Teaching Media in Primary Schools

Cary Bazalgette

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781446245415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Children growing up in the 21st century need to understand the full range of media available to them, both as sources of information and entertainment, and as a means of communicating and sharing ideas. Embedded in the primary curriculum, media education enables children to become more fully literate for the digital age. Grounded in best classroom practice, this book aims to help you think about the role of media in children?s lives, and to teach about media effectively in your classroom.

Three dimensions of media education for the 3-11 age range are highlighted: children?s own cultural experiences, the development of critical awareness, and opportunities for creative expression. The chapters are written by literacy advisors, leading academics, teacher-trainers and classroom practitioners.

Topics covered include:

- understanding children?s relationships with media and how to build on these constructively

- getting to grips with "multimodality"

- developing children?s critical skills through watching and analysing moving image media

- broadening children?s experiences of different kinds of media and their media literacy

- creative media activities that promote imaginative thinking and decision-making

- the importance of social networking and social media and how to use these in the classroom

In an increasingly digital world, media education is an essential part of good teaching, not just as a tool to teach the more traditional aspects of the curriculum, but in its own right as an essential part of literacy.

This book is relevant to all teachers working in Primary schools, and will be particularly helpful for Literacy Co-ordinators.

TV Talk and Children’s Identities

Liesbeth de Block

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Chapter objectives

This chapter focuses on the importance of talk about television in facilitating children’s social relationships, especially across linguistic and cultural boundaries; in helping children to build their own identities and memories; and in helping social groups to bond together. The chapter also looks specifically at the role of talk about TV news programmes in the lives of migrant children and their families.

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I first became interested in the role of media in children’s social negotiations and relationships when I was working as a language support teacher with refugee children in a London primary school. I began to notice how often references to TV dominated the children’s social interactions, games and jokes. My particular interest was in the ways in which ‘TV talk’ appeared to facilitate cross-cultural and cross-language relationships (de Block, 2002; de Block and Buckingham, 2007). Of course, other communication technologies are now increasing features of these playful interactions, but TV was dominant at the time of the research I will be discussing, and it remains children’s favourite medium, so it will be my main reference point (Livingstone and Bovill, 2001).

Teaching and then becoming a researcher in the same school gave me unusual and privileged opportunities to observe a variety of children in different contexts, focusing on two groups in particular, one of boys (aged 10/11) and one of girls (8/9).¹ I spent 18 months ‘hanging out’ and observing in the playground; going out with small groups in the local neighbourhood and across London; visiting homes; working with children in the classrooms; and making videos. In this way, I was able to cross-reference and verify my conclusions and compare them with other research in related areas of childhood and media studies (Gillespie, 1995).

How does talk about television relate to questions of identity and belonging? Why is it important to study an area of social interaction that appears to be ephemeral and essentially transient? What is relevant in this for schools and teaching? In this chapter, I will offer a glimpse of some of the dynamics of TV talk so that you can build your own picture of how the children in your school use media, and consider what implications this might have for teaching, learning and school practice.

What is TV talk?

TV talk can take many different forms: chat, storytelling, a single word or phrase; non-verbal interaction in the form of games, gestures, role play; knowledge about producers and channels, the latest developments in technology and production methods, upcoming shows, etc. TV talk is an activity that has its own social rules, creating within the group a shared remembering, a bedrock on which friendships are formed and identities are played with. TV talk is collaborative, drawing on the group’s shared experience; it evokes emotions, appeals to the affective and the humorous, and prompts that exploration of identity and belonging that is essential to the process of growing up and belonging to a particular community.

Memory and shared meanings

Both within the family and with friends in and out of school, television plays a significant role in building autobiographical memories or histories. Television can help to locate children in time and place in almost the same way that family photos or stories do (Spence and Holland, 1991). Often the children referred to programmes they used to watch when they were younger. This acted to reinforce a shared history. In the boys’ group, the names of programmes such as Powerpuff Girls and Rug Rats were called out and ridiculed, even though they themselves had in fact often watched them.² The girls expressed almost hysterical excitement when they remembered programmes such as The Tweenies or Rosie and Jim. These shows performed the same function as their playground games – that of building a group memory they could draw on in times of tension. Many of the games had been played so often, and many of the television stories told so many times, that they formed a resource the children could draw on for security – to overcome arguments or simply to ‘belong’.

Some of the refugee and migrant children mentioned programmes they used to watch before they came to this country. Rhaxma, originally from Somalia, still enjoyed watching an Italian programme she had seen as a toddler when living in Italy, even though she no longer understood Italian. It offered her a personal historical reference point. She had no photos from that time but television kept the memory alive. Several children from very different origins drew on the global popularity of The Simpsons, which had become a point of continuity in their lives. For example, the Somali children had watched it in Somalia, in Kenyan refugee camps, in transition, and now in their new country of settlement.

In fact, The Simpsons, closely followed by Rug Rats, was omnipresent in all the different forms of TV talk. These two shows provided wordplay, jokes, dialogue, verbal mimicry and endless storylines to be learned and retold in detail. The children could act out some scenes and characters without the need for words. They related to familiar everyday scenes and used them for reference and comparison with their own family lives. Above all, the programmes were funny and therefore adaptable to a range of purposes and situations.

Group dynamics

TV talk has several different starting points. A child will name a programme, or an incident or personality from TV, and call it out to see if it will be taken up by the others – a kind of ‘auctioneering’. It was noticeable how often new children or those on the edges of the friendship groups would do this. They would offer a selection of programmes for the group and then have to either suffer rejection or be accepted into the subsequent group chat. It was a tense process that I witnessed time and again. Set phrases were often used: ‘Did you see the one where …?’ (a trope Friends also uses, titling episodes ‘The one with …’).

