Me and Media is a project that has been developing during the past seven years, since 1992 when it started as a special elective class for second year students at Doshisha International High School. Me and Media - m&m, for short - meets two periods (total of 90 minutes) each week, and from the beginning has been used as a ground-breaking experiment in redefining media and rethinking approaches to learning. Over the years, a variety of schools outside of Doshisha International have been invited to take part in m&m, and the results of this interaction has been different each year.
It is only recently - since 1997 - that there has been an effort to involve other schools in Japan in the m&m project. This has been done with the cooperation of CEC, which has as one of its main goals in supporting the project, to increase the involvement of Japanese students in international communication projects. Therefore, this year, we aimed to work more closely with Japanese schools and make m&m into a model project that schools in Japan could take part in successfully.
At the end of last year’s project, five schools in Japan and six schools in Europe had been involved in various ways. One more school joined the project in Japan and three schools in Europe were not able to take part this year. So the Me and Media project looked like this at the beginning of our school year in April, 1998:
In Japan:
School #1: Doshisha
International High School in Kyoto
School #2: Tachibana
Girls High School in Kyoto
School #3: Shinonome
High School in Matsuyama, Ehime
School #4:
Tezukayama Izumigaoka High School in Osaka
School #5: Nanzan
Kokusai High School in Aichi
School #6: Tokyo
Kokusai Gakuen in Tokyo
In Europe:
School #1:
Kooperative Gesamtschule Rastede in Rastede, Germany
School #2: rsg
Broklede in The Netherlands/Holland
School #3:
Obchodna Akademia (Secondary Commercial School) in Levice, Slovakia
At the esp (European Schools Project) meeting in Copenhagen in March, 1998, a gathering was held to find interested European partners for the Me and Media Project. Here is some information about esp from their homepage
“The European Schools Project is a network
organisation which supports a community of schools worldwide to explore
applications of educational telematics. The ESP aims at improvement and
innovation of educational activities and its organisation. It offers
educational, organisational and technical support and provides opportunities
for: electronic communication between individuals, schools and educational
networks . . . Initiated in 1988 by the University of Amsterdam, participation
in ESP has spread to 26 countries with over three hundred teachers, and tens of
thousands of pupils. . . . Although the members of ESP are connected by
telematics throughout the year, the personal face-to-face contacts have proved
to be an important extra and very valuable element for designing successful
curriculum collaborations.”
At this meeting various topics were discussed, but five-six teachers there were particularly interested in looking at film, school textbooks and other media in various countries during the second world war; that is, wartime propaganda as media. Since Europe and Japan were heavily involved in this war, it was thought that this topic would be have wide interest in both areas.
However, at a meeting of Japanese Schools the following month, it was found that two of the active teachers - from Shinonome and Tezukayama - preferred to follow the more general topics introduced in the previous year, rather than be limited to one topic - media and wartime propaganda. The list of topics from the year before, basically chosen by students in the various schools in the project, was narrowed down this year to include the following themes:
Me and Media - Themes for Research - 1998-99
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Comedy/Comics/Cartoons as Media |
Drugs as Media |
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Family as Media |
Fashion as Media |
Internet as Media |
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Movie/Video as Media |
Music as Media |
Nationality/Race as Media |
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Privacy as Media |
Religion as Media |
Sex as Media |
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Violence as Media |
Wartime Propaganda as Media |
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The activities in each school differed quite a lot. At Doshisha International, the students meet for 90 minutes per week and the time is directly related to thinking about media, rather than being a class which focuses directly on teaching English or Social Studies, etc. Also, the students there each had their own email addresses and free access to computers during the day. This creates a very different situation from most of the other schools in the project. Because of these differences in time, focus, and availability of various equipment, students were actively working in groups and researching in their media areas, so that by the end of the year, each group was able to create a homepage which presented their themes rather extensively.
The other schools in Japan who said they were interested in joining our project each reacted very differently. Although the teachers at Tachibana Girls High School and Nanzan International School originally indicated that they would be involved in our project, in fact they were not able to join in any of the activities. Actually each school and each teacher was very unique in the way they were able to be involved. This made it very difficult to have any overall plan that everyone would take part in.
Project
Example
An example of trying to create a mini-project for all schools to follow was the idea for watching a film together. If we look at this idea in detail, we can see some of the general problems in the project that we can address in the future. At the esp meeting in Copenhagen, the European teachers expressed an interest in watching a film together. In thinking about possible films to watch, we mentioned “Swing Kids”, about youth in Germany during the war, and two Japanese films, “Grave of the Fireflies” (Hotaru no Haka) and “Barefoot Gen” (Hadashi no Gen), both about the effects of the war and atomic bomb on children. But no decision was reached because it was felt that this should be decided by those definitely involved in the project at a later date. But there was much enthusiasm about the students watching a film together.
Later in Japan the teachers discussed the idea of suggesting a film to our students to watch. The teacher at Doshisha International preferred to have this choice left up to the students themselves, as this was a part of the philosophy of Me and Media class - to have students make as many of their own choices as possible. There was some concern expressed about how long this process would take, but finally it was agreed to create a bbs (electronic bulletin board system) so that students could express their ideas about which movie to watch and discuss. This bbs was created, but finally very few students gave any input to movie choice. In fact, the movie that was finally chosen, Forest Gump, only received two votes. The total number of students voting for any movie was less than 20, out of more than 300 students in all the classes.
After the voting deadline passed, Forest Gump was recommended to all the classes by two methods. We posted the information on the homepage and also sent letters to each teacher, asking him or her to announce it to their classes. Then we set up a new bbs for discussing the movie. However, after making these announcements, we heard from only three classes. Two classes in Japan said that their students were already involved in other themes and that the students either didn’t have time to watch a film or weren’t interested in that particular film. One class in Germany said that their students would all watch the film and send their ideas to the group’s bbs. A month after creating a Forest Gump bbs, at a meeting one of the teachers said that his students had watched the movie and would soon post their comments on the movie. This teacher did not inform us of this plan by email so we had no knowledge of his students’ activities.
Finally, at the beginning of February, nine email messages about Forest Gump were posted by students from a Tezukayama Izumigaoka class. It is expected that some students from Germany will post their own ideas about the movie, or respond to the Japanese student messages. Also, one of the teachers wrote and gave some reaction to each of the messages.
There’s no doubt that all the teachers involved in the Me and Media project did the best they could, each in their own circumstances, which includes different amounts of class time to devote to our projects, different amounts of technology available to their students, different support from their administration, and different levels of expertise themselves with using various forms of media in their classes. Each teacher tried to develop his/her own classes as much as possible and encourage them to take part in some way, in writing email letters, in creating homepages, in thinking and doing research on various media topics, or in watching this video.