Children, Film and Literacy

Becky Parry

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137294326
• eBook ISBN: 9781137294333
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Children, Film and Literacy explores the role of film in children's lives. The films children engage in provide them with imaginative spaces in which they create, play and perform familiar and unfamiliar, fantasy and everyday narratives and this narrative play is closely connected to identity, literacy and textual practices. Family is key to the encouragement of this social play and, at school, the playground is also an important site for this activity. However, in the literacy classroom, some children encounter a discontinuity between their experiences of narrative at home and those that are valued in school. Through film children develop understandings of the common characteristics of narrative and the particular 'language' of film. This book demonstrates the ways in which children are able to express and develop distinct and complex understandings of narrative, that is to say, where they can draw on their own experiences (including those in a moving image form). Children whose primary experiences of narrative are moving images face particular challenges when their experiences are not given opportunities for expression in the classroom, and this has urgent implications for the teaching of literacy.

1

Introduction: A Narrative on Narrative

Narrative is ubiquitous and takes many forms, from written and oral language to still and moving images. Barthes (1975) observes that in every culture narrative is ever present:

Like life itself, it is there, international, transhistorical, transcultural. (Barthes, 1975, p. 1)

As Barthes describes, the earliest philosophers, including Aristotle, turned their attention to defining the characteristics of narratives and this has been the subject of debate as new forms of storytelling emerge. Regardless of innovations in medium and form, narratives continue to be highly important to the lives of children:

When we are born we enter into a world of stories: the stories of our parents, our generation, our culture, our nation, our civilisation. (Goodson, et al., 2010, p. 2)

As parents we teach children how to be, how to think, how to imagine, how to feel, how to remember, using stories in many different forms. Bruner (1986) describes narrative as a mode of thought and the work of Vygotsky (1978) and Elkonin (1978) demonstrates that it is make-believe or playing stories which form the richest context for young children’s learning. Hardy (1975) describes narrative as a primary act of mind:

Narrative is crucial in life and in literature. Our ordinary and extraordinary day depends on the stories we hear. One piece of news, a change of intention, even a revision of memory, a secret, a disclosure, a piece of gossip may change our lives. (Hardy, 1975, p. 16)

Although the primacy of narrative has been contested in relation to very young children’s experiences of reading (Pappasa, 1993), there can be little doubt that narrative is highly significant to their engagements with texts. Robinson (1997) demonstrates that with each encounter with a new text, readers draw on previous experiences to make sense of them. As a result, as readers we develop repertoires of experience of narrative from print, film, television and other media, which help us engage with new texts. However, literacy has conventionally been taught through the telling and re-telling of print-based stories.

The importance of narrative was acknowledged in strategies to support the formal teaching of literacy in the UK:

The promotion of children’s understanding of narrative texts, and opportunities to create them, are core aspects of children’s literacy development. (DCSF, 2006 Year 1 Literacy Planning)

Fictional books are used to teach children not only how to decode alphabetic text but also how to infer meaning from the combined uses of language, font, layout and images. Through narratives we learn literacy (Dyson and Genishi, 1994), we construct identities (Marsh, 2005) and we become storytellers (Brice Heath, 1983). The importance of narrative is ingrained in school practices in written, oral and dramatic form. Learning about narrative is a critical aspect of becoming a reader and accessing education:

Narrative is primary in children, but it stays with us as a cognitive and affective habit all our lives long. (Spencer, 1982, p. 288)

Despite the clear significance of narrative to the teaching of literacy in schools, film and other popular media narratives are often treated with suspicion (Lambirth, 1994).

Meanwhile, at home children’s early experiences of narrative are likely to be visual (picture books), moving image (children’s television and film) or screen-based texts (computer games and websites). Attention has been paid to the role of media forms of narrative in children’s lives such as television (Hodge and Tripp, 1986; Buckingham, 1993;Robinson, 1997; Messenger-Davies, 1997, 2001), games (Buckingham et al., 2006;Bearne and Wolstencroft, 2006) and websites (Marsh, 2010; Merchant, 2005a, 2005b); however, the relationship between children’s film as a narrative form and children’s emerging literacy has not been fully explored.

This monograph, therefore, presents a study of children’s experiences of film and the significance of children’s film as an aspect of a shared children’s culture. The work contributes to a growing field of study that acknowledges the relationship between popular media and children’s literacies and identities. It is important to make clear at this stage that I am not claiming a greater significance for film over other media or popular forms. I do however, demonstrate, in subsequent chapters, the benefits of examining in close-up a specific media form. I recognise that film is just one element of a wider constellation of other media and activities that constitute children’s popular culture and indeed children’s lives. Furthermore, that the different forms of children’s popular culture converge and interrelate in interesting ways that it is also important to pay attention to. The same narrative can now appear as a film, television programme, book, console or computer game and website. However, children’s films are narrative texts with their own formal affordances, codes and conventions and, as such, they contribute to what Robinson (1997) describes as children’s developing repertoires of narrative.