But there were also openers occasioned by an external prompt provoking a memory that started the ball rolling. One girl made a link, then taken up by others, between a tuna sandwich and an incident in Kenan and Kel. Similarly, when for some reason I got annoyed with the boys’ group, they all spontaneously started to hold their breath because it had sparked a group memory of an incident in another programme.

Yet on several outings with the boys’ group, I got the impression that this was not entirely random: the children were actively looking for prompts. There were some well-known local characters and places in the area where they lived that they used as part of their common knowledge on home turf. Beyond this, on unfamiliar territory, they would seek out and try to anticipate the prompts that cemented them as a group. On one outing, walking along London’s South Bank, the boys’ group lit on a busker playing the clarinet. One of them, Jima, had been trying to get back into the group after a rejected film choice. Now he seized the opportunity to lead the talk onto a secure knowledge base. He began to retell an incident in The Simpsons that featured a saxophone player. It took him several attempts but with the help of the concrete reference (despite this being the wrong instrument), he succeeded.

Humour and play

Once a story was established within the group as one of their stories, then a single word, movement or phrase was enough to provoke a response. So the longer story got honed down to just its punch line, or a wordplay or a gesture. Understanding this key word or action established group membership.

On some occasions, misunderstandings were incorporated into the talk and became established, unwittingly adding a new layer of humour and subversion:

Jima:

Hank gets cussed by this man. He goes to him, ‘It’s been so long since your mother’s bath that she smells of cocaine gas.’

Here, Jima mistook the word ‘propane’ for ‘cocaine’ in an episode of King of the Hill – probably partly because he did not know the word propane. But it fitted into his understanding of the form and, in fact, the context of his life in King’s Cross, London, where drug dealing and use was clearly visible on an everyday basis and the children knew all about it. Jima saw ‘cocaine’ as subversive and therefore worth a joke with his friends. It fitted into the sense of the joke, so he got away with it. The others responded appropriately and it was never clear whether they got both the intended joke and the unintended joke, or only the former.

Music – singing and dancing

Singing and dancing form a large part of TV talk. Every playtime, you could see children singing in groups; the new children learning from the well-established children, the younger learning from the older. Mention of different programmes inevitably prompted the singing of the theme songs by both boys and girls. For the girls’ group, when I first started working with them, the theme of the Powerpuff Girls was their song. Its words held a special meaning for them.

The Powerpuff Girls

Fighting crime, trying to save the world

Here they come just in time, the Powerpuff Girls

Powerpuff!

The Powerpuff Girls theme © 1998–2010, Cartoon Network: A Time Warner Company

At first, they would play out this girl power in the playground with great excitement but as time went on, only Rhaxma held on to the song and the programme. The others moved as the top ten moved, but they would return to the theme of girl power in various ways in their discussions and, through that, return to the theme song and the programme. It became a joke that Rhaxma still held to it so firmly and they would sometimes indulge her.

Knowing the words of songs was very important. Those who knew them well gained extra status in the group. One boy, who had been a real outsider for much of his school life and the butt of fairly recent bullying, suddenly flowered in the last term by becoming a music and dance specialist. At the school-leaving party, he was the centre of attention, with children watching and copying his dance moves; from this he gained significant status.

Both the girls’ and the boys’ groups used songs and music to create a sense of togetherness. When there was friction in the group, it was often a song, started by one of them with the others joining in, that would smooth the waters. It calmed the group and, while it lasted, created a very cohesive atmosphere.

Fear, emotion and the news

Of course, TV talk also touches on pain, fear and trauma. Soaps, for example, are absorbing for children because they offer a view into an adult world (Buckingham, 1987), touching their own fears, and offering ways of considering family and relationship issues which are important for them. Yet while the soaps’ formulaic construction makes them safe, for them to perform the functions of real life it is essential to pretend they are not constructed. Buckingham (1996) stresses the emotional resonance that makes soaps popular across cultures (Ang, 1985; Miller, 1992) and applies it to the ways in which soaps offer the opportunity for public displays of emotion or, for children, an arena for trying out emotions publicly.

Soap-related discussions involve issues of modality and ‘reality’, but news programmes have even more direct meanings and generate different kinds of fears. News is generally considered to be an adult genre, but it is also increasingly assumed to be relevant to children’s learning for the purposes of citizenship and inclusion: an assumption which tends to disregard, or avoid, its affective aspects. Children are thus offered contradictory perspectives: an adult agenda which sees news as important and necessary, and a child protection agenda in which it is boring or upsetting. What do these perspectives add up to? The fact is that children do watch some news items, even if they do not choose to, as news broadcasts are often on when they are around. This raises two issues: firstly, how children react to and are affected by news; secondly, within the discourse of citizenship and political inclusion, the extent to which children consider news to be important for their own education and knowledge about the world.

Being familiar with the news can be seen as a sign of growing up, dealing with adult issues and entering the public sphere; emotional difficulties are part and parcel of this process. Local news, in particular, directly affects children’s sense of safety and, especially for girls, restricts their geographical movements. But for children who see conflict and trauma not as faraway events but as part of their everyday realities, watching the news becomes a different experience (de Block, 2008). You see on the screen what ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 - Cultural Learning
• Part 2 - Critical Learning
• Part 3 - Creative Learning
• Index
• Back Cover