs combined explicitly with the investigation of the Internet with the excursion to real sites which showed animals in relation to war. The orientation on animals in war matched to these students specific situation to receive care and support. Therefore the focus of this workshop was on becoming aware of the vulnerability of animals. This was visible at the 'Animals in War' memorial in London Hyde park. Animals' vulnerability was not visible at the tourist event at the Horseguard's ceremony in Central London but the students developed this relation. During the picnic at the memorial for animals some students played digital games on tablets. They widened the relaxing part of the school event by playing in the manner of their everyday life.
2.4 Final products of the workshops.
Formal learning in school has to lead to a final product. In the case of the anti-war film and the production of short videos the essential product was the video. One video based on the thematic strand started with the family story of the Algerian grandfather, another one followed the idea of a street gang which linked to the Gunner App, which two students presented after the performance at the war memorial. Further, one video was based on drawing an image of a football game. An interesting product of the students' production of Raps were PPT slides which the students produced for a school theatre event to which they were invited. On the basis of their workshop structure the leading small group of students produced PPT slides and presented it also to a non-school audience. These slides showed the complete process of the workshop. Also the students of the workshop Animals in War summarized their workshop with PPT slides for which they used the photos and materials or the workshop including their excursion to the Horse Guard and to the memorial Animals in War. Slides as final products integrated the reflection on the process of learning, not the least by using intermediary products. This integration of reflection lifts learning as a re-interpretation on a level of its own awareness. One can say it is extraordinary to reach such a level of awareness in school, especially considering the restricted options of the target group of students in a school for special educational needs.
The PPT slides as students' summary and reflection of the workshop Animals
in War
The trend of these slides about animals in war is to avoid visible war victims but fits with an impression that the workshop and especially the excursion were really enjoyable. The slides don't show photos of the horror of a war. Exceptions are slides with the dog's memorial / tomb and, in the parts below "What we did on", the opener with a photo of the memorial Animals in War and the slide "Sad
moments" on which students present themselves as mourning at the memorial Animals in War. Students wrote: "It's sad you see all animals that there in war and all the hard work they had to be doing so it's better and just have a quiet time". This text is in line with the sensitive observation and related photos from the second narration in exercise book with a student who touched empathetically the state of a horse or donkey at the Animals in War Memorial. A similar photo is part of the slide "What we enjoyed about are [our] trip". There Toby enhances "I liked the museum and I enjoyed learning about the army".
Two of the six slides "What we did on" refer to the Animals in War Memorial (no 1 and 4: "Sad moments") and three on The Household Cavalry Museum: "Soldier telling us information", "We were trying on the suit", "What we came across in the museum". One photo is explicitly on the training and relaxing side of the excursion: "Calm moments".
The photos of all the slides in the category "What we enjoyed about our trip" are on positive self-representation.
The photos refer to everyday life and the typical way of older children or young people on an entraining tour. Normal life delivers their dominant evaluative pattern.
Four students showed themselves without and five ones with the uniform elements they dressed up in at the Household Cavalry Museum. Students gave the following types of reasons for liking the excursion visit, which they named "trip":
- About entertaining
Entertaining as reason for the excursion relates primarily to tourist attitude and everyday life. Valerie: "I liked trying on the army clothing"
Terry: "What I liked about the trip is we saw the hours [probably: horses] and the clothing that we tried on"
Peter: "What I liked about the trip is that I was interesting and fun."
Jermaine: "I liked that every one had fun and we were all being nice to each other"
Darren: "I liked the changing of the guards."
- About the object of the school workshop
John: "I liked finding out about the history and how they used animals back in war" Annie: "I liked see different picture of animals in war" Toby: "I liked the museum and I enjoyed learning about the army" Carly: "What I liked about the trip is that we got to see what animals help us in the war and that's why I love dogs because dogs were used in the war."
