The so-called “refugee-crisis” and increased misinformation spread via social media concerning refugees and migration caused xenophobic resentments in German society. Addressing topics like racism or xenophobia as well as the critical reflection of stereotypes and prejudices are crucial when fostering intercultural competences and media literacy skills. 

The following dissertation project aims at unifying these two strands by developing and evaluating a teaching concept to foster intercultural competences of German students in the light of fundamental media literacy practices such as act and create (Hobbs 2011). The research project is planned as practice- and theory-oriented development and evaluation of a both intercultural and media educational concept for secondary education (Tulodziecki et al. 2013). From an empirical perspective, there is still a lack of research regarding these two issues (Reinders et al. 2011; Lorenz et al. 2017), although intercultural and media literacy education are deeply rooted in German curricula for secondary education (KMK 2013, 2016). On the one hand, intercultural competences can be defined as knowledge (cognitive dimension), attitudes (affective dimension) and skills (behavioural dimension) which are acquired and extended in intercultural contact situations (Bennett 1993; Deardorff 2006). On the other hand, media literacy education is not restricted to media use, but it also includes practices of reflecting and creating digital media in the context of teaching and learning (Hobbs 2011; Tulodziecki et al. 2019).  Based on these and further intercultural and media educational theories and findings a unifying teaching concept is developed and empirically evaluated.

The overall teaching concept adheres to the pedagogical principles of action-and-development-orientation (Tulodziecki et al. 2017). The related teaching units follow an ideal-typical structure of teaching including complex stimulating tasks as major features of the intervention. 

In the first part, students from a high school need to solve a complex evaluation task. They are asked to reflect prejudiced statements and images about refugees deriving from misinformation through media. 

After a brainstorming with first proposals for a possible task solution, students deal with several learning units which focus on topics which were brought up by the initial prejudiced statements. These learning units include basic culture specific knowledge, which is meant to support the students in solving the evaluation task from the beginning. Skills of critical thinking are activated due to the use of a digital learning platform providing information and material stimulating collaboration and communication processes through digital and verbal exchange.

These skills of critically reflecting and evaluating were carried over to a new task focusing on the creation of a digital product. This task is realized in a direct intercultural contact situation for which there was a collaboration with another middle school class, established especially for students with lower German language skills and refugee background.

First, students from both classes share their experiences of cultural conflict situations and misunderstandings via a digital learning platform. In this way, they can discuss and reflect the influence of prejudices deriving from misleading media coverage about refugees. Secondly, students of both classes meet in a face-to-face contact situation to create stop-motion-videos reflecting cultural conflicts and misunderstandings arising out of prejudices. Media creation as an unifying aim challenges the group members to collaborate and communicate productively which strengthens the sense of belonging and reduces prejudices within the groups (Pettigrew & Tropp 2008). Thus, the combination of in-depth critical reflection and discussion processes in intercultural contact situations with the creation of videos contributes to intercultural competences and media literacy skills. 

In addition to the empirical and theoretical framework, the poster will include the developed teaching concept, the related teaching units, the underlying evaluation concept and a range of empirical results.

The evaluation of the teaching concept is realized as a quasi-experimental study with pre-post-design containing an intervention (ni=19) and a control group (nc=18). The students of the control group are part of a different class which does not receive any specific lesson treatment with intercultural or media educational focus. The study includes quantitative and qualitative data and measurements. According to the principles of mixed-methods (Creswell & Plano-Clark 2011), the evaluation results of both strands will be combined in the end to provide a holistic picture of the treatment outcomes. Intercultural competence as dependent variable is assessed through a quantitative questionnaire, the Intercultural Sensitivity Scale. This focuses on the affective dimension of intercultural competence (Chen & Starosta 2000). This instrument was used in its German translation consisting of 22 items with a four-point Likert scale (4 = strongly agree; 1 = stronlgy disagree) to respond to each item (Fritz & Möllenberg 1999). This scale also shows high internal consistency (Cronbachs alpha: .89) and its items correspond to five factors of intercultural sensitivity: Interaction Enjoyment, Respect for Cultural Differences, Self Confidence, Self Esteem, and Interaction Attentiveness. Additionally, the quantitative part includes self-assessment-scales, like knowledge or self-efficacy regarding intercultural and media educational topics, as well as scales concerning the use of digital media at school and at home. Furthermore, the quantitative part comprises nominal scales to gather data about gender, intercultural contact or friendship. Regarding qualitative methods, the students are asked to verbalize experienced or imagined conflicts in intercultural contact situations. These so called “critical incidents” (Göbel 2007) are assessed in pre- and post-test. The students should describe an incident and answer several tasks, like “For what reason(s) did the conflict evolve?” (cognitive), “How does each involved person feel and why?” (affective) or “What could you do to solve the conflict?” (behavioural). These questions help to assess the development of students’ intercultural competences under a cognitive, affective and behavioural perspective. Moreover, the qualitative part includes focus groups (Krueger & Casey 2015) subsequent to the treatment. The guideline is based on the affective dimension of intercultural competence and follows the factors of intercultural sensitivity (Chen & Starosta 2000). Within the group conversation the students discuss the process of media creation in intercultural contact and its impacts on the development of intercultural sensitivity. Qualitative data deriving from critical incidents and focus groups is evaluated through qualitative content analysis (Mayring 2015).

One expected outcome is the positive influence of the treatment to students’ intercultural competences (= dependent variable). Statistical analysis confirmed that during the intervention the students improved their intercultural sensitivity significantly (p-value: 0,026). Besides to that, the experience of intercultural contact in general is suspected to have positive effects on the intercultural competence level. This relation has to be verified through an analysis of variance with repeated measures. Ideally, the combination of quantitative and qualitative data through mixed-methods would prove a possible relation between the level of intercultural sensitivity as affective component of intercultural competence and its cognitive and behavioural dimension. With regard to the critical incidents, the level of intercultural sensitivity is expected to predict the complexity of the students’ responds. To check this hypothesis, a qualitative content analysis with deductive category assignment according to Mayring (2015) is planned. Answers will be categorized into three dimensions (cognitive, affective, behavioural). Then, they will be ranged from higher to lower levels of complexity using a three-point scoring system. In order to confirm or reject the prior hypothesis, this quantified results then should be compared with quantitative outcomes of intercultural sensitivity. Besides to that, it could be interesting to check if media use as well as the reflection and creation of digital media influences the development of intercultural competences. Although this relationship is yet to be verified statistically, a first explorative analysis of the qualitative data from focus groups reveals that media creation encourages students’ self-confidence in intercultural situations. With regard to previous and expected findings, the described dissertation project seems to fulfil its defined goals. Empirical evaluation shows, that the teaching concept is appropriate for fostering intercultural competences among German students in the light of using, reflecting and creating digital media in the classroom.

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