Abstract:

The adoption of a truly compromise on competency-based learning, so fostered today through diverse discursive sources (from legislative to informative), allows any active teacher to see the need to leave behind the conception and the merely instrumental use of digital media. Facing the uncritical employment of the new information and communication technologies, we should start to think about all the practical implications which that brings with it. In this sense, this proposal presents the design and experimentation of a media literacy project that, consisting of an independent subject for 4th of OSE (Obligatory Secondary Education), has been implemented in the 2018-2019 academic year in a private school of Seville (Spain).

In order to justify this project from a theoretical and practical standpoint, its essential didactic aspects are briefly described, paying particular attention to the design of a specific curricula whose contents range from the historical evolution of mass media to the most recent media problems, passing through the ideas of the main theorists of communication. All this has been worked through different active methodologies promoted by the school itself (flipped classroom, based-learning project, e-learning, etc.).

The experimentation itself has been analyzed using the ethnographic research method and the participant observation technique, with a researcher’s diary, questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and focus group as data collection tools. From this point, all the information gathered has been processed following the principles of the Grounded Theory, giving rise to a series of results that allow to formulate a double claim of the didactic potential of this proposal, but also a warning about the consequences of inserting a radically new experience in the context of a very traditional school culture.

On the one hand, this project has connected educommunicative theory and practice in an alternative way to the curricular transversality that is claimed today, adressing successfully the development of media competence from the development of self-critical thinking, that is, from the invitation to the student to question their own responsibility in the construction of a social reality like the current one, mediatic and mediated at the same time. On the other hand, however, there have been many practical problems to be solved, derived from the clash between the innovative nature of this proposal and the requirements of the old but still present paradigm of educational standardization.

Keywords:

Media literacy, competence-based learning, critical thinking, experimental curriculum, educational innovation.