Keywords

Teacher education; civic literacy; media and information literacy (MIL); democracy; whole-school approach; human rights; Norway

3.1 Introduction

Civic literacy plays a key role in the development and maintenance of democratic societies. Teachers need to have the skills and understanding required to help children, from an early age, to be motivated to take an active part in democratic activities in schools and in the wider society.

Media and information competences are key instruments for the construction of civic literacy.

The UNESCO (2012) Media and Information Literacy Curriculum for Teachers is a flexible framework for supporting civic literacy programs at every level from kindergarten to higher education.

Modern technology gives individuals the possibility of participating in educational activities and of receiving, using, and sharing information of various kinds with few obstacles or limitations. This situation has widely influenced not only the teaching and learning activities in our educational organizations, but how, where, and when learning takes place. From an early age, children are using new technologies to learn, understand and participate in the world. The learning takes place in formal, noninformal, and informal ways in various contexts, a fact that has influenced many teacher education institutions in Norway and beyond and that has changed the way that we educate teachers. Initial teacher education no longer has a specific ending point; it is the start of a lifelong professional and personal learning process. Because of our rapidly changing societies, teachers have to work continuously to improve their knowledge, skills, and competences. New technologies entail new learning strategies and offer multiple challenges in schools and classrooms which are becoming more and more diverse and multicultural.

There is also the important and pertinent question of ethics. As information comes from so many sources, both filtered and unfiltered, there is a need even in kindergarten and primary schools to develop ethical guidelines and theories for a digital ethical understanding and reflection.

Sandos (2014) did a case study in some Norwegian kindergartens for his doctoral dissertation. His aim was to discover how preschool children are educated in order to become robust and empathic users of internet resources. He found a significant knowledge gap in this area. Children as information and communications technology (ICT) users seem to be a neglected group in research projects and in the debate about ICT ethics. Consequently, the formation of the knowledge construction processes in teachers, both in college and in practice as teachers in kindergartens and schools, has to be focused on issues connected to the ethical and responsible use of the internet and the social media; these must be critically investigated, discussed, and learnt. Sandos recommends a digital training program including digital ethics for preschool teachers and proposes that this training should be a compulsory part of teacher education.

In order to assess the quality of information and judge its relevance, teachers need critical thinking and reflection (Brookfield, 1995). They also have to ask themselves how they can use information in ethically acceptable ways and how to help their pupils to do the same. As professional teachers they need to cooperate with their pupils to create appropriate approaches to deal with ethical questions related to a responsible and ethical use of ICT.

3.2 Media and Information Literacy and Human Rights

In recent publications from the Council of Europe (2014a, 2014b), media literacy is described as the critical, responsible, and beneficial use of the media environment and as one of the key competences for the construction of sustainable democratic societies. A sustainable democratic society needs citizens with a set of basic skills, called transversal skills, which are composed of the attitudes, skills, and knowledge central to the education and actions of concerned and responsible citizens. For teachers, transversal skills will be foremost among their specific competences in academic subjects, particular skills that they will be encouraged to develop within themselves. The Pestalozzi program of The Council of Europe offers a number of publications with the aim of supporting teachers’ development of transversal skills (see, for example, Council of Europe, 2008, 2011, 2012; Huber & Mompoint-Gaillard, 2011). The Council’s most recent publication titled Tasks for Democracy (Council of Europe, 2016b) offers 60 different activities to learn and assess transversal attitudes, skills, and knowledge.

In a democratic society all citizens ought to have free access to all sorts of information on-line and off-line. The right to information and freedom of expression has to be viewed and implemented as a human right for all, regardless of age, race, gender, religions, worldviews, positions, or nationality. Nevertheless, freedom of expression has its limits, which should be known and respected by all citizens. In 2014, the Council of Europe initiated the No Hate Speech online Campaign, a campaign that will last until the end of 2017. Hate speech uses social media to promote racism and discrimination (Council of Europe, 2014a). Extreme and radical movements use the internet to spread hate and propaganda and manipulate young people to take part in conflicts and wars causing fear, uncertainty, and destruction all over the world. We live in a digital culture that affects us in many different ways, economic, political, social, and cultural. For example, in Norway if elderly people have not become familiar with this new digital culture, they have problems paying their bills and fulfilling other social obligations.

