Iconic Potentials in Education
The research group of Visual Media Education examines various visual worlds and the circumstances of their development. The aim is to gain insights into the reciprocal relations between subjective-biographical and historical-culturally determined preconditions of current picture and media practice, which are relevant for educational contexts.
Thematic focuses and levels of analysis
Pictures in school learning processes
(Level of analysis: Instruction; basic research; instructional research; teaching-materials research)
In many cultural areas, pictures have taken over from language as the primary means of information and communication. Nevertheless, specific pictorial didactics, which go beyond the ideology-critical conception, and bring together findings from cognitive science and insights from the fine arts and artistic vision, are still in their infancy (Kirschenmann 2007). Of particular interest in this regard is how learning with pictures can take place in different subject areas, and how and under what conditions young people can develop visual thinking.
Pictures in non-school contexts
(Level of analysis: [Medial] living environments of children and adolescents)
Children are growing up in a world that is shaped by visual media. The research group is interested in which socialising functions these visual worlds assume for adolescents (e.g. development of imagination, means of identification, development of aesthetic preferences). The concern in this respect is not solely with using pictures as projection surfaces for particular non-pictorial questions (e.g. tension between social and personal identity), but rather more with learning about adolescents' visual practices and the changing perception structures.
Visual representations of school
(Level of analysis: Education and development in different media and historical contexts)
The perspective of the humanities and of social and cultural sciences regarding the pictorial presentation of developmental and educational relations enables a form of construction/reconstruction of social reality that has thus far received little attention. This occurs from a diachronic (e.g. representation of instruction from the middle ages to the present day) and from a synchronic (e.g. pictorial reporting of school-based themes) perspective.