Creating a new media pedagogy through cultural studies approaches to the design of educational technology: Using discourse, subjectivity, and agency to (re)tell stories about cancer
DISSERTATION
Richard Joseph Voithofer, The University of Wisconsin - Madison, United States
The University of Wisconsin - Madison . Awarded
Abstract
This study explores a reflective new media pedagogy through the design and production of a web-based learning environment. This environment addresses and invites cancer patients and their supporters to question established social and cultural discourses that shape the experiences of cancer by inviting them to create ways to talk about cancer that more closely relate to the uniqueness of their lives and to the characteristics of the disease. Through a collaborative approach to educational media design involving an educational media designer and cancer patients and their supporters, a web site (http://www.cancershock.com) was produced to support cancer patients and their supporters in creating non-linear, flexible discursive spaces for rewriting social and cultural discourses that shape and inform the experience of cancer in Western, industrialized cultures. This interdisciplinary study offers a critique of current educational media design practices dominated by educational psychology perspectives. It then presents an alternative practice influenced by cultural studies approaches to new media pedagogy and drawn from the experience of engaging in collaborative and reflective educational new media design. A cultural studies approach to new media design created a language with which to incorporate the complex and fluid intersections of subjectivity, discourse, and agency as design components for electronic learning environments. This culturally informed approach to educational new media offers a design framework that addresses the rapid social and cultural changes occurring as a result of the proliferation of new media.
Citation
Voithofer, R.J. Creating a new media pedagogy through cultural studies approaches to the design of educational technology: Using discourse, subjectivity, and agency to (re)tell stories about cancer. Ph.D. thesis, The University of Wisconsin - Madison. Retrieved February 5, 2023 from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/129765/.

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