Teachers as facilitators of knowledge and skills have to learn how they can construct more inclusive relationships with the learners in order to interact in positive and empathic ways with them (Brudal, 2014). Lisbeth Brudal is a Norwegian psychologist and expert in positive psychology. She recommends empathic communication as an appropriate and effective dialogical tool in teacher–learner interactions. As violent radicalization is spreading all over the world, teachers have to build more inclusive and sustainable interactions and relationships with their learners as a way of fighting it. Properly educated teachers will be able, with help, to address this problem and find a solution for this challenge. It has to be faced by a whole-school action plan approach in which school leaders, teachers, learners, and parents cooperate to develop a safe and inclusive learning environment for all learners. This challenge is too difficult for individual teachers to solve on their own.

Children and young people are already competent and enthusiastic users of social media, but they have to be educated to become responsible ICT users who turn away from the use of hate speech on the internet. The key disseminators of this education are teachers who are media- and information-literate and able to interact with learners in democratic ways.

This education has to start from the prospective teacher’s first day in teacher education, developed and expanded in the college lessons, in teaching and learning activities, in practice schools, and in the construction of personal knowledge bases, skills, and competences. Few teacher education institutions so far have been able to promote this education systematically or to include all educators, students, and staff in this process (Flornes, 2007).

According to the documents from the Pestalozzi Program in the Council of Europe (2011, 2014b), in the past two decades media users have changed from recipients and consumers of messages, to active producers of content of a much wider range than previously imagined. This shift is widely felt in teacher education, for students have become more selective and reflective users of internet resources and more creative in composing their own presentations both in group works and plenary sessions. They are more professional in the production of the presentations, which have become less based on resources from the internet and more drawn from their own authentic work, for example, creative compositions of multimodal texts, pictures, drawings, and video-clips. This is evidence that MIL competences can afford and fuel autonomy in student teachers’ professional development and stimulate their capacity to be creative and innovative.

3.3 Teacher Education in Norway

In 2010, a new program for teacher education was introduced in Norway. This program is a 4-year course of studies, involving a bachelor’s degree with a thesis after 3 years, and a fourth year leading to a diploma in teaching. There is also the possibility of a master’s degree after a fifth year of study. From 2017 this option will be compulsory, requiring all teachers who are educated and trained to work in the primary and lower secondary schools in Norway to obtain a master’s degree for their professional work as teachers.

The 2010 program offers two models, one called GLU 1-7 for student teachers who want to work with children in the first 7 years of primary school. The other called GLU 5-10 is for students who want to be qualified to teach both in primary school 5–7 grades and in lower secondary schools 8–10 grades. The compulsory subjects in teacher education in Norway are Norwegian and mathematics, 30 credits each, and pedagogies, a 60-credit subject composed of four 15-credit units, one for each of the 4-year-long program.

In the first 2 years of this program, students have to choose to study a particular school subject according to their individual interests. These subjects are:

As the writing of assignments is a focus of the 2010 teacher education program, which entails a bachelor’s degree based on a thesis, teacher educators have become more concerned about information literacy and ways to educate information-literate teachers (Bårnes & Løkse, 2014).

My MIL investigation took place in the first 2-year course of GLU 1-7 from 2010 to 2012 with students who had chosen to study RE. It started as a pilot project but gradually it was implemented as a model for the RE program in the subsequent years of 2012–16. RE is a 30-credit subject, 15 credits for each year of the 2-year-long program.

3.4 Educating the Information-Literate Teacher: A Pilot Project

In the department of RE that I belong to, a colleague educator and I decided to improve our practice. We were responsible for the 2-year RE program for student teachers in GLU 1-7, student teachers who would qualify for the teaching of grades 1–7 in primary school. Consequently, from the induction phase of the new model, we started to work more closely, not only within our own subject but bringing in an ICT colleague and librarians from the college library. From the start of our project, experts, librarians, and practitioners were part of our cooperative team. The county library, the director, and a chief librarian were contacted and agreed to contribute to the project offering both expert help and financial support. This paved the way for us to ask trainers in schools to join us since we could then cover the cost of the time that they spent on the project.