Comparison of final slides, which form the third narration of the school workshop, with the proceeding narrations in the exercise books
It seems that the slides do not reach the complexity of the first narration about my favourite animal in the exercise book (result of first 2 weeks of workshop) and the second narration with the report about the excursion to horse guard and animal in war memorial (4th week of the workshop). The following reasons could be responsible: - The PowerPoint slides as cooperative work needs to reduce the individual input.
- At the end of the workshop, students reduce their final interpretation about war to a clear grippy message for themselves.
- Students reduce their information about the workshop to a compact massage to the school audience.
- The is perhaps a lack of motivation because the presentation took place in the final week of school before summer holidays.
- Students have no experience with PowerPoint.
Because the teacher balanced his relation for learning to students explicitly on Lev Vygotzky's concept of obuchenie, the teacher avoids to use PowerPoint slides as tool for lecturing. The teacher argued that PowerPoint lecturing cements the imbalance of teacher-learner-interrelation:
"2 years ago I made a conscious decision to not teach lesson content using IT; for me the embodiment of this was PowerPoint presentations or 'Interactive' Whiteboards. I felt that it encouraged complacency in my teaching methods, reduced learners to mere observers, did not utilise the space in the classroom, and turned the concrete into the abstract. The whiteboard was only used to display videos as a visual learning tool. Instead, I relied on exploring and experiencing subject matter by feeling, smelling, holding, seeing, demonstrating, role play, worksheets, and student-led teaching. The epitome of this for me was watching an interactive whiteboard activity where students had to drag and sort objects into hard or soft. How had technology come to replace pupils physically sorting a collection of objects with their own hands?"
3. Learning as re-interpretation in a disparate culture
These diverse activities are forms of interpreting the pre-given subject war, and in addition, peace. In this view learning is not just a result of instruction and students' analogue acquisition but a form of interpreting the pre-given subject by personal interpretative activities. This means to open and widen the traditional
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definition of learning within instruction to activities, among others, in everyday life, to family history, or to entertainment. Of course, there were and are strong educational endeavours to uncouple learning from the teacher guided instruction of acquiring knowledge. Among others these are the Symbolic Interactionism, especially Blumer (1969), Situated Learning with the offering of sites for learner centred learning (Lave, Wenger 1991), knowledge building by cooperating learners (Scardamelia, Bereiter 1999), informal learning close to everyday life (Holm S0rensen, B., Danielsen, O., Nielsen, J. (2007), appropriation (Pachler, Cook, Bachmair 2010).
The headline for learning as re-interpretation leads to the innovative educational perspective on the recent cultural transformation. The educational task was to motivate students to learn about war, not as historic facts but as a subject they were immersed in. A teacher does not have to provide his or her knowledge about facts, but students have to discover traces of war and, of course, also of peace which they have to interpret. This shift of educational procedures for learning is not due to a constructivist approach, but tries to react in a conceptual way to our cultural transformation. This transformation is characterised among others by the technology of ubiquitous individualized mobility, by provisional and multimodal cultural resources like a Whatsapp communication, and by the activities of learners to generate contexts (see section 4 about the key features of educationally relevant cultural transformation).