The research was motivated by a desire to situate film alongside other media as a form through which children learn to read and create their own narratives at home and potentially at school. The data described in this work seeks to understand what children learn about narrative from their engagements with children’s films. The ways in which children participate in and engage with children’s film are examined alongside an exploration of the extent to which children’s films are sources of ideas about narrative in the classroom. Finally, the processes through which children draw on children’s film when creating their own moving image narratives is analysed in detail.

Narrative learning

Goodson et al. (2010) describe narratives opening up spaces for learning:

Narrative learning is not simply learning from the stories we tell about our lives and ourselves. It is learning that happens in and through the narration. (Goodson et al., 2010, p. 2)

I present narratives of six children’s literacy identities in relation to film at home, at the cinema and at school. My perceptions of the children’s identities, informed as they are by fieldwork data, are also informed by a narrative of my own – the cumulative experience of participation and engagements with film at home, at the cinema and at school. As a result I begin with six vignettes, storied accounts, of my own experiences of film as a child, a teacher, a parent and a film educator. The process of reflecting on these telling moments contributed to the formulation of my research. Goodson et al. (2010) point out that narrative learning as part of the life course often occurs implicitly and that making it explicit is associated with learning:

For all those interested in education as a route to self-development and social purpose narrative learning would seem to offer a promising gateway. (Goodson et al., 2010, p. 132)

I therefore present a reflection on some key personal and professional experiences, which provoked questions and enabled me to arrive at an appropriate starting place for my research.

Hollywood tales

When I was a child my gran used to tell me stories. There is not anything unusual about a granddaughter listening to the stories of her grandmother but the stories I listened to were not from books. The stories she told me were intricately woven plots and they were based on Hollywood melodramas and the lives of the Hollywood stars. Bette Davies, Olivia de Havilland, Vivien Leigh, Audrey and Katherine Hepburn, Jane Russell, Ingrid Bergman and Joan Crawford became the brooding, pouting, earnest, heroic stuff of my imaginings. Whether they played an insolent and feisty heiress, a martyred downtrodden sister, or the classic femme fatale, I came to love hearing their stories. My gran had a particular way of telling stories, building up gradually to a key line such as, ‘Why ask for the moon when we have the stars?’ from the film Now Voyager (Rapper, 1942). She would mingle the film plots with snippets of juicy information from the private and public lives of the stars. According to my gran’s wonderfully digressing narratives, on and off screen these women had terrible difficulties to overcome including poverty, heartbreak and public misunderstandings.

It was many years later that I actually got to see any of the films she retold. No video or DVD copies of old films were available then. Sometimes I would find myself watching a ‘half-way through’ film on a Saturday afternoon on BBC Two and realise that the story was oddly familiar to me. As a consequence of this experience I always believed that film was a significant source of stories. It did not occur to me that films were of any less value than books, television, comics or songs. I did not become a film ‘buff’, I had no interest in how films were made and did not imagine I could make films, but just as some children become habitual book-readers, I did go to the cinema or watch films at home whenever I had the chance, especially those films with strong female characters and with a high likelihood of being a ‘weepie’.

Alien invasion

I have two particularly significant childhood cinema memories. The first was going to see Star Wars (Lucas, 1977). I cannot remember being especially excited before going but all the same there was a buzz about it and as a result I found myself, with my siblings, in a long queue for tickets. When we finally got into the cinema, the tickets had been oversold and there were no seats. I look back and imagine the usherettes taking pity and letting us sit on the floor at the front (something that surely would not happen now in times of more health and safety rules). However, this was an important part of the whole experience. We were caught up in the excitement that was Star Wars the cultural phenomenon. It wasn’t long before we were using large sticks, broom handles and any other tube-shaped objects as light sabres and, although none of us ever wanted to be the only female character, Princess Leia, we made up our own girl Star Wars characters or took on the roles of the boys.

I also recall with great emotion watching E.T. (Spielberg, 1982), the story of a stranded alien. During the scene by the river where E.T. is found close to death my sisters and I wept noisily. I was distraught, but I loved the film. I loved the fact that the children kept things hidden from the grown ups. I loved the humour of the connection between Elliott, the main character (and middle child!), and E.T. but most of all I identified with Elliott. I responded to the fact that his family did not listen to him, believe him or take him seriously and for me the denouement of the film was that everyone had to stop and listen to Elliott; he was right and they were wrong.

My love of the film E.T has become a family narrative. Like children today keen to collect toys, cards and experiences linked to a favourite text, I was delighted to find, in a charity shop, a model of E.T., which still lit up and said, ‘Phone Home’. On a recent trip to the Florida theme parks I was more excited than any of the children when I got to ride on a BMX bike over the night sky to John Williams’ evocative music. Perhaps some films become ‘always’ films – significant memories of a shared experience.

Tread softly

After completing my Communication Studies degree in Sheffield I trained to be a secondary school English and Drama teacher (there were no courses for teachers of Media) and took up my first teaching post in 1992. During my training we spent just one day exploring the possibility of teaching Media Studies, despite the growth of this area and the high likelihood of a teacher of English being asked to teach either the subject or media within English. This session was run by a local secondary school teacher who described what he did in the classroom to explore the film Pretty Woman (Marshall, 1990). However, before we even got started, a lively discussion erupted about whether or not this was a text worthy of study. This discussion drew on common discourses about the value of the text, and the film was dismissed, by my peers, as being rubbish. There were also anxieties about the representation of gender in the text, although eventually a consensus was reached that this was a text that could be studied to ensure young people were able to deconstruct it and see its ideological imperfections. Coming from a Communication Studies course which was largely composed of the study of popular texts, whether they were television detective series, representations of race, or the history of the penny dreadful, I realised that my position in the group was distinct from many of the English graduates who would go on to be colleagues. I also realised that my peers were asking fundamentally different questions of popular texts than those applied to literary ones.

There is a moment which I love in the film Pretty Woman. As someone who loathes shopping and feels totally intimidated by glossy shops, I love and re-enact this moment with friends. Julia Roberts’ character returns to a shop in which she had been sneered at, with a large amount of money to spend. In context this is hardly a feminist moment, the money is her client’s, the shop assistant is female and our Cinderella still gets prettily transformed for the ball. However, for me the shopping moment connected with my social anxieties about going into ‘posh’ places and I loved it. In the classroom this affective response was being trampled on and I worried about the children these English teachers would also encounter whose pleasures they might also trample on (Pompe, 1992b). This experience made me increasingly determined to teach Media Studies.

Monstrous stories

In my early years of teaching I encountered an issue which appears to be a fairly common experience. One boy in my English class persistently wrote extremely violent stories with sprawling narratives and evolving monsters, which I found difficult to respond to appropriately. I discovered on further enquiry that this boy had a particular interest in Japanese anime films and manga. This made me aware of the need to take an interest in the sources from which children draw in their stories, but also left me with a dilemma about how to make the writing compatible with the newly introduced statutory requirements of the National Curriculum. Years later this dilemma also contributed to the formulation of my research.

Chivalric code

From a period of time in which I worked in cinemas and children’s film festivals one experience in particular stays with me. I was approached by an education welfare officer at a school who ran a group for children with experiences of bullying, and who wanted to explore if there were any films the children might find relevant to their experiences. We discussed some possible activities and this led to the group taking part in two screenings, one of an Icelandic film called Benjamin Dove (Snær Erlingsson, 1995) and one entitled The Mighty (Chelsom, 1998), an American film. Both films had male protagonists who were from ‘ordinary’ not affluent backgrounds and explored issues of bullying. Both films end with tragedy and redemption and some greater understandings, although their moral stance is not didactic. Both also draw on myths of the codes of honour between knights and explored the reasons why people bully and are bullied.

Following the activity we ran a drama activity, which gave the children an opportunity to further explore and discuss their responses to the films. It would be fair to say I was relieved to have an audience for Benjamin Dove (Snær Erlingsson, 1995) – few teachers would opt to bring a whole class to a subtitled Icelandic film with its washed out, if achingly beautiful, snowy landscapes and its depiction of such a bewilderingly different rural lifestyle. The Mighty (Chelsom, 1998) was more accessible although, by having such a sad ending, it was not the end-of-term treat choice. However, nothing could have prepared me for the children’s responses. They took on an ownership of these films and used them to make comparisons with their own experiences. It struck me that this is often what we do with fiction; we relate, we empathise, we distance ourselves, we immerse. And yet it was striking that these children seemed to respond to the films as if they had never seen aspects of their own lives, in this case bullying, at the cinema before. Following the screening the children forme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: A Narrative on Narrative
• 2 Children’s Film: Children’s Cultures
• 3 Assets, Resources and Repertoires
• 4 Movies Teach Movies
• 5 Researching Film with Children
• 6 Film Identities in Practice
• 7 Film in Children’s Storytelling
• 8 Film in Children’s Film Production
• 9 A Case for Children’s Film
• References
• Index