Abstract:

Teachers' willingness to use digital media in class is highly dependent on teachers' attitudes towards digital media. Long and successful non-digital teaching practices also have a negative impact on digital media use (Blackwell et al. 2014). It, therefore, makes sense to intensify digital media use already in teacher training in order to have positive experiences with digital media in class at an early stage. However, an overview of international research among teacher training students reveals a great ambivalence: they are very active and technically competent in dealing with digital media. At the same time, about half of the teaching profession students have "negative beliefs and considered ICT as a distraction during their teaching practice" (McGarr et al. 2019: 32). In other words, media literacy as a learning task for the students is subject to the reservation of teachers to impart this media literacy.

Thus, from an international perspective, there is still a general criticism in teacher training of media use in general and of the (mostly digital) media practices of the younger generation. The great importance of the attitudes and convictions of the teaching staff makes it clear that a change in this situation is not a question of digital literacy, i.e., a more technical competence-oriented training of future teachers. Instead, it is a question of general media competence, which includes not only technical and creative aspects but also the ability to deal with media criticism (Baacke 1996). The professionalization of prospective teachers, therefore, requires a normative orientation conveyed by arguments (Rigotti et al. 2009). Thus technical skills, pedagogical/didactical skills, and individual attitudes/beliefs must be supported by ethics (cf. PEAT model by McGarr et al. 2019) that enable teachers to identify problem areas of digital media use and judge them argumentatively.

The presentation contrasts the "media moralization" (Kerlen 2005) of future teachers with the anthropologically fundamental media orientation of humans as animal symbolicum (Cassirer 1944). Because of this inescapable need for media, media competence is an essential competence for coping with the life of man as a creature written in the media. The mediation of media competence is, therefore, an ethically plausible demand, also concerning the responsibility of the audience and user, which has often been underestimated. Subsequently, the presentation reminds us of a theory of the change of generational relations (Mead 1970) in modern societies and currently demonstrates this in the increasing acceleration of social and media change (Krotz 2007, 2009) through digitalization. Educators in general and school teachers in particular therefore have a special responsibility as mediators of media competence (Rath 2017). This responsibility makes it necessary to provide ethically informed media education. Philosophical (media) ethics must systematically develop the normative core of such media education. Today, media education is therefore inconceivable without a professional area of ethics in addition to technical and didactic skills. For only rational ethics can develop the individual attitudes/skills of teachers argumentatively in the direction of openness towards digital technologies.

Keywords:

Media education, pre-service teachers, teacher education, media ethics, mediatization, media compntence.