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[ecrea] CfP - Summer school : Actors – Texts – Practices: New Approaches to Educational Media Research

Wed Nov 09 12:51:35 GMT 2011




Call for Papers
International Summer School
Actors – Texts – Practices: New Approaches to Educational Media Research
Georg Eckert Institute

Brunswick, Germany, 10 Sept. – 14 Sept. 2012
Application deadline: 1 Dec. 2011

The Georg Eckert Institute invites applications from doctoral candidates and post-doctoral scholars from the humanities and social sciences working with textbooks and/or other educational media to participate in the third GEI International Summer School.

Recently textbook research has been subject to an ‘empirical turn’; it has broadened and diversified its scope to adopt transdisciplinary and praxeological approaches from the social sciences and cultural studies. These new approaches place more weight on examining textbooks and other educational media in the contexts of their production, alteration and reception, and on the actors and discourses shaping them. Accordingly, contemporary educational media research includes a wealth of qualitative and quantitative methods such as ethnographical classroom studies, interviews, discourse analysis, etc. The GEI Summer School 2012 seeks to investigate these developments further by using diverse empirical methodology to focus on the various actors, texts and practices relating to educational media.

The summer school thus pursues three interrelated aims. Firstly, it seeks to broaden the participants’ understanding of current theories and methodologies and to explore new directions in educational media research inspired by the empirical turn. Secondly, it will constitute a transdisciplinary and international forum in which to discuss key research questions in an open and constructive atmosphere, ideally applying new methodologies to the participants’ own research projects. Thirdly, it aims to consolidate and develop further an expanding network of young scholars researching educational media in a variety of disciplines and with diverse methodologies, also with a view to future collaboration.

Methods and approaches will be presented and discussed in five panels and corresponding workshops on the following topics:

*Actors and experts involved in educational media:* their role and influence in economic, political, and cultural processes. How are experts and expertise socially constructed and negotiated, which power relations develop within advisory contexts, and how do experts contribute to the circulation of knowledge about educational media?

*New approaches to textbook analysis in the light of the linguistic and visual turns: *What analytical opportunities open up from a broadened concept of ‘text’? What is conveyed by illustrations in educational media and how can we analyse their use? How do texts and images in these media correlate and correspond, if at all?

*Biographical research:* teachers as mediators of the textbook and curriculum. To what extent do biographical experiences of teachers shape school instruction and do these affect didactic aspects? How do teachers deal with the institutional requirements for teaching the more sensitive topics or recent periods of history that they have experienced themselves, and how effective are institutionally prescribed interpretations of history?

*Focus group approaches:* Which opportunities are presented by focus group discussions as an approach that is both reconstructive and interactive? Which underlying semantics can be identified particularly well with this method, and where are its limitations?

*Participant observation:* How do children and young people use educational media in social situations, including those outside the classroom? What are the differences in textual control and authority between interviews and participant observation scenarios? What are the limitations involved in observing the behaviour of children?

The working language of the summer school will be English. Accommodation and travel costs for participants will be reimbursed (subject to funding).

Application deadline: 1 December 2011

Doctoral candidates and post-doctoral scholars are invited to submit abstracts of no more than one page, together with a cv and publication list as one pdf file (file name: last name, first name; 3 MB max.) to: (summerschool /at/ gei.de)


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