Media | Transformation
With media change comes societal change, yet equally changes to social conditions also bring about changes to media technologies, formats and practices. The Media | Transformation department (MeTra) explores these changes through a focus on educational media for schools and with recourse to the theoretical concepts of critical mediality research. In MeTra we ask what schools do with media and what media do with schools. We understand ‘schools’ in this context as a social space in which power relationships and discourses are reproduced and can be upset, learnt and forgotten. We conduct research into all these areas on national, international and transnational levels, taking contemporary and historical processes and phenomena into consideration.
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Research
Our understanding of critical media studies is defined by three perspectives:
Perspective 1: Analysis of media as artefacts. In this aspect we are interested in whether, and how, media have the potential to enable, limit and/or transform the content of education and educational practices. There is a particular focus here on which subject positions and power relationships are imprinted within educational media. We use methods such as walkthroughs, interface analysis and algorithmic audits.
Perspective 2: The analysis of media-related practices. In this aspect we examine how educational media and the content they convey demonstrate their effectiveness in specific, situated practices of appropriation, and what power relations and subject positions are reproduced. The methods we use include video recordings, participative observations and interviews.
Perspective 3: Analysis of the contexts of educational media. In this aspect we ask how digital media are interwoven with genral media-cultural and socio-cultural relationships. We are interested in the technologies, interests and production conditions that shape educational media. We also explore which future scenarios are being proposed for schools and education in the context of media transformations. We are guided by concepts from discourse analysis and dispositive analysis. We use methods such as network analysis or conducting interviews with the producers of educational media.
The focus lies principally on digital media - i.e. programmed media - that meet at least one of the following criteria:
- Firstly, media that are regularly used in schools or whose use is supported by education policy-makers;
- Secondly, media that originate from or are disseminated in non-school contexts and whose use in schools promises to open up new possibilities for education in schools and has the potential to stimulate change.
The current foci lie on researching AI and games as well as emerging technologies.
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Research Infrastructure / Transfer
The Media | Transformation department has developed the digital lab ‘The Basement’ as part of its research infrastructure and as a site of knowledge exchange, and has run it jointly with the Didactics of Educational Media department since 2026. Functioning as a ‘classroom of the future’, it enables new perspectives on how to address educational media. In the lab, researchers can explore interactions with educational media when removed from the social space of schools. We translate our research findings into innovative transfer formats, which then form the basis for new research questions while also presenting new possibilities for the collection of research data. Teachers and students can use the space to develop and test new teaching scenarios. Researchers, policy-makers and educational practitioners can be brought together in a number of different formats that support the social relevance of the research and enable educational media for schools to be continually developed.
