Maria Seyferth-Zapf is PhD student in School Pedagogy at the University of Wuerzburg. Since August 2019 she has started to work as research assistant at the Teacher Training Center at the University of Bayreuth where she coordinates a project for digital teaching and learning.
At the Emerging Researchers’ Conference in Hamburg she presented a poster regarding her thesis Fostering intercultural competences in the light of media literacy practices through a unifying teaching concept.
Due to the increasing cultural diversity in German society, emerging fears and uncertainties and upcoming negative or incorrect information about refugees in the media, intercultural and media literacy education become key elements in German education. Therefore, the dissertation projects unifies intercultural and media literacy educational approaches and aims at developing and evaluating a teaching concept to foster intercultural competences in the light of media literacy practices.
The developed teaching concept adheres to the pedagogical principle of action- and development-orientation. Additionally, intercultural contact is an important aspect. Thereby, regular high school students collaborate with a special class for youths with refugee or migrant backgrounds. Together they follow the unifying aim to create media products regarding a cultural topic.
This teaching concept is evaluated in a quasi-experimental study with pre-post-design and intervention and control group. Both quantitative and qualitative data and measurements according to the principles of mixed-methods are included. The results show that the intercultural teaching concept, and especially the aspect of intercultural media creation, contributes positively to the development of intercultural competence.
You can view the award-winning poster here.