After these initial preparations, we were able to develop a project called “Educating the information-literate teacher”. As teacher educators, we had considerable experience of teaching freshmen in teacher education, many years of cooperation in RE courses, and a shared conviction that the process of academic writing, especially in higher education, is a very efficient learning strategy and an excellent way to learn. From the beginning of the project this certainty was confirmed. Academic writing is a good way to learn, an argument, widely reported in the research literature (Imhof & Picard, 2009). Sigrid Grøtterud in her doctoral studies found that students in teacher education improved their personal and professional development by writing. She formed groups of students who cooperated in the writing process by using what she calls “love and critique” as the guiding perspectives of reference and evaluation (Grøtterud, 2011). By using both a positive and a critical regard in the proofreading and editing of each other’s texts, students were able to improve their written work considerably. The reading of their written texts and discussion of their quality and what measures to take to improve them were good exercises for developing a professional language and using the specific concepts related to particular themes. They then learned to discuss various issues related to the teaching and learning of these themes. This approach also challenged them to cooperate in a range of situations in which they had to negotiate and reach a conclusion based on the best possible arguments.

Piloting the “Educating the information-literate teacher” project convinced us that the process of writing assignments had a great influence on teacher students’ professional development. In their feedback during the course and in the last metatexts in the exam portfolio we read a number of texts from students who shared their experiences, such as the following:

Encouraged by such positive feedback from the students and by our own experiences and evaluations, we decided to develop a project about the information-literate teacher and investigate how the competences of information literacy could be promoted in initial teacher education through RE. We wanted to develop a new model for the 2-year-long RE course based on cooperation, creative interactions, and democratic participation on all levels of the study. The main aim was to create a good learning community for student teachers and to include in this community librarians both from the college and from the schools where students had their practice. Therefore, we started to look for schools with good school libraries and staff members who wanted to improve both their libraries and their information literacy competences. We visited some practice schools and talked to the principals and the school librarians. All of them showed a positive interest in the project and agreed to participate.

In all these schools teachers wanted to improve the quality of their school libraries and improve the MIL competences among the teachers. Thus we could discuss and share a vision that student teachers in their school practice would be able to use to improve their information literacy in step with their learners by using the information literacy skills acquired in the college. In this way a continuous process of information literacy learning could take place in the practice schools by means of teaching and learning activities with pupils in the classroom.

The aim was to build a more constructive and sustainable bridge between the MIL taught and learnt in the college and that taught and learnt in schools. The education of teachers has several aims to fulfill—learning, learning to learn, and learning to teach (Palmer, 1998; Riedling, 2002). Therefore it is necessary to “ride two horses” at the same time to show student teachers, the teachers of the future, a clear coherence between theory and practice. After a period of discussion and planning we developed an action plan with a key focus on MIL.

3.5 The Construction of an MIL Approach in Teacher Education

The work started by revising the RE program, curriculum, and working scheme. The main change we made was to compose a structured scheme for a portfolio, consisting of a number of compulsory assignments that were linked to some of the main RE themes presented during the term. The process of constructing a personal MIL knowledge base and achieving the necessary competences of academic writing to compile a portfolio starts from the first year of the students’ study. The main focus in the induction phase is on MIL. By the end of the 2-year 30 credit course, the specific aim for students is to compile an exam portfolio containing one meta-reflective text and two texts selected by the student. These texts are the ones considered the best of all texts that they have written as evaluated and approved by the course leaders. The portfolio approach offers a pedagogical tool to acquire the skills of academic writing by submitting the required assignments. It also promotes reflection and critical thinking which are very important competences for an RE teacher who must teach this school subject, as the curriculum demands, in a pluralistic, objective, and critical way.