3.1 Semiotic access to the dynamic of individualization
In general, our cultural dynamic is characterised by an increase of individualisation, not the least at the moment of which is driven by smartphones, tablets etc. which urges to ask what learning is about. In the perspective of social semiotics (Kress, Bezemer 2015) any kind of learning is per se a mode of meaning making by people. Meaning making is the basic dynamic of learning as interpretation. In the dominant routines of school-based learning, this basic insight is submerged by ritualised practices of the teacher guided instruction. Typical for instruction is to transfer curricular defined information to a target group of learners. These curricular and output oriented transfer routines are regulated by assessment. It is probably not by coincidence that the school's basic learning rituals are framed, perhaps, made flexible by ideas of lifelong learning. Such a term is an indicator for public reflection on learning beyond the established practice of school learning as instruction. Not the least the phenomena of so called NEETS, young people not in education, employment or training, and the numbers in PISA of underachievers in school learning can be seen as indicators for the decreasing societal effectiveness of the traditional curricular defined learning by instruction. The increasing individualization of modes of living and correlated habitus forms of learning asks for new impulses in schools to rethink learning from its basis. That
means, learning is meaning making. As already told, digital mobile devices with their independence from specific local sites, enhance and accelerate individualisation. Digital mobile devices as parts of everyday life, meanwhile globally in use, should be considered as cultural resources and as learning resources in individualized forms of learning. The common frame for bringing individuals together as learners is the social semiotic concept of learning as meaning making. Because meaning making is always integrated in regional, social and cultural sites now, learners do have a new defining power and also the task to define or to neglect "sites of learning" (Kress, Bezemer 2015). This is meanwhile visible, when people travel with mobile devices in their hands, what are they doing, when they listen, read, write etc. on the train? The proposal is to consider this as linking contexts. When students play on their tablets during the picnic at the memorial animals in war then they open the memorial to their routines in their everyday life. To get a feeling for the subdued animals needs a view from everyday life with e.g. pets.
The educational planning for the workshops tried to combine this semiotic definition of learning as personal process of formation of meaning in a culture which we characterise as disparate. This assumption of learning as interpretation in our disparate culture asks for an educational concretisation e.g. by the category of
context awareness.
In this argumentative line the students were invited to bring into school their personal cultural products from war games to their mobile devices, from family stories to gender stereotypes. One task of the workshop facilitators was to open relevant sites outside of the school and offer pathways between school and such sites. The opening and construction of sites for learning is a main feature of meaning making and were a central task of the three workshops.
3.2 Interpretative and provisional, 'liquid' forms of learning
With the concept of learning as interpretation on the basis of individual meaning making now education reacts to new or changed cultural features like provisional and multimodal cultural resources, and, furthermore, to individualized, convergent mobility and also to user generated contexts.
To argue in this way results from a culturally informed and culturally aware education. Quite a lot of key terms exist which summarize the transformation of our culture, for example,'fluidity' (Bauman 2000). We are proposing the term disparate culture, because the familiar cultural and societal structures, as well as the agency of the people and the dominant cultural practices don't fit together anymore. They are in a disparate interrelation. The responsible overall dynamic for this disparate situation comes from detraditionalization and delimitation (Beck et al. 2004). The disparate interrelations have to be made compatible by individual interpretative activities of the people.
Also, learning is subject to the overall dynamic of detraditionalization and delimitation. Cultural sociology uses these two terms in the following sense: Beck, Giddens and Lash (1994, p. vi), protagonists of a theory of "reflexive modernity", discuss the detraditionalization which appears as migration:
"To speak of detraditionalization in the present day at first seems odd, particularly given the emphasis of some forms of postmodern thinking upon the revival of tradition. To speak of detraditionalization, however, is not to talk of a society without traditions - far from it. Rather, the concept refers to a social order in which tradition changes its status. In a context of global cosmopolitism, traditions are today called upon to defend themselves: they are routinely subject to interrogation. Particularly important in this respect, the 'hidden substratum' of modernity, involving traditions affecting gender, the family, local communities and other aspects of day-to-day social life, becomes exposed to view and subject to public debate. The implications are both profound and worldwide in scope."
Typical for the running process of detraditionalization is the dynamic delimitation. Cultural sociologists, among others Ulrich Beck et al. (2004), summarise the prevailing economic, social, cultural, technological changes with the sociological term of delimitation (Entgrenzung). In the field of the media now, new representational forms like YouTube or Whatsapp disrupted the established and linear organized broadcasting organization of TV. By YouTube a student can connect to serious and research oriented lectures about the history of war, and also a rap by a local rapper etc. They can upload their own video, perhaps a selfie. This is possible via smartphones, independent from a specific local site and a specific time.
4. Educational answers to key feature of the disparate culture.
How to assimilate the cultural and societal transformation to the designing of learning and teaching? We can widen this question: How to concretise de-traditionalization and delimitation? Which are the educationally relevant feature elements? We propose
- Key feature: Provisional and multimodal cultural resources.
