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

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)