Nearly all German schools operate as half-day schools. The Open All-day School (Offene Ganztagsschule or OGS) is a childcare and support offering after the normal German school day and supplementing it. It seems to be more effective than school even, especially with regard to the “computer” area (cf. IGLU/PIRLS 2011). However, the “computer” category does not yet entail any literacy – media literacy education clearly is about more than the ability to use a computer.
The project “KidSmart Goes Open All-Day School – Media-literate at School Transition” is an attempt to carry out a broad, integrated expansion of the OGS: inspired by the expectations for “Media Passport NRW,” based on the education agreements of the state of North-Rhine Westphalia and geared to literacy promotion requirements, the children work collaboratively on joint media-supported projects and thereby experience holistic development. The attempt is thus made in a multi-support learning setting to win children and staff over permanently to integrated media use.
The project “KidSmart Goes Open All-day School – Media-literate at School Transition” tries to establish a new, innovative project structure within OGS, in order to improve the pedagogical practice of educational institutions.
In order to do this, to begin with, we intervene by making computers, printers and scanners available to the participating schools during and beyond the project phase, thus augmenting, in line with Bourdieu’s theory of capital forms and habitus, the economic capital represented by the institutions’ media equipment.
Further, the OGS teaching staff takes part in training designed to build up the teachers’ cultural capital by addressing topics related to both teaching and using media. Following this, the staffers conceive and implement curriculum-related projects that integrate media and are specifically attuned to the needs, interests and competencies of the participating children and the school’s parameters. Mentoring by students accompanies both phases, so that the staffers receive continuous support (social capital) and can rely on a designated contact as they do the work, which often will be new for them. Beyond this, the intention is to build better networking between school in the morning, childcare in the afternoon as well as the parents by setting up a moodle platform.
In these interventions, the foremost question is to what extent it will be possible to develop, through such structural and organizational changes in the OGS, a new and above all conceptually well-prepared project structure in primary education that aids in improving the quality of educational institutions for the long term. In order to be able to answer this, the intervention will be linked with a broad-scoped, parallel evaluation.