The project started with the cooperation of a group of teacher educators who from a variety of competences could constructively participate in a MIL approach—two RE teacher educators, an ICT specialist, and several librarians. We wanted to explore how we could work to improve our information literacy using the college’s It’s Learning program as our basic online learning platform. This learning platform is a shared learning and information arena for teacher educators in the teacher education college and for the teacher-mentors in practice schools.

In addition we found a library resource, a set of tutorials called Search & Write, to be a good instrument for our work (Torras & Sætre, 2009). “Search & Write is for all students who want to learn more about information gathering and academic writing, independent of institution and subject area” (see http://sokogskriv.no/en/). Since the college librarians are responsible for this program, we started to work closer with them.

Two college librarians gave a library and information literacy course, which both student teachers and RE teacher educators took. The aim was to develop new and more efficient skills in information literacy by using the online learning platform, the internet and social media such as Web 2.0, blogs, and Facebook. In addition to the library course, the ICT specialist arranged a workshop where students could improve their ICT skills, and the students constructed a blog to exchange their experiences and ideas.

Ethical questions regarding religions and worldview are of great interest in RE. Winje (2009) developed a tool for distinguishing which websites are of a quality appropriate for academic texts in RE. He named this tool for “the four Ss” to stand for the four different perspectives to adopt in analyzing internet resources which in Norwegian all start with S. The only perspective useful for an academic text is the one called “serious and objective”; the three others have a hidden agenda trying to manipulate and influence users one way or another. The contrast between the different websites made it very easy to pick out the one that could be used in an academic text. This problem was presented and discussed by the librarian who introduced the problem to the students, and the discussion continued in the subsequent RE teaching and learning activities.

In this interdisciplinary work, the Search & Write program became a common source of information concerning all of the “how” questions that can possibly be asked in the writing process. In addition we wanted the librarians to inform our students of interesting sources for their writing and to encourage them to develop a closer relationship with the librarians in the academic library. The main aim for this approach was to inspire our students to spend more time in the library and thus have sufficient opportunity to explore all the available resources for their work and become active users of the Search & Write program.

Information gathering and academic writing are key elements of the Search & Write program, a program which is continuously revised and improved by a team of expert researchers from abroad who interview users, students, and staff for regular revisions of the program. The program is designed for libraries in higher institution organizations as a tool of MIL that is accurate, reliable, and updated for use in the academic community.

3.6 Religious Education and MIL

Early in the project, we found that RE, as a compulsory school subject, is excellent when it comes to the development of a MIL project. RE comprises a wide range of topics and offers an excellent framework for students to explore a variety of issues related to religions, worldviews, ethics, art, philosophy, human rights, citizenship, and democracy (Council of Europe, 2014b). For students asked to write the compulsory assignments on an academic level, the competences of information literacy play an important role. The RE curriculum invites student teachers to start the process of developing these competences. The first step is to raise an awareness among future teachers that they must include in their vision of becoming a professional teacher a definition and a view of what is implied by being information literate and the way to become so. The Search & Write tutorial offers the following definition of an information-literate person:

The need for information is closely related to the assignments process. As soon as the topic of the work is defined, the writer has to search for information to inform the writing. In the pilot project of MIL, the first assignment was given by the librarians who also took care of the evaluation of the assignment. In this way the knowledge of MIL had to be put into action immediately after the MIL course. This procedure created a relationship between the students and the librarians and motivated students to make more extended use of the academic library and to ask the staff questions face-to-face in addition to asking questions on the online learning platform It’s Learning.

In 2014, Bergen University College moved to a new campus with new buildings and new facilities. Thanks to these new opportunities, students developed new strategies for their learning. They could now bring their laptops into the library, find a place to work either individually or in groups, and ask the librarians for help when needed. The collection of books on the shelves was considerably increased, and they were displayed in a more informative and structured way, making it easier for students to search for and find what they needed. The library was extended to embrace all the libraries from the colleges of engineering, health, and teacher education, and a number of new librarians were appointed to serve this multitude of studies and subjects. The new librarians, many of them quite young, could offer guiding support in the research and writing process. For RE, the appointment of a new librarian with a master’s degree in religious studies considerably improved what the library could offer in terms of guidance in the work and tasks of the RE students.

