Media education for older people - views of stakeholders

ABSTRACT

This study is a part of an ongoing design-based research (DBR) project aimed at designing, piloting, and assessing a digital study module focused on older people’s media education. In order to gain a better understanding of older people’s media literacy and develop the teaching of adult educators, participatory creative workshops for a total of thirty-one stakeholders (older people and professionals who work with them) were conducted. Research data was collected from these workshops through a case exercise from stakeholders and a questionnaire from older people during the year 2019. According to the stakeholders, older people need more training in all the dimensions of media literacy, which is understood as competence in accessing, using, understanding, creating, and critically analyzing different media texts. However, use dimension was the most featured dimension in the data. In addition, older people are a heterogeneous group and it is essential that media education is tailored to meet the current needs of older people. The results indicate that media education should be designed especially to address the needs and individuality of older people.

KEYWORDS:

• Older people
• media education
• media literacy education
• design-based research

Acknowledgments

This study was a part of a research project, IkäihMe - Developing Teacher Education of Adult Educators – Targeting Older People’s Media Education (2018–2020). The author would like to thank all those with whom she collaborated in the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the funding for the IkäihMe-project for the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture [OKM/85/592/2018].