Teacher Students’ Designing Media Education for Older People: Creative and Need-Based Pedagogies Emphasized

This qualitative and deductive study develops Finnish teacher education by exploring the perspectives of teacher students on older people’s media education in order to equip teacher students to better support older people’s media literacies. To achieve this goal, student teams designed media literacy interventions in the context of a course, “Older People, Media Education, and Facilitation of Learning,” which had been developed as part of a previously completed design-based research (DBR) project and was being offered for the first time in separated teacher pedagogical studies at one Finnish university during the academic year 2019‒2020. Research participants included 22 teacher students from the piloted course and 15 stakeholders (older people and professionals working with older people), who only participated in the evaluation workshop organized at the end of the course. The research data, collected during the course, consisted of students’ designs and presentations on how media education should be implemented for older people, as well as written and oral feedback from stakeholders based on the student presentations. The findings indicate that creative and need-based pedagogies should be emphasized and course development should be continued in light of the results.