In The City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media, Marshall McLuhan et. al.
(1977) suggests that most learning takes place outside of the classroom, with and through
media. Then in the last chapter they suggest that the book title should be inverted to
“Classroom as city”. This inversion clarifies the classroom as a main node in a mediatized
society – “in an age when answers are being discovered outside the classroom, questions
belong inside the classroom” (ibid, p. 165). This (media ecological) understanding of media
inside schools (why is the blackboard behind the teacher…?) seems more relevant than ever;
following digitalization of schools and the instrumental use of educational technologies,
framed by a “deep mediatization” of society at large.
In spite of this, the media literacy tradition is dissolving (McDougal, 2017) by being
subordinated to presentistic ideas of the market and of policy making (Forsman, 2018,
Livingstone 2009). As a consequence, some influential media literacy researchers are now
going outside K12-education to set up "new classrooms" by focusing on civic engagement
outside of schools, online with individuals, in NGOs etc. (c.f Mihailidis 2018, Mihailidsis,
Gordon, 2017).
This panel want to bring back media literacy to the classroom, understood here as; a
media technological infrastructure, a pedagogical space and an imagined place for citizen
making. The classroom is a material and architectonic space, it is an algorithmic (online)
space, an object for representations, and a metaphor that comprise and organizes historical
understandings. By understanding classrooms “as media” and as infrastructures where
mediatized projections of the future are inflicted, this panel addresses the conference theme
by challenging the orthodoxy of the field of media literacy and media education through
questions such as:
–How can the relation between the classroom as a factual and conceptual space be
described and analyzed in relation to different aspects of the media literacy tradition?
–What new and creative ways are used to understand the classroom as a medium?
–How is the “media literacy classroom” constituted in different K12-subjects (like
language, social science, art)?
–How can media literacy concepts and theories be projected on things like learning
management systems?
–What educational imaginaries are underpinning the architecture and organization of
the classroom and how does digital classroom technologies play in to these visions of
education and future citizens?
–How can we as researchers and educators rethink this future by suggesting other ways
of organizing a classroom?