Abstract:

How do teachers actually use films and other video content in their teaching and learning activities? How do they integrate video materials into their teaching? What personal, technological and contextual factors facilitate this integration? Does the integration of video materials offer opportunities for the development of visual and film literacy? These questions lie at the core of the FAST – Film A Scuola per Tutti research project.

Today’s children and teenagers spend a considerable amount of time online every day (OECD, 2015), and recent studies indicate that, thanks to free services like YouTube, video is possibly the most largely used media online nowadays (OECD, 2015; EUKidsOnline, 2017). Also, the production of video – for fun or for school/work, connected with sports, events, partying, etc. – is a common practice among young people. Under this perspective, the development of visual and video literacy appears as a central issue in the domain of media and digital literacy (Masterman, 1985; Hobbs, 2010; Rivoltella, 2008; UNESCO, 2011). This new situation has definitely impacted how we can consider video as a school media. The advantages of audio-visual media like documentaries, films, music clips, etc. are currently being redefined by an audience that is massively exposed to the consumption of online video, is thus developing new practices and tastes and is accustomed to new genres and formats (e.g., YouTubers, or super-short clips).

This is also the case in Switzerland (Suter et al., 2015; Weller et al., 2016), a country where only recently the new school curricula published in 2015 have acknowledged the importance of video both as a medium of instruction (e.g., in flipped classroom, or as content presentation) and as a basic form of literacy.

In Autumn 2017 we conducted a survey data collection among 118 pre-service and in-service teachers in the Italian-speaking region of the country, and then conducted three focus groups with teachers. Due to the limited sample size, the survey data was analysed with descriptive statistics, focusing on differences across school sectors (primary, lower secondary, high school), years of service (novice, experts), digital competences and personal media consumption profile.

The results offer useful insights into the greatly understudied practices of video integration in school education and partly dispel the myth of digital native teachers (Schulmeister, 2008). The most frequent need expressed by teachers is the identification of reliable and easy-to-use online sources for high-quality video materials, currently not easily available in Italian (exemplary projects are BBC Schools and SBS Learn; see also Cunningham et al., 2016;) The results also provide indications about how best to make video content available and usable for teachers, following an Open Educational Resource approach (OER; OECD, 2007).

Keywords:

Video, teacher education, digital literacy, visual literacy.