Education and mass media: an example of workshop teaching

Abstract

The educational strategy of the workshop provides a learning experience in the form of research, active experimentation with knowledge building strategies by individuals or groups working in autonomy using their own existing knowledge and creativity in problem solving activities, thus “learning by doing”. It consists of actively deconstructing and constructing, destroying and recreating in a new form, setting objectives and discussing in groups, undergoing experimental testing and evaluating the results. In essence, the function of the teacher is that of a councillor who provides “soft” support through scaffolding and takes care to provide the necessary space for children in the process of shared knowledge-building. Starting out with a number of reflections regarding the workshop described in this article, we move on to analyse the educational value of television and its positive and negative potential. The starting point is the provocative representation of the deconstruction of a media message by way of an analysis of its different narrative and graphic phases paying particular attention to meaning and the means used to convey it in filmic language.