BU Research Blog

3 findings from CEMP research that might be significant in the months ahead. We hesitate to over-state these or offer them as a ‘rapid response’ to Covid-19 but some of the stuff that came out of this work seems important going forward …

(1)  Virtual learning and the ‘Third Space’ – during the old normal, Julian McDougall and CEMP Visiting Fellow John Potter, from the UCL Knowledge Lab, researched the concept of the third space in digital media contexts and looked for the potential of such spaces to redistribute educational access and generate a more reciprocal, ‘porous’ exchange of knowledge from co-creation. The outcomes were published in this book and developed into a student partnership project for the International Journal of Students as Partners, with Phil Wilkinson co-editing the special issue. Here is John talking about this research with Neil Selywn.

(2) Curation and ‘dynamic literacies’ – the research with John extended into a conversation with Neil (author of the recent ‘Should Robots Replace Teachers‘) and Cathy Burnett about three of the key findings – that curation is a new (ish) literacy practice deserving of academic attention; the conditions of possibility for third spaces to impact on second spaces (schools, universities) and the difference between dynamic, agentive learning practices and static educational systems. That conversation is published here. In the midst of the current crisis, it could be argued that this dynamic / static tension is very much the challenge in the rapid move to virtual teaching and learning, but also that (inter) textual curation might be seen as culturally important during ‘lockdown’, for example the Tik Tok Carole Baskin (Tiger King) / Savage ‘fusion‘.

(3) The Uses of Media Literacy – a series of CEMP projects during 2018-19 led to a set of recommendations for policy and educational practice to the US Embassy, DCMS, School Libraries Association, Information Literacy Group and the European Union with regard to the need for media literacy in the response to information disorder and ‘fake news’, a subject that has been amplified in the current situation. The CEMP research found that the ‘uses of’ media literacy are a better focus than defining competences, returning to the work of Richard Hoggart (with John Potter, again, Pete Bennett and Kate Pahl) to offer a ‘deep dive’ into such an approach. In recommendations to the EU, we highlighted best practice in secondary school media literacy education, much of which was configured in third spaces, often virtual. The toolkit developed by Karen Fowler-Watt, Anna Feigenbaum and Julian for the US Embassy distinguishes between reactive, fact-checking or verification resources which ‘give a fish’ and a sustainable critical media literacy education (Media Studies, in the UK, as featured in Times Education) which ‘teaches to fish’, whilst the DCMS research, by Isabella Rega, Julian and Richard Wallis, not yet in the public domain, will feed into the UK Government’s Online Harms strategy. This blog post for the Information Literacy Group draws this work together. Previously, Phil, Julian and Mark Readman delivered projects for Samsung and EPSRC on a community-based third space ‘digital families’ intervention, coming to conclusions from our findings on access, identity and ‘second space’ obstacles that shaped the further work but, looking at that research again now, the findings we generated there resonate with current anxieties about inequality in home-schooling capabilities.

As stated, we don’t see these three bits of ‘new knowledge’ as immediately helpful or fully formed as education adjusts to a ‘new normal’ of digital teaching and virtual learning, nor do we suggest that a media literacy toolkit impact in the short term on public health disinformation. But we do know, from research, that it’s the way people use media literacy and how our media literacy is used, by others, that matters for social justice. And we also know, again from research, that the ‘how’ of media literacy education (dynamic, third space pedagogies) is going to be crucial to how this plays out in the future.