The Whatsapp communication above on the translation of the Rap refrain is an example.
- Key feature: Individualized, convergent mobility with its resources tablets, smartphones, Internet.
- Key feature: User generated contexts as individualized and provisional spaces.
The workshops examined scenarios as educational reaction to key features of the disparate culture within the school structure of learning. Some scenarios are closer to the teacher guided instruction, in contrast others are nearer to informal learning outside of the school (dimension of formal / informal). Further, there is the dimension of orientation to the prerequisites curriculum or to the life world of the students.
4.1 Key feature: Provisional and multimodal cultural resources -Examples of the practice.
Whatsapp is a typical example of an unstable cultural structure, among others it is not restricted by traditional grammar or spelling regulations. Whatsapp is a multimodal construction with a very short text and a restricted communication but with a wide option of representational elements like typed text, photos, emoticons, sound.
The manifold mobile devices in the interplay with the internet are now changing mass communication. Hereby the appearance of new institutions like Google contribute to the dynamic of delimitation. It results from multimodality and provisionality of meaning making in the new mass communication. Social semiotics explored multimodality (Kress 2010). The new "arrangements" to which mobiles and internet or apps belong make meaning "material" (p. 145 ff). These arrangements are multimodally constructed as photo, sound, printed characters, mis-èn-scene etc. Mobile devices fit to this multimodality by their variety of application from the typed characters of SMS to videos. The actually highly appreciated Whatsapp is by itself already multimodal. A decade earlier Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001, p. 11) discussed multimodality by a child's bedroom; the "bedroom as a multimodal text". Mobiles don't just fit to multimodality, they promote multimodality in a highly individualized way.
"Modes are semiotic resources which allow the simultaneous realisation of discourses and types of (inter)action. Designs then use these resources, combining semiotic modes, and selecting from the options which they make available according to the interests of a particular communication situation." (Kress, Van Leeuwen 2001, p. 21).
Multimodal texts e.g. in the Whatsapp flow are typical for provisionality as key features of a disparate culture.
"Stability - even though that had only ever been relative - has given way to instability; homogeneity has given way to often radical diversity; permanence has given way to provisionality, a condition in which crucial characteristics of the environments of communication may vary from one moment to the next." Kress (2010).
The multimodal forms of texts with images, traditional characters, sounds, films, spoken language contribute to the instability of communication by text. Ambiguity, always a characteristic of language and communication, comes in the foreground. For education, this becomes a real challenge. Multimodal writing, in general, and multimodal texts have to combine with precise modes of texts. Students should develop awareness about the adequate contexts. Furthermore, it has to be recognised that writing has extended beyond the traditional written texts.
35
Writing, also in the context of explicit learning, is a narrative collage, a "narrative assemblage" (Jocson 2012) with diverse modes and relevance for the social and personal situation of the communicator and his or her context. In addition education has the task to recognize the multimodal text within its context but also in the context of formal learning. Betsy Rymes (2011) speaks about the educational approach of "deference": to recognize educationally the learners cultural resources. In different intensity the three workshops followed the deference approach not the least by recognizing the student's naive expertise of everyday life. The "narrative assemblage" was seen as provisional multimodal texts.
Examples on multimedia and multimodal writing also by means of digital
interfaces like PowerPoint, Whatsapp etc. London: Animals in War - Scenario for widening the design repertoire for narrative writing
Jermaine writes his rather complex story about animals in war. He uses the traditional mode of writing by hand with characters but adds his drawings. He widens his hand writing with a printout of WAR but in a creative design.
Figure 6
Jermaine searches for his own graphic tools to write his story about animals in war in addition to his handwritten story in his exercise book. He used the app Halftone 2 for his comic strip,n the tradition of the media educational practice of media production.
Figure 7
Jermaine writes his report about the excursion to Horse Guard's Parade and Animals in War Memorial. He widens again his repertoire on design elements.
