Media competence, thinking, critical dialogue and training context

Studies into media competence have established a set of dimensions and indicators (Ferrés & Piscitelli, 2012; Pérez-Rodríguez & Delgado-Ponce, 2012) which have resulted in a diagnosis of insufficient media competence levels in both adults and children (Ferrés et al., 2011; Pérez-Rodríguez et al., 2019; García-Ruíz et al., 2014; Caldeiro-Pedreira et al., 2017). This type of enquiry is important, as it draws the attention of political institutions towards the need for educommunication in education. They are diagnostic studies– and therefore of a structural and static nature –which measure the acquired level at a specific moment. The question being raised is how to improve competence levels and to what end. If Educommunication seeks to integrate the two poles mentioned before, it must connect the static diagnosis of media competence with dynamic models that lead to learning and to the improvement of these structures in educational contexts. If it seeks to foster autonomy, creativity, dialogue and critical thinking, it must review and expand the concepts it uses, its tools for analysis and the methods employed. It is therefore necessary to broaden the conception of what we understand as media competence, which implies theoretical, methodological and applied reflection.

As we understand it, diagnostic-static media competence must be complemented by a second, formative-dynamic approach, and vice versa. It is therefore necessary to locate and integrate the dimensions and indicators of media competence of knowledge, comprehension and expression (Pérez-Rodríguez & Delgado-Ponce, 2012), within the broader context of thinking. This includes a set of mental processes and a context of action. Media communication mobilises the former (attention/perception, comprehension, memory, knowledge, imagination, etc.), in a process of building the structures of knowledge, following a dialectic of assimilation of the media content (coding/decoding, comprehension, interpretation, evaluation) and of accommodation of this (expressiveness, creativity, production, participation and critical attitude). The manner in which the mental processes are activated will depend on the conditions of the context and the subject's level of cognitive development. The acquisition of media competence and critical attitude which Educommunication seeks to foster will depend on the way in which the educational activity is organised, the characteristics of the context where the activity develops and the manner in which these mental processes are mobilised based on the context. Thinking is activated when we face an internal or external disequilibrating situation perceived as a problem for which we must provide a response. The result of thinking leads to this response and is linked to action, either to guide it/evaluate it, or to trigger it. Thinking is therefore a homeostatic process of self-regulation and optimising equilibration of cognitive structures (Piaget, 1975) that leads us to attempt to provide a response to the difficulties presented by our environment. This makes us learn and accumulate experience.

In educommunication, dialogue participates in activating thinking and media competence. In conversational dialogue, the educator makes queries about the media content. The participants express-defend their (individual) opinions and attitudes. According to Bohm (1996), it is difficult for this type of dialogue to lead to the development of critical attitudes, as we understand them here, because it does not enable the current stance of the subject, relying on beliefs established prior to participation, to be questioned. If dialogue has to contribute to the change, as a result of the development of critical attitudes, there must be a process enabling this transformation and resulting in improved thinking skills and structures. We argue that this mechanism consists of a specific manner of questioning implemented in the context of a collective/group search and which we will term critical dialogue. This type of dialogue differs from conversational dialogue. It has elements in common with Socratic maieutics and other contemporary positions such as the problematisation of knowledge (Freire, 1973) and the critical method in the construction of cognitive structures (Inhelder et al.,1974; Inhelder & Cellerier, 1996).

As Bang (2016) argues, a situation contributes to development when one of the participants experiences a state of openness, uncertainty and indeterminacy in relation to what is happening at that moment. This can lead the participant, if the conditions are suitable and encourage this, to make mental adjustments and decisions which result in new actions that seek to restore balance to the disequilibration experienced. In this process, as asserted by Sartre (1943), there is questioning, and a search for answers, as argued by Dewey (1938).

Finally, in order to be able to implement critical dialogue, it is essential that there is a certain type of context in which a specific activity will take place. We can identify different types of training contexts based on the way in which the educator stimulates the dialogue and defines and develops the activity. To develop critical dialogue, we propose a sociocultural context (Wertsch, 1993; Lave, 2001; Rogoff, 1990; 2003), in which the educator promotes media competence and critical attitudes in accordance with the theory of activity theory (Leontiev, 1981; Engeström, 2015) and successive steps (Galperin, 1995; Talizina, 1988).

