Abstract:

A school that is to prepare students for the challenges of the 21st century needs teachers who are themselves prepared for this. A central process is the mutually influencing development of society and technical possibilities, described in the meta-process of mediatization [cf. Krotz 2017]. This conditions the mediatized lifeworld of teachers and pupils, both now and within the entire professional careers of educational staff. Teachers must constantly adapt to the challenge that new technical developments also change pupils' communication habits, and that new media generations develop, whose training in basic communicative skills is a central moment of the subject German in education [cf. Marci-Boehncke 2018]. Internationally, the discussion of the division into media generations mainly considers the concept of "digital natives" ([Prensky 2001], [cf. Evans and Robertson 2020]). However, the primacy of age as a singular determinant of digital literacy cannot be maintained [cf. Adjin-Tettey 2020]. The planned article uses an understanding of media generations that defines them based on a "specific experiential space of mediatization" [Hepp, Berg, and Roitsch 2017, p. 111]. It takes the media biography into account and grants a "self-image as a media generation" [cf. ibid.].

This research project addresses whether students
(1) consider the media lifeworld of pupils in their school type to be comprehensible to them and
(2) whether they expect this assessment to change throughout their professional careers.

This knowledge provides the basis for students' further analysis and video reflection on the relationship between mediatization and inclusion.

We collected and analyzed the records of 14 short group discussions in the first session of the preparatory seminar on the didactics of literature (subject German) in the practical semester (master's phase, TU Dortmund University, n=51 students). We see that the students consider the current media world of pupils to be comprehensible, as they see themselves as part of the same digital media generation. They define a common "experiential space of mediatization" [ibid.] for themselves and the school children. At the same time, they expect the comprehensibility to the media lifeworld to change as the age gap between them and their pupils widens.

Keywords:

Media generations, pre-service teachers, media lifeworld, mediatization, teacher education.