Figure 8
The exercise book works like an interface, which combines the standard format of a handwritten text with self created and downloaded images and graphic tools from the Internet. The downloaded graphic elements link the exercise book to entertainment comics. With his contact to the Internet via his tablet, Jermaine combines the school context with the still standardized exercise book with the context of entertainment. This is Jermaine's way of writing which can be used or understood just by himself or by whomever. It brings to the writing and communication process a kind of arbitrariness which makes writing and communication provisional. But this provisionality can be seen as his form of design creativity.
Scenario from the Rap workshop - from Whatsapp as provisional everyday communication tool to a target oriented work tool in collaborative knowledge building which leads to a standard text.
A girl sends a good night message as a video with a small dragon, which is made for children. The boy reacts to this with a video, which shows a shouting lorry driver. These videos widen the students' communication context with Whatsapp to entertainment media. This context is defined by Whatsapp as a communication tool of everyday life. The girl uses the communication tool to get, probably from YouTube, a female gender connotation with references to children. The reacting boy stays within the pre-given communicative context of entertainment videos, but sets his male gender profile. This male gender profile is a shouting, misbehaving male lorry driver who screams: "Scheiß Wochenende vorbei. Scheiß Sonntag." (Shit weekend. Shit Sunday).
Parallel, the students regularly used Whatsapp as tool for sending photos of their handwritten drafts on their Rap lyric by Whatsapp and step by step - see above Section 2.2 with the discussion by Whatsapp about the translation of the 'hook' - they produced a standard version in the formal form of a poem with a refrain in three languages:
Wir sind gegen den Krieg, Unsre einzige Waffe ist die Musik. Mi protef wajni naschim jedinstinim oruschijam jewlajetsa musika. Biz Savasa karsiyiz. Bizim tek Silahimiz Sarkidir.
The final version is a publically available. It was also printed on a poster and on flyers, which invited the school and friends to a final presentation in the youth centre.
Figure 9
Hook
Wir sind gegen den Krieg,
Uns re einzige Waffe ist die Musik.
Mi protef wajni naschim jedinstinim oruschijam jewlajetsa musika.
ßiz Savasa karsiyiz. Bizim tek Silahimiz Sarkidir.
4.2 Key feature: Individualized, convergent mobility with its resources tablets, smartphones, Internet - examples of the workshops.
Meanwhile the process of individualization integrated into everyday life mobile devices like Smartphones or Tablets. They function as ubiquitous personal resources within the Internet system of YouTube, Facebook etc. This integration made them cultural resources. This essential characteristic as cultural resource legitimizes their use as a means of meaning making, in other words, for learning. The workshops integrated smartphones and tables with several scenarios among others to bring together different kinds of conversations, like small talk and formal considerations.
Scenarios: From small talk and informal conversation to formal statement enhanced by mobile video recording
(a) After the performance at the war memorial a conversation in the coffee shop
After the performance at the war memorial and now in the coffee shop, students and teachers talked about the experience over coffee. It began as small talk. Then the teacher asked if anybody would mind to video record the statements. Suddenly the conversation changed to interviews and became formal but still adequate to the environment of a coffee shop. These video-interviews with a mobile phone dealt with a width of issues listed below.
Issues of video-interview in the order of statements given
- Rest in peace and memorial (student Tomas)
- Wandering around the churchyard environment, feeling uncomfortable (student Neal). Neal is reluctant, perhaps shy during his statement. For speaking he gets support from the school chaplain. Recording his statement is not sufficient to support his statement, but both - being addressed by a person and by recording - are supportive.