In summary, critical dialogue requires, from this theoretical perspective, a unit of analysis which includes the intertwining of four dimensions: a) the subject’s competences which are activated/fostered during the activity; b) a specific media product; c) a sociocultural critical dialogue activity that is promoted and channelled by the educator in successive steps; and d) collective participation by the members of the group. The study detailed below illustrates this model, which has made it possible, at the same time, to demonstrate both a diagnostic process, and one of training media competence and changing thinking structures through critical dialogue in a sociocultural context.

Television stories and critical dialogical training: An empirical study

In a multi-screen world, consumption of audiovisual stories throughout childhood continues to be very significant (Gallardo-Camacho et al., 2020). Through that recurring and informal assimilation of audiovisual stories, children also gain media competence. This process can progressively model their narrative thinking structures. Today we know that there are two types of thinking: paradigmatic thinking and narrative thinking (Bruner, 1986). While the former applies above all to the physical world and to logical-mathematical abstractions, the latter applies to the social and personal world. Narrative thinking is activated both to understand and to respond and express oneself in the face of the vicissitudes experienced in one's social and cultural environment. This activity progressively shapes the construction of the person, identity and the person’s sociocultural being.

Narrative thinking produces and feeds on stories (real and fictional). This is why interaction with media content is highly important, since this content participates in modelling people's thinking (Lipman, 1998; Mateos & Núñez, 2011; Aguirre-de-Ramírez, 2012) and progressively shapes, over the course of their childhood, their five cognitive-emotional structures: action, cause, intention-motivation, diegesis-space and time (Bermejo-Berros, 2007). Thinking, to resolve a narrative disequilibrium, leads to these structures being set in motion. Education must seek to ensure the modelling of these structures is appropriate for the child. In addition, it has been highlighted how important it is that the structures built in this process enable children to transfer the principle of learning involved, adaptively, to new situations (Bruner, 2006). The question is which educational method can be used to foster acquisition of thinking structures that provide children with greater media competence. Based on this, the objectives and hypotheses of this study are:

1) To explore whether the context of training –either critical dialogue training or conversational dialogue training– on a media product is capable of improving children's narrative thinking structures and, by extension, their media competence. An initial hypothesis with regard to this type of training is as follows:

• H1. While children who follow a critical dialogue training process improve their stories and structure them coherently and appropriately for narrative thinking, merely exposing the children to audiovisual stories in a context of informal social interaction and conversational dialogue is not sufficient to improve the structure of their narrative schemata.

2) To explore whether certain audiovisual products encourage the development of media competence and thinking structures and others do not. Research on audiovisual stories has shown that there are "narrativizing" products which encourage cognitive development and other "denarrativizing" products which disarrange it (Bermejo-Berros, 2007). A second hypothesis thus considers the influence of the type of audiovisual story on the child:

• H2. Narrativizing stories contribute to enabling children to benefit from the educational processes of educommunication in their acquisition of media competence, whereas denarrativizing stories do not allow them to obtain those benefits.

3) To assess whether the children's age, as an indicator of their development level, influences the potential benefits to be obtained from the training process in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and whether these benefits are also greater when the story is of the narrativizing type. A third hypothesis is posited:

• H3. Both the type of training and the type of audiovisual story affect the benefits children can obtain and their intensity will depend on their level of development.

Participants and experimental groups

Over two weeks, 246 children from two schools in Castilla y León, from the 1st, 3rd and 5th grades of primary school (M: 6;8, 8;2 and 10;8), participated in four sessions lasting 50 minutes each, which took place in the school's audiovisual classroom.

The pupils in each class group were divided into experimental groups, based on the three experimental factors explored in the research (type of training: critical dialogical training vs conversational dialogical training; type of story: narrativizing vs denarrativizing; age level: 1st grade-3rd grade-5th grade). By cross-referencing these three factors with their respective variables (group design: 2x2x3), 12 experimental groups were established for participation in the training sessions.

Method

In the first session (pre-test), the children watched an episode of an animated series and then took a diagnostic test to determine their level of comprehension and verbal retelling of the episode they had seen. In the fourth session (post-test), this procedure was reproduced using a different episode. Taking into account the indicators provided by earlier research (Bermejo-Berros, 2007), half of the experimental groups watched a total of four episodes of the narrativizing series "The World of David the Gnome" (GN) and the other half watched four episodes of the denarrativizing series "Dragon Ball" (DB). In the second and third sessions, after watching the episode (average length: 20’), the children attended a session (lasting 30’) with the educator in accordance with the type of training they were assigned (critical dialogical or conversational dialogical). Therefore, the pre-test diagnosed the initial competence level, the two intermediate training sessions were activities that pursued learning of media competence and, lastly, the post-test diagnosed whether the training had induced microgenesis of narrative structures and media competence.

For the training phase, the method designed in this study was the result of taking the theoretical aspects introduced above into consideration and included the following components:

1) Type of activity: Based on activity theory (Leontiev, 1981; Engeström, 2015), the task-activity encouraged by the educator during the training sessions included various components. In this study, the two types of training structured the four components of the activity differently.

The motive, which can be external or internal, was the interpretation the children made of the context in which they found themselves (what I want to do and/or they have asked me to do) and which led them to give their actions or operations a direction/goal during the session. In the critical dialogical situation, the educator problematised the situation and impelled the children to direct their motive towards the need to carry out successive adjustments. In contrast, in the conversational dialogical situation, the educator/trainer reproduced the patterns of a natural context where they simply talk about a story they have watched. There was therefore neither problematisation nor re-direction of the initial motive.

The objective involved the materialisation of their motive. In the critical dialogical context, it was to retell the story well, whereas in the conversational dialogical context it was to talk about the story.

The action was the specific material response. In our case, it was the verbalisation by the children during the session. In the critical dialogical situation, the educator’s actions consisted of asking specific questions which focused on the need for the children to participate by describing all the elements of the story well. These questions included the action components of the narrative sequences, the causal representation components and the space-time components (who does what, where, when, why and what for). This educommunicative process included all the elements that make up the five structures of narrative thinking. By contrast, in the conversational dialogical situation, there was no specific plan of action. The children's actions were the result of what they wished to say about the current story or past experiences, of spontaneous queries that came to them during the session. The educator/trainer merely invited the children to comment on the images, to give their opinion about the stories they had watched, to compare them with others, and so on.

Finally, the operation was the set of specific answers to each request or enquiry from the educator or from other children during the session. In the critical dialogical session, the children had to perform operations in relation to the five thinking structures in order to provide a response to the actions asked of them. By contrast, in the conversational dialogical situation, only those operations required for the spontaneous conversation occurring during the session were activated.

2) Training stages: In the critical dialogical situation, the educator's planning included four stages which sought to foster optimising equilibration: action (the children initially told the story); disequilibrium (the educator introduced queries which triggered cognitive perturbation as they invoked gaps appearing in the initial accommodating action); initial re-equilibration (the children respond to the disequilibration raised in the questions); final equilibration (the perturbation was resolved in such a way that ultimately the process of verbally retelling the viewed story was completed). There is, therefore, a cyclical interactive alternation between the expressive process of accommodation through language and the assimilation of the appropriate responses that have been provided in the interactions between those participating in the situation. These responses help the children understand perceived imbalances and lead to better cognitive balancing. This process goes "from the periphery to the centre" according to the concept of the optimising equilibration of cognitive structures (Piaget, 1975). It begins with a generic request made to the children to tell the story.

After the initial response, a process begins in which the questions which the children are answering make it possible to begin reconstructing the horizontal and vertical relationships of the three levels and of the five narrative structures described in the following section. It continues in this way, through successive steps, which go from the periphery (the what) to the centre (how, why and what for), eliciting progressive improvement of comprehension and expression of the five structures which comprise narrative thinking. This method is also consistent with that proposed by Galperin (1995), which leads children to progressive internalisation of the external verbalisations towards mental internalisation of these.

In addition, this scaffolding educational process, in which the reconstruction of the story’s structural coherence is generated, takes place in the ZPD, as it begins at the initial level expressed by the child and, during the session, through this maieutic procedure incites the child to produce better answers at the child's potential development level (Vygotsky, 2000). By contrast, in the conversational situation, there are no stages as such, as the activity follows the spontaneity of the participants, thus reproducing the media situation in a natural environment.