Media teachers’ discursive understandings in developing 21st century education: Are we the tugboat, the satellite, or the terror cell?

The overarching aim of this thesis is to explore media teachers’ understandings of being teachers, of their educational practices and goals, and how the teachers link these understandings to their epistemic beliefs within a framework of 21st century and media literacy education and research. I discuss how these discursive understandings develop within professional communities of practice and how they interact with broader discursive orders and epistemic practices in school. Article 1 starts with the discursive concepts and understandings available in the field of media literacy research and education, in a scoping review that show how the conceptual understandings of media literacy has evolved from a rather narrow perspective of training individual skills for media protection, towards a broader agenda of fostering public media competences within democratic societies on an individual, interactional and systemic level, mainly with a focus on student outcomes and educational practices. The findings establish what are the main research topics in the field and discuss if a joint understanding of media literacy is possible and wanted. Through establishing what the main research topics are, it also becomes evident what is not among the main research topics – research on the media teachers and their perceptions of educational practice. Article 2 has this last finding as a starting point. The existing conceptions of the media teacher within media research literature are addressed, exploring if and how they function as underlying discourses for how media teachers see themselves as educators and motivate their educational practice within a policy-framework of 21st century education. The findings suggest that there are different and conflicting understandings of being media teachers, resulting in different educational practices with wider implications for the future implementations of media education. Article 3 contextualizes the media teachers’ perceptions in article II within institutional settings, thematized the core educational practice of production work in the MC program, examining the teachers’ interpretative repertoires on student participation and educational goals in using this method of teaching. In addition, the underlying historical media discourses addressed in the former articles are thematized within an institutional framework. The findings suggest that the media teachers’ interpretative repertoires on production work are framed by theoretical and pedagogical reflections connected to media education discourses that thematize 21st century education and competences, but that these understandings are not necessarily evident or appreciated within the broader school context. Comparing findings across articles, the MC teachers typically focus on both the individual, interactional and systemic levels of media literacy, with working and learning in ways that foster creativity and critical reflection seen as the main goal of the MC program