- Situation in the churchyard as an island with storm and sun (teaching assistant);
- Effect of reading a Bible text; linear way of talking about war, war narrative (school chaplain);
- Comment on Franklyn self-representation at the war memorial as expression of life and an adequate gesture for the commemoration of young men who died 100 years ago (teacher);
- Choice and freedom in this country, situation on churchyard (student Bennet);
- People in war; refers to film (student Darrin);
- Event in the churchyard, normality, people in war (student Franklyn);
- Event in the churchyard, storm, island, confusion (teaching assistant);
- Event in the churchyard (chaplain);
- People who have died; opportunity in this country to have freedom and peace (student Ronny);
- Very short statement about US military (student Franklyn) which leads to personal experiences of chaplain to be evacuated by soldiers;
- War refugees, story of a student who had to be hours on a bottom of a lorry (teaching assistant);
- Civil war in Congo (student Ronny).
(b) Steps from associative ideas to formal discussion and transcribed short texts.
At the beginning of the Rap workshop students took videos of interviews, wrote short texts with smartphones and took photos of texts. These are steps from
- informal association, which is recognized by the photo report;
- to formal verbal discussion e.g. by interviews and their recorded videos;
- to written texts.
First step: Informal association which was recognized by the photo report: Taking photos about digital war games, which students brought from home into school - photos made by students for the photo report of the 'war project'
Second step: Formal verbal discussion - the video recorded interviews: Talking about own ideas about war in the family language Russian and Turkish. Students recorded videos with their smartphones.
Figure 10. Boys interviewees, a observer Photo made by
in the role of the interviewer and girl is in the distant position of an (awareness).
the teacher for the report.
Third step of verbalization: Written texts.
In this phase, students organized themselves in 2 groups with different rap-lyrics. The male group was oriented to the "Call of Duty - CoD" with the emphasis on the two Afghan boys in the transfer class for migrants. The more female oriented rap group worked under the headline 'Russian grandma'. This group followed a proposal of the perfectly Russian and German-speaking girl A..a and her story about her Russian grandmother in the war. Further, A..a read also a section of the book "Lenas Tagebuch" (Lena's Diary). "Lenas Tagebuch" is the war diary of Lena Mucha which she wrote during the siege and starvation of Leningrad / St. Peterburg. The author Lena Mucha belongs to the generation of the girl's grandmother.
In this female oriented group, a girl with a Turkish cultural background took a video of the story in which the girl with a Russian cultural background told about what she has heard from her Russian grandmother. Afterwards the girl with the Turkish background transcribed a handwritten narrative of the video, then typed the video story about the Russian grandmother with her smartphone and published this typed text on Whatsapp. This typed text was then the basis of the further composition.
Figure 11: Transcript of the video interview, typed by the reporting girl on her smartphone (below):
Annas Oma - Annas Oma hat ihr erzählt das ihre Oma als sie klein war mit ihrer Mutter unter einem Dach stand. Flugzeuge flogen über ihnen und waren sehr nah. Ihre Oma hat alles mitbekommen auch wie der Vater in den Händen der Mutter gestorben ist. Sie hatten kein Essen und mussten überall suchen um wenigstens etwas zu essen. Sie hatten nur Probleme sie hätten keinen Wohnplatz. Sie durften noch in die Schule gehen.
Beginning of the creative writing of the Rap lyric
IfakS Aim ,, ckr iid^jV i.-aW
¿iul.A If, ' ^ A™ Lsns frjiAh^in ,,„„ gsrfM*
'¡fe^ü «Ii O10- ^«H «r ^rtl ÜJU^I wfe fjfien D<Jc|i,
t"«cf & KrJft Js-C K mk Cn1- ,
S<■>>"-"liW^ :.,h-,1-: Aw rsiMj ....
c^pfr Cvol- £ f r,-f
The Rap lyric below of the group "Russian Grandma" which was developed under the guidance of the Rap trainer in the youth centre.
Neulich in der Schule hat A..a erzählt,
eine Story die ihre Oma heut' noch quält.
Damals stand sie mit ihrer Mutter unterm Dach,
Flieger flogen vorbei, — sie hörten den Krach.
Die Oma war sehr Traurig, hat es live erlebt,
wie der eigene Vater von der Erde geht.
nicht zu Trinken nicht zu Essen — von Hunger wie besessen,
das ganze Leben — von Sorgen zerfressen.
