The research presented is of an interdisciplinary character and it deals with the topic which verges on the hybrid fields of the visual culture, media studies and pedagogy.
As the media is a term of multiple meanings, it is appropriate to define how it is understood in the framework of the research submitted. This work focuses on the mass and the network media whose functioning predominantly differs in the organisation of the sharing of news and messages, in interactivity and in the scope of content control.
The enormous development of the mass and network media has reinforced the influence of visual culture. The mass media experts admit that pictures influence the recipients more strongly than words as they, apart from other aspects, are more similar to the real world we live in. (Jirák, Burton, 2001).
Therefore, the need of visual literacy has increased and it has become a significant concept in the educational subject entitled Arts Education. The Czech curricular documents currently support this concept. The development of media literacy, which consists in the ability to interpret, use, and create one’s own media products, is anchored in the national curriculum framework in the Media Education cross-curricular theme.
Presumably, in order to perform a comprehensive content analysis of the media messages (which usually consist of the combination of an image and a text) and to deepen media and visual literacies it is appropriate to work with the knowledge and tools of the Visual and the Media Studies in an interdisciplinary way. Thus, on the educational level it is necessary to include the Media Education (ME) cross-curriculum theme in the Arts Education (AE) educational subject.
Therefore, a target has been pinpointed to offer new knowledge and support to the AE teachers as far as this sphere is concerned.
Research Objectives:
- Examine the interdisciplinary penetrations of the AE and the ME in educational practice at the Czech post-secondary level/grammar schools.
- Find the educational strategies of how to develop the partially overlapping visual and media literacies in the educational practice and to substantiate these methods as examples of good practice.
Research Questions:
1. Is the Arts Education an appropriate field in which to include the Media Education cross-curriculum theme? Can these discourses enrich each other?
2. How to work with the Media Education cross-curricular theme in the Arts Education so that both of the educational subjects' targets would be reached?
Based on the research objectives targeting at the curriculum improvement and providing support for the art teachers an Action research has been chosen. As stated by John Elliott (1991), a successful curriculum must be based on the existing practice, devised by the practitioners themselves and to be developed in the classrooms. On the basis of this theoretical framework there has been created a plan of a research design as follows:
1/ the examination of the exiting situation of the AE practice using the following methods: questionnaires, in-depth interviews, participative observation, and a case study.
2/ There will be conducted a discursive analysis of the gained data and a visual semiotic analysis of cultural artefacts (visual media message, lessons’ output, etc.).
3/ The suggestion of the strategies of how to incorporate ME into AE based on outcomes of the first two phases will be provided.
4/ Finally, the strategies will be implemented and verified together with subsequent reflexion (a case study).
In the following text, the partial results of the first phase of the research will be explained. More specifically, I will present a case study obtained at a grammar school in the Czech Republic.