In 2007, Sætre, the first director of the new extended university library, investigated the role of the library in the students’ construction and acquisition of knowledge. She related the shift in the work and role of librarians to the Norwegian Quality Reform, introduced in 2000–01. Traditionally the role of the librarians was to act as facilitators and mediators of knowledge and information, but since the implementation of the reform (2003), which gave more weight to academic writing and student-oriented learning activities, librarians have been asked to play a more active role in the students’ learning and studies. Given that assignments are compulsory in all study programs from the first year, the competences of the librarians in the “search and write” phase of assignments have become very important.

Sætre (2007) emphasizes that there is a close connection between students’ personal and professional development and the quality of the library for study and research, with support for the students from well-qualified librarians. This argument is widely reported in the RE-students’ assessments in the metatexts of the exam portfolio, as the example below illiustrates:

This student is able to share her experiences of learning in an informative way: her first two years of teacher education in the area of RE have helped her to become a good and reflective teacher. To be open to new ideas, and thus find opportunities to consider specific issues from different perspectives, is a very useful and important competence, not only for an RE teacher, but for all teachers. During this process, as this student reports, students reflect within themselves and construct fresh knowledge in a quest for academic certainty. This conviction helps new and inexperienced graduates to present themselves to their pupils as confident and trustworthy teachers.

3.7 Conclusion

The number of positive reports from RE students suggests that a cooperation between librarians and RE teacher educators in the process of writing assignments is a good model for learning in the induction phase of teacher education. Few students start their education and training with enough skills in academic writing to tackle the thesis required at the end of their first degree. A well-organized and -structured program in a specific subject such as RE can serve as a catalyst for individual personal and professional development. In their reports, an important part of the required exam portfolio, all the students emphasized the importance of the coherence between the teaching and learning activities, the bridge between theory and practice. All claim to have learnt a great deal from the writing process. Even those who judge the compulsory reading list of the curriculum to be relevant and interesting claim to have found in the new academic library a number of additional books to explore and many digital resources “that made me deepen my understanding of the themes I was dealing with” (quote from an RE student). Many students report that it was in the actual writing process that they realized the importance of this work for a teacher:

For this student who had very little experience of academic writing, there was a long process of writing, correcting, and rewriting assignments. In this process the precepts of Grøtterud (2009, 2011) to “love and critique” helped me as the course leader to give my feedback in a helpful and constructive way. First I would tell the student what was good and interesting in the text (the love perspective) and then point to what could be improved and how this could be done (the critique perspective). To be specific and accurate in this process is very important. It motivates the student to do the work and gives them guidance in doing it. Many students underline the importance of constructive feedback as one pointed out:

As the RE course leader I found that evaluating these texts has equally been a very good learning activity for me. The on-line learning platform, It’s Learning, creates a new connection between students and teachers. Students can ask questions and receive answers quickly. They can easily rewrite their texts in order to demonstrate the best of their knowledge and ability. For teachers, the digital space created by the learning platform develops new and closer relationships with the students. It affords an insight into the problems and questions that the students are facing in their work.

New power structures are constructed as we all participate in the development of a community of learning, sharing knowledge and experiences in the learning process. Teachers who are educated in this way in the first years of teacher education are challenged to participate in an inclusive and democratic community of learning. They are motivated to develop their capacity to model this democratic way of teaching and learning in the remaining years of teacher education, in their future work in schools and classrooms and, it is hoped, in a lifelong learning process. In their final metatexts when they look back at the study that they took part in, many of the students appreciate the quality of cooperation between them and their classmates. By sharing and evaluating their text under Grøtterud’s two concepts, they were able to revise their work and improve their writing skills. They felt that their classmates helped them to do better by inspiring new reflections about their texts and suggesting how their ideas and arguments could be better phrased and composed. In their future work these students can choose to develop similar ways of work with their own learners, focusing on learner-oriented activities and a value-based pedagogy where the aim is to help each learner to do better and contribute to the construction of a democratic and sustainable school ethos. Schools that are governed by this ethos will see their work and mission as supporting a just and democratic society.