Kein Zuhause, keine Schule, die Familie in Not
Stundenlanges suchen-nach Wasser und Brot.
4.3 Key feature: User generated contexts as individualized and provisional spaces - examples of the workshops
A context is a frame under construction for optional combinations of actions, representational resources inclusive media and literacy, virtual and local sites or social sites like socio-cultural milieus. This definition follows Dourish (2004, p. 5):
• ... "contextuality is a relational property that holds between objects or activities"...
• ... "the scope of contextual features is defined dynamically."
• "Context is an occasioned property "...
• "Context isn't just 'there', but is actively produced, maintained and enacted in the course of the activity at hand."
Dourish's description of contexts meets the interpretative approach for learning as well as the de-limitation feature of our disparate culture, not the least of which is the provisionality of contexts. The workshops tried to support the participating students to deal with their own and with offered contexts.
One example of a user generated context was briefly described in section 1 above. Students of the London film and video workshop "We went to war" were invited to bring into school whatever they thought could be relevant to the issue war. For the performance at the local war memorial students and at the discussion afterwards in the theatre lounge they presented a printed photo, short videos and an app on their smartphones, which they brought from everyday life. By these images, videos, apps they widened the context of formal learning about war by including sports, family history, self written poetic texts and entertainment. The following scenario is close to the usual procedure of writing a story e.g. to find relevant images and talk about them.
Scenario: Image from internet for story writing, verbalization in groups with tablets + writing.
The London workshop Animals in War opened its first narration of the students by accessing the Internet. Also working inside of the school opens Internet sites, which depend on the interests of a student. The subject of the first narration was the personal theory about war which should become visible in the story about the animal as personal favourite. Students wrote their story under the headline: My favourite animal. Students checked on the Internet and other media sources like TV documentary for animals (figure 12 - 16), which led to a hand written story with images of the internet and to the outline sketch about 'Animals In War'
Context awareness - steps from a familiar media educational task to new practices.
To find images in the Internet is a meanwhile normal task. Children and young people don't need support; it is one of their normal cultural practices. But media and literacy education tried and tries to support their addressees to become aware of what they are using. But context awareness is the issue of a wider question: finding and using e.g. an image is always a process of meaning making within a situation. Because the Internet is not a defined situation but a provisional context, especially by the individual activity of accessing it, the task of becoming aware of 'my' context spanned between school and the Internet doesn't lead to defined tasks like to analyse critically a film about its composition, intention etc.
The example above, the excursion to the Horse Guard Parade and the memorial Animals in War (see section 2.2) the educational intention was to give impulses to interpret the tourist event and its military mis-en-scène as related to
12 -16
war. With the four tablets,the class students took photos of the Horseguard Parade and of the memorial Animals in War and combined both sites in their report. Glueing their photos in their exercise books, students combined reflectively their photos of both sites with the overall issues of animals in war.
Awareness of a context is similarly provisional as the context itself. In this line of provisionality, the educational proposal to use the provisional cultural tools, e.g. smartphone photos and Whatsapp, for enhancing context awareness. The mobile photo portfolio is closer to an intentional form of awareness as the more or less arbitrary comment about the personal feeling in the social context.
An example is gender sensitivity in a photo report of the workshop. A girl takes photos for the photo report. In relation to boys she is reluctant, not the least because she stems from a Muslim family. But with the distance tool of the photo application of her smartphone she can see her class mates as attractive young men. She sends her photos for the common report to the Whatsapp group. Other girls remained in the genre context of a report and kept the distance view on the boys. But also the casually typed talk on Whatsapp opens options for social awareness. In late afternoon some students talked about meeting in the evening. One of them does not understand where to meet. He motivates this by being a "Kanak" which is a rather discriminating word for a migrant.
The teacher as member of the Whatsapp group asks him what he means with the statement: "Let me be a Kanak". He replies: "As Kanak we name foreigners,-and because I had spelling mistakes I said 'let me be foreigner' hahahahha" ("Also Kanak bezeichnen wir ein Ausländer, und da ich Rechtschreibfehler hatte hab ich gesagt "lass mich Ausländer sein" hahahahaha.") With this explanation ends this short conversation, which makes overt a part of the self-reflection of a student of the second generation of migrants in Germany.
6. Conclusion: Re-interpretation, a summary of fitting disparate structures in educational practices.
The basic theoretical way to practical education about the issue of war led to three key features of disparate structures: Provisionality and multimodality, further, individualized, convergent mobility, and user generated contexts. These key features suggest to widen formal learning to formations of meaning and to integrate practically a wide field of interpretative activities of students into formal learning. In this argumentative line the three school workshops about war did not intend to teach students assessable historical or political knowledge about the issue of war. Instead the 'naive' knowledge of students opened the educational approach to widen this knowledge and getting this knowledge on a higher level of awareness.
The practical scenarios of the three workshops used already established forms of open and learner centred learning, especially situated learning,
collaborative knowledge, investigative and exploring learning (forschendes Lernen), using mobile devices as resources for learning. The three workshops were differently close or in distance to the usual teacher guided instruction, which depended on the concrete conditions of the specific school. The workshops widened the sites of learning from the school precinct to the neighbourhood (Rap workshop, awareness path) or to relevant tourist sites in central London (animals in war).
Of high relevance was the everyday life and the learner's personal expertise, like being a rap expert or being familiar with weapon oriented sports, dealing with the history of own families, using comic like text formats, finding interesting stories about fighting, protecting or vulnerable animals in the Internet. The educational intention was to support activities of students which followed explicitly the typical modes of appropriation of children and young people within everyday life and youth culture. This included explicitly mobile devices like smartphones. Scenarios of the workshops enhanced individual and fragmented procedures of students, like playing with a gunner app or downloading YouTube videos with pop songs which did not deal with the issue of war. But it was also intended and realized to achieve results like a self-produced rap, which refers to the Russian grandmother or to a video about the Algerian grandfather. Other results were images and texts for a report to the school public, which was realized by PowerPoint (animals in war, rap workshop) or by a stage like mis-en-scène as school event or an event of youth culture (rap workshop).
In general, learning as process of interpretations of the students elaborated a wide view and understanding of special aspects of war, which students had chosen individually, partly with high intervention of the teachers. Therefore, the three workshops covered rather different issues of war which were animals, family history, and the anti war film.
At this point of reflection it is necessary to speak about the criteria of evaluation. Criteria are not marks of exams, which focus usually on positive knowledge which is alienated from a learner's life development outside of the school learning. The question is how to evaluate such workshops, which are practiced under the categories of disparate culture with delimitation and provisionality:
- No assessment in the sense of isolated exams, but enhancing results of high complexity in the sense of objectified material like photos, texts on Whatsapp, self produced videos, self produced and performed raps with own texts on poster.
- Avoiding an arbitrary bricolage of isolated practices of students but combining elements of knowledge and practices in line with the processes of learners' activities of interpretation. This succeeds also when students produced a variety
of products, which were close to a mosaic, are like a collage or assemblage but rather far away to a Wikipedia text.
- Receiving sustainability by enhancing awareness about the flow of learning with the personal and individual engagement of a learner. This happened by taking photos during the workshop which were used for final PPT presentation at the end of the rap workshop or the PPT presentation to the school public about the excursion to the horse guard and to the memorial of animals in war in London.
- The disadvantage of a learning procedure in the sense of re-interpretation is a lack of precise knowledge like facts of historical research. But the recent political research on the history of war does not provide non-ambiguous answers. This is also due to disparateness of professional knowledge production. This disparateness gives the teacher a double role by offering a situation for learning and acting as specialist for a subject. An example was the theological contribution of the school chaplain to the workshop, which started with the analysis of an anti-war film.
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