The Mediatization of Education: Classroom Mediation as an Agent of Change in Middle Eastern Higher Education Systems

The chapter stresses the importance of media aids in Teaching and Learning (T&L) and discusses classroom mediation as a theoretical object of inquiry and conceptual elaboration. Reflecting on the prevalent sub-cultural, emotional/rational, and lingual barriers that typically materialize among undergraduate students, primarily first-year students and sophomores, the chapter explores whether and also to what extent classroom mediation dynamics are applied in the T&L process and their relation to effective education in heterogeneous T&L environment (classrooms). A probabilistic sample of 486 undergraduate participants from a cluster of six university campuses in the West Bank was studied to assess the effectiveness and innovation that media-influenced learning can bring to the T&L process, primarily in its cognitive, pedagogical, and behavioural dimensions. Data gathering and analysis draw on mediatization, a meta-theory that discusses how media-associated effects play a vital role as agents of change in culture and society (Schulz, Eur J Commun 19(1): 87–101, 2004). The chapter confirms the inter/relatedness of classroom mediation to effective education, principally as an agent in mitigating school-inherited and socio-cultural disparities among students of heterogeneous backgrounds, to efficiently foster the cognitive, behavioural, and pedagogical dimensions in T&L and their subordinate mechanisms of students’ engagement, motivation, innovation, and productivity within undergraduate classrooms in the sampled Palestinian universities.