Children in today's media world are overwhelmed with a variety of information on a daily basis. It is therefore necessary to familiarize the children with a variety of media and include them in the process of media education in order to gain the ability to critically evaluate media content and skills of analysing, understanding and assessment of media messages; thereby educate competent and autonomous citizens. At the same time we must not neglect the child wishes, needs and opinions. Participation of children must necessarily become a part of life and work in kindergarten. To educators it must be important, what children think and feel, and their opinions should be respected.
In the theoretical part of the thesis I will define the medium and and describe characteristics of the mass media (press, television, radio, computer and the Internet). I will also point to the problem of advertising and violent media content. I will introduce media education and related media literacy, which is linked to the goal of media education. In the following I will write about theoretical platform of the participation and how the latter is defined in the Curriculum for kindergarten and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, as well as introduce other important documents in the field of children’s participation. I will also describe the various stages of participation or non-participation. Finally, I will introduce project approach; I will describe the process of researching the problem of closed-type and process of researching problems of an open-type.
In the empirical part of the thesis is presented the implementation of the project How information travel. Children had the opportunity to get to know a variety of media, to figure out how a letter travels, see the radio and television station, and finally to summarize their feelings in a local monthly; thereby enriching their knowledge, actively learn and thus take on greater responsibility for learning.
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