Popular Literacies, Childhood and Schooling

Jackie Marsh, Elaine Millard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134219629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This bold, forward-thinking text offers a clear rationale for the development of curricula and pedagogy that will reflect young people's in-school and out-of-school popular culture practices.

By providing a sound theoretical framework and addressing popular culture and new technologies in the context of literacy teacher education, this book marks a significant step forward in literacy teaching and learning. It takes a cross-disciplinary approach and brings together contributions from some of the world's leading figures in the field. Topics addressed include:

• children's popular culture in the home
• informal literacies and pedagogic discourse
• new technologies and popular culture in children's everyday lives
• teachers working with popular culture in the classroom.

This book illustrates the way in which literacy is evolving through popular culture and new technology andis an influential read for teachers, students, researchers and policy makers.

Part I

Early childhoods

Chapter 1

Technokids, Koala Trouble and Pokémon: Literacy, new technologies and popular culture in children’s everyday lives

Knobel Michele

INTRODUCTION

Interest in the extent to which very young children’s prior-to-school and out-of-school literacy practices can and do cross over into formal education contexts is well established. For example, the fields of family literacy and emergent literacy have long dominated early childhood research and publications, and proponents within each field have had much to say about supporting young children’s literacy development in ways that maximize their potential to be successful readers and writers once they begin school. However, one limitation within these fields is the orientation generally taken towards young children’s home and community lives and literacy practices. In both fields, existing, conventional school literacy conceptions and practices often are used to shape what counts as effective scaffolding of and interventions in young children’s literacy development prior to formal schooling.

What has been less attended to, but is rapidly gaining ground as a recognized field of research focus, is the literacies young children aged birth to eight years actually are practising in their prior-to-formal-schooling and out-of-school lives and which in many ways can be more sophisticated and ‘mature’ than those prescribed for them as ‘developmentally appropriate’ in formal school or school-like settings. In particular, studies of young children’s engagement with new digital technologies such as computers, the Internet, email, mobile phones, video games and other digital and screen media at home are providing fruitful insights into the degree to which conventional school literacies grounded in developmental models of early reading (and writing) may no longer provide sufficient guidelines for early childhood teachers in planning effective literacy learning experiences for their young students.

This chapter presents two cases of young boys who not only make use of the new technological and cultural resources available to them at home, but take up these resources in ways perhaps not intended by the original producers of these resources (e.g. by software companies and trading card publishers). Both cases make important points about how these two young boys engage with these resources, how deeply embedded within meaningful practices these resources are, and how both boys ably and confidently appropriate and enlarge the social meanings and possibilities of new technologies and popular culture within their everyday lives. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications that young children’s take-up and ‘making over’ of new technologies have for formal literacy education and pedagogy.

TECHNOKIDS, LITERACY AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES

Recent studies are showing that young children – especially middle-class children – are beginning to use computers, the Internet, mobile phones and other electronic gadgets at younger and younger ages (Arthur, 2001; Hutchby and Moran-Ellis, 2001; Marsh, 2005). A 2003 study, for example, commissioned by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, surveyed, via random phone dialling methods, more than 1,000 parents across the USA about the new media uses of their children aged six months through six years. The findings suggest that very young children are using a range of new technologies, and very often using them independently. Survey data show that approximately 30 per cent of the children in the survey have played video games (with 3 per cent of the children aged less than two years having done so). One in ten of all children in the study had their own video game console in their bedroom (Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2003: 4, 7).

The study pays particular attention to young children’s computer use and reports that almost half of the children in the study (48 per cent) have used a computer, almost one-quarter (23 per cent) of them have loaded their own CD-ROMs, and 12 per cent have asked for specific websites while surfing the Internet. One of the more intriguing findings of this study was that more than half (56 per cent) of those children aged four to six years have used a computer by themselves (i.e., without sitting on a parent’s lap, etc.) and 17 per cent of children in this same age group have sent an email message with or without the help of a parent (ibid.: 4, 5). The Foundation also reports data that show 27 per cent of the children in the study aged six months to three years have used the computer without direct guided assistance (ibid.: 5).

These findings resonate with a growing body of research conducted in a range of countries (e.g. Downes, 2002; Holloway, and Valentine, 2003; Kankaanranta and Kangassalo, 2003; Livingstone and Bober, 2004; Marsh, 2005). Indeed, children born in the 1990s and 2000s (in economically ‘developed’ countries) have captured popular imagination by dint of being born into a world where they will never have personal memories of a life prior to digital devices and networks. These children are often referred to en masse ‘in the media and education research literature alike’ as the ‘Nintendo Generation’, the ‘Digital Generation’, ‘Cyberkids’, ‘Millennials’, ‘NetGenners’ and other similar terms. This fascination with a group whom I’ll call ‘technokids’ plays out in interesting and sometimes contradictory ways in literacy education studies. At least three dominant mindsets can be identified in the research literature:

(a) new technologies enhance learning and it is therefore important to document and evaluate the effects of new technologies on technokids and their literacy development in order to better support children’s success as readers and writers;

(b) new technologies are flashy and seductive, and technokids are in danger of being too attracted to new technologies; in fact, new technologies and new media are intrinsically harmful to young children’s language, social and physical development, and new technology and media use should be highly curtailed and strictly surveilled;

(c) technokids involve themselves in a range of social and technological practices when using new technologies and it is important to document what these practices are in order to inform and further enhance effective classroom literacy pedagogy.

Each of these mindsets is discussed briefly below.

(a) Tracking the effects of new technologies on technokids and their literacy development

Ever since the 1960s, when computers were first used within compulsory education, there has been strong investment in their potential to enhance learning in general, and literacy learning in particular. Much of the research on young children, literacy learning and new technologies to date has tended to target specific hardware items and software programs and their effects on the child (cf. Labbo and Reinking, 2003; Kamil et al., 2000; Kamil and Lane, 1998). Researchers operating from this mindset tend to focus for the most part on the positive (and sometimes negative) impact that technology can have on reading comprehension, growth in phonemic awareness, peer tutoring and collaborative text production, and authoring skills (Lankshear and Knobel, 2003a).

(b) Technokids and the dangers of electronic media

Other researchers working in the area of early childhood and new digital technologies argue that technokids need to be protected from the dangers of computers, the Internet and electronic toys in order to avert a range of social and developmental troubles caused by digital media (cf. Grossman and Degaetano, 1999; Healy, 1998; Levin, 1998; Montgomery, 2002). Arguments in this camp focus on the potential of new digital technologies to generate developmentally inappropriate experiences for young children. These inappropriate experiences include ‘bad’ language models which promote ‘stunted’ language development, the ‘over-predetermination of play’ where electronic toys are viewed as removing important creative and imaginative possibilities from children’s play, the promotion of violence and antisocial behaviours, diminished time spent playing outside and correlated increases in child obesity levels, diminished time spent reading books, and so on. From this orientation, technokids need to be protected from using new technologies too much.

(c) Technokids and their literacy and digital technology practices

This mindset argues for the importance of examining the ways in which very young children are taking up and using new technologies and media within their self-selected everyday social and literacy practices (Lankshear and Knobel, 2003a; Marsh, 2002, 2004). Much of the driving force behind this mindset has been advocating on behalf of children for wider recognition and valuing of these new literacy and social practices in reaction to narrow, ‘schoolish’ orientations that privilege particular and normative language and literacy uses, even with respect to very young children. In many ways, this third mindset defines itself in contradistinction to the two mindsets discussed above. For example, from the position of this third mindset, much of the research into the effects new technologies can have on young children’s literacy development is grounded in narrow and monolithic conceptions of literacy as something comprising discrete encoding and decoding skills that can be fine-tuned or strengthened via applications of new technologies. Or, with respect to the second mindset, pundits who warn of the likely dangers to be encountered when using new technologies at too young an age are seen, from the position of this third mindset, as promoting erroneous and patronizing constructions of children as passive victims of ‘manipulative and dangerous media discourses’ and are not paying due attention to children’s abilities to construct socially meaningful literacy events and learning experiences using a range of toy-types and technologies (Marsh, 2002: 133).

In addition to offering direct challenges to long-standing claims concerning what counts as ‘developmentally appropriate’ literacy learning resources, this third mindset has sparked new research which suggests that many young children are not so much ‘using’ new digital media and technologies as ‘making them over’ in ways not necessarily intended by their original developers. For example, young Japanese schoolgirls use their camera phones to take snaps of handwritten notes to send to classmates because it’s quicker than text messaging, very young children act out and elaborate on the plots of CD-ROM storybooks (including ‘clicking’ on different toys to make them ‘move’), etc. One fruitful way of looking at this ‘making-over’ phenomenon is provided by Lee Sproull and Sarah Keisler (1991). Sproull and Keisler make a useful distinction between first- and second-level effects in explaining how technologies are taken up and used by people. First-level effects are the planned or anticipated benefits to be had from using a technology as a resource. Thus, the anticipated first-level effects of using a mobile phone include being able to make and receive calls while on the move, store frequently used phone numbers on the phone’s SIM card, access address and phone directory services, and so on.

Second-level effects are changes that occur within the context of social practices as a result of people actually using new technologies. For example, mobile phones have impacted directly on the social fabric of countries around the world (e.g. mobile phones mean it’s impossible to be ‘late’ for social gatherings in the traditional sense because meeting times are now more about converging on a place at a fluidly negotiated time, rather than setting a fixed time and place beforehand). Mobile...