Television and Internet to reflect about of non-violence

Summary

Convinced that the school cannot ignore such a persistent social problem as violence, we decided to use television to reflect upon this medium, re-building its contents and “publishing” the results from our discussions in a web page. We hereby analyze the development of an extracurricular workshop in which we intended to work, together with the teacher and children, in an education in values and, more specifically, in defence of ‘non-violence’.

Objectives

Our main goal in this project was to explore how to introduce new technologies in the classroom so that they may contribute to the design of educational settings that prevent and avoid violence.

Project Development

For the implementation of this project we worked in educating in values and, more specifically, in fostering "non-violence" in a workshop with Primary education students and their teacher (2001/2002 school year). During the workshop, boys and girls reflected upon the violent contents shown daily on the TV programs they watch. To guide the debate we watched in class two programs proposed by them: ‘Gente’ and ‘The Simpson’.

Based on their reflections regarding the violent contents seen on TV they re-built and published their conclusions on a web page.

Results

New literacies

The oral and written re-creations of the audiovisual discourse favour the surging of a critical conscience insofar as the child has to re-write this discourse and, thus, he or she has to take a different perspective to the one represented by his or her "hero", not just in relation to time and space, but also in relation to his values. The narrative re-creation of the “hero” allows us to confer sense to the character’s activity dispersedly presented on the screen. From this perspective, we believe that an education in favour of non-violence within a multi-media experience has driven us to work on new literacies in the classroom.

Critically re-building through narratives

Oral and written narratives allow the reconstruction of audiovisual texts so that the former become educational tools that guide critical re-interpretations of TV contents related to violence. In this sense, the narrative commits boys and girls to moral processes of thoughts, feelings and representations. It’s not so much a matter of searching for a change in attitudes, but rather of providing a framework within which they can contextualize their moral judgements.

New learning tools

Media, and more specifically television and the Internet, have revealed themselves as excellent tools from which to instigate in class thinking processes which, without a doubt, make it easier for the teacher to introduce issues regarding an education in values and, undoubtedly, also make these issues more attractive for boys and girls.

Financing

This project is part of a research study subsidized by the University of Alcala (2001-2002 school year) and titled ‘Violencia escolar y lectura de textos televisivos en el aula (School violence and reading of television texts in the classroom)’.