2013 Summit Programme - The Centre for Excellence in Media ...

PARALLEL SESSION 1: Thursday 19th 14.00 - 14.40
TRANSMEDIA:
Dis/continuity and Contemporary Discourses of
Media Education and Literacy in the Czech Republic
Zdenek ˇ Sloboda
Cantor
9129
abstracts
The discussion on Media Education was instigated in the Czech Republic around the
year 2004. Only two years later it was introduced as an obligatory cross-curricular
topic at all elementary and high schools. The concept was developed mainly within the
academic area of Media Studies which caused problems after the introduction, as the
Educational Sciences, schools and teachers were unprepared. Yet, Media Education
has a deeper history in the Czech Republic, one that goes back to the beginning of
the 20 th Century. Also, the development before 2004 (and after 1989) could be defined
as fragmented, even separatist, disregarding historical embedding and uncritically
assumed foreign concepts without local contextualization.
For the last seven years, analysis has been conducted on the background of the discipline
of Media Pedagogy 1 , current Czech debate and historical roots of media education,
media didactics, media literacy and media-educational research. This paper
will introduce part of this analysis and offer an interpretation of current development
of the debate. Analysis revealed that, since the 1990s, this debate has evolved in to
three partly separate, partly interconnected discourses of specific characteristics and
focuses.
Keywords: media education, media pedagogy, media literacy, Czech Republic,
historical development.
Zdenek ˇ Sloboda is enrolled in PhD study of Sociology at CU Prague, and of
Media Pedagogy at the University Leipzig. He is lecturer in the Dept. of Journalism at
Palacky University in Olomouc.
1 Medienpädagogik; developed in Germany since the 1970s is creating a large base of
knowledge and integrating intersectional and transdisciplinary theoretical, research
and practical aspects of the area.
Media Education Summit 2013 19