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Dr.
Linda Wason-Ellam is a Professor of Curriculum Studies in the College
of Education, University of Saskatchewan. In 2002, she provided the
Foundation’s Learning from Practice Conference with insights
from her extensive research into literacy.
Socialization
in Virtual Realities Literacy
as Social Practice On the occasion of the McDowell Foundation’s 2002 Learning from Practice Conference, I was asked to share thoughts on my on-going research addressing the social worlds of literacy learners. While working as a teacher-researcher for over 37 years, there have been many children who have taught me about their literacy worlds. Teaching in inner-city neighborhoods within the USA; working with refugee children in Canada, multi-ethnic schools in England; religiously integrated schools in Northern Ireland; and community schools in Saskatoon gives my work a kaleidoscope of perspectives. In Colors of the Wind, lyricist Stephen Schwartz states that "if you walk in the footsteps of strangers, you'll learn things you never knew you never knew." And that is what I do. In research, I project myself into deeply textured experiences and perspectives quite different from my own to create a nuanced understanding of children. As I explored the multiple literacies that exist in families and communities, I sharpened my research focus to look at the whole child in many contexts – schools, homes, and communities. Understanding children's situated histories within these landscapes has been a starting point for raising critical issues about literacy practices. Critical literacy as a form of social activism involves readings of situated lives and commitment to creating possible practices that extend from those readings. Literacy is often described as a set of social and cultural practices; it is not simply a skill learned through formal schooling or detached from other social activities. Such a view of literacy has a deep research and theoretical base in socio-cultural studies (Heath,1983; Street,1995) but also in family literacy studies (Taylor, 1983; Taylor & Dorsey Gaines, 1986; Fishman, 1983, Wason-Ellam,2001) and community literacy (Moll,1992; Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Neuman & Celano, 2001). This social-cultural orientation speaks to the role of context as increasingly important in educational research and theory building. Like others, I believe that critical to literacy research is an expanse of Alived time" or historicity doing field work in urban neighborhoods so that I am are able to understand, interpret, and respect the literacy lives of children and families in determining social-cultural meaning in ethnographic research. Literacy practices are as fluid, dynamic, and changing as the lives and societies of which they are a part shift and change (Barton, Hamilton, & Ivani…, 2000). That makes literacy not just an individual construct, but a more complex concept that is embedded in the daily stream of activities within families and their community networks. Literacy practices across family, community and school settings are viewed as complementary when the literacy practices that occur in these spaces build on and easily inform each other, non-complementary when these practices do not do so. Often children from the mosaic of Canadian cultures are outsiders in the natural rhythm of classroom cultures. Their everyday or vernacular literacies which exist in their home lives are less visible, less influential, and less supported (Barton & Hamilton, 1998, p. 10), or do not fit into the high status of school literacy or the language codes of the dominant culture. What are the everyday literacies that children share? Over many studies, I observed that in the naturally occurring dialogical routines, children often share chatter, news, and stories informally in the realm of the daily collaborative work especially in activities such as writers and readers workshop. Children follow the culture of media technology as rapport-talk, a way of establishing classroom conversations or negotiating relationships about things they have, things they want, and things they see rather than things they do. To illustrate, I draw upon my observations of children in homes, classrooms, and communities. I have become increasingly aware that family and community literacy research may not address the widening divide in what constitutes literacy learning and who has access. In today's world, young readers and writers are developing layers of literacy beyond the traditional tools of family story book reading, exploring magnetic alphabets, or experimenting with paper, crayons, and pencils which are the situated practices and building blocks of learning that underpin and support the more valued literacies that school teaches. Immersed within the layers of these Achild networks" (Nespor, 1997) is an emerging digital and media culture, a hybrid literacy often under the guise of being educational, that is being propelled by a confluence of technological and economic forces that has created a plethora of media products and services marketed to children worldwide. These layers of literacy are articulated through a variety of interactive linkages not only in the dialogical spaces between adult and children but also in the decontextualized spaces found in representations (books, games, leisure activities) but most of all in the virtual spaces transmitted through globalized technologies (television, films, computers, and videos). As a researcher, I have been interested in the question that asks: What is happening in child networks where young readers and writers engage in social and cultural activities with electronic texts that are spread across mass distributed images or representational spaces? Trade treaties aside, I have become aware that the driving force behind much of what we call globalization in Canada is the communications revolution; the present ability to exchange ideas electronically (and often instantaneously) around the globe is changing the way we live. Already, the effects of new information technologies are being observed in the children's culture especially within the health communities – the physical inactivity of children, inattentiveness, and obesity and in education with the work of Patrick Shannon and Kenneth Goodman who raise issues on the commodification of reading materials and practices. Commodification means that reading instruction has become pre-packaged to sell in the public spaces of schooling (Shannon & Goodman, 1994, p. 215-216) and the private spaces of homes. From leveled reading series to Jump to Start to Reading computer games, Hooked on Phonics instructional materials, Between the Lions videos or the battery operated Leap Pad Reading Series, reading is packaged and tailored to markets as much as any other product. So much so that Hooked on Phonics is on the New York Stock Exchange as a publicly traded company. Publishers rely heavily on research to produce their curricula products, but it is market research that more often that carries the day on how to sell more products, not basic research on how children learn to read. Who is making decisions about how reading is taught? As more of the teaching practices have been changed by leveled reading programs, teachers are being deskilled as the responsibility on what to teach, how to teach, and what materials to teach have been co-opted by the publishers. In the same way, commercial publishers are changing the way parents foster early literacy in their homes. Leveled reading series are produced as computer games, library resources, or as Disney teach-at-home-products which regulates children thinking, level by level, to a guided mastery of controlled information. This may be contrary to learning to read as a problem solving process for in reading a book off a library shelf it is the reader that displays the agency by sampling the text and predicting the word that makes the sentence meaningful. Incidentally, the same companies that produce leveled reading as home products and for school instruction also produce the standardized texts that are altering the way children learn to read. Why is this monopoly not a conflict of interest? So how are young readers using electronic technologies in their leisure time? There is a growing awareness that media technology has overtaken children's playtime, so that they are becoming more sedentary and robbing them of the carefree hours in which they could be enjoying the creative forces of play (Wason-Ellam, 1997) – such as climbing trees, investigating a bird's nest, or walking along the riverbank. Children are living within the geographical spaces of community but most are engaged in structured play outside those parameters in the battery-operated, electronic or digital spaces of the virtual worlds (Wason-Ellam, 2002). The rapid infiltration of digital and electronic literacies into homes in North America and beyond to the globalized world has witnessed the production of children's television programs in tandem with children's books and websites, as well as multiple distribution Aplatforms" such as CD-ROMS and video games. All of which is blurring the boundaries of the retail line between mass marketed books, media, the spin-off toys and the food industry, such as the fast food giant, MacDonalds, the purveyor of Disney toys linked to Disney movies and books and merchandised with unhealthy food. These commodities are resources in Aa built kid's community" with layers of attached meanings that are becoming essential for children to possess in order to socially construct identities, selves, and relationships with peers. Seiter (1993) states that children depend upon commodity consumption Anot just for survival but for participation, inclusion, in social networks (p.3)." For most children every other child they meet will know some of the same things, do some of the same things, and perhaps have some of the same things, such as Winnie the Pooh t-shirts. This possession about things gives children the currency of being identified as Ahip" or belonging. Reflecting over time, I have begun to realize that the extraordinary power attained by commodity capitalism has altered the exchange process. Trading in the cultural value of goods means that exploitation which is at the heart of capitalist exchange process is Athe child as consumer," (achieved through pester power) not the adult as the purchaser. The appeal of the consumer industry is undiminished. Accumulating, ordering, naming, trading, and assigning value to media collectibles are all primary impulses of increased complexity and commercialization. You can't get one Scooby Doo or Spiderman video; you have to collect them all! In playing with media characters like Barbie – a doll, a story character, a video and movie star – the opportunities for learning are limited because of the association of Ahigh definition back stories" for the imaginary situation already contains rules or behaviour. That makes Barbie more than a teen-aged doll for she has a back-story representing a pretend world beyond every-day childhood roles. For every activity, Barbie has a wardrobe change, that is, she has accessories that are sold separately for roller-blading, jogging, skiing or dancing at the prom. Since Barbie is about collecting paraphanalia rather than constructing fashions out of silk scarves or remnants from mother's sewing basket, a child's ingenuity and creativity may be crimped. If the child gets tired of the Barbie doll, then with a flick of a switch, that child can connect to a Barbie Fashion Play Corner on the Internet to spend time in the game-room, selecting a fashion word search or a playing a game that allows her to dress up a model the way she wants it to look! Alternatively, when a child uses open-ended toys such as erector sets, building blocks, tinker-toys or Lego, it challenges his/her manual dexterity in building a myriad of forms. To transform a plan into a construction project requires higher order thinking skills, such as analysing, problem solving, estimation, weighing alternatives, creative thinking, and stretching imaginative thinking; skills that are not needed when a child is staring at a television screen, pointing and clicking a computer mouse, or pushing a joystick. Mega-corporations such as Disney and AOL Time Warner with arms into children's publishing houses have made media books lucrative as possible to attract would be investors. As a consequence, media literacy is replacing book reading. Book lines based on the electronic game Spiderman, Monsters Inc. or the latest Star Wars movies are hot sellers which are sold in supermarkets, pharmacies, corner or discount stores, and even gas stations. Successful book licences are distributed in Canada and globally by foreign-owned multinationals. Favorites like the television-linked Blues Clues books relating glib struggles are written and illustrated with formula plots and cartoon caricatures making them illustrated stories rather than children's but they rank at the top in the New York Times best sellers list – and somebody is making a profit. While less popular but high-quality Canadian picture storybooks reflecting the cultural mosaic such as the Objiwa tale, Morning on the Lake (Waboose, 1993), conveys to readers a morning glide through still lake waters in a canoe, amid haