Technology and Pedagogy: Analysing Digital Practices in Media Education
This thesis examines how teachers in a vocational media course in Norway develop local classroom procedures related to digital tool-use in media production. The aim of the study is to investigate and document the significance of establishing working procedures such as tasks, assignments and classroom routines related to classroom based digital production work. The research in this thesis thereby explicitly examines how digital practices are institutionally embedded in the classroom.
The thesis contains three articles in addition to an overview describing the theoretical and methodological basis. Empirically, the thesis draws on ethnographic observations of two media studies classes at an upper secondary school in Oslo, Norway. The study observes how these classes engage with digital production tasks and how these production activities are embedded in instructional design. The theoretical basis for the study refers to cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), which provides a conceptual framework for analysing how social practices and institutions evolve over time.
The findings in the thesis demonstrate how teachers extend their competencies in applying digital technologies through developing local working procedures and routines. Working procedures and routines prove here as vital in providing stable working conditions and making explicit the purposes of classroom-based production work. Moreover, developing procedures and routines represents a kind of professional learning which in turn makes available a knowledge basis for handling anticipated as well as unexpected challenges during classroom based digital production. In this sense, developing classroom procedures in digital production appears as a vital knowledge-basis in adapting externally-given educational goals to local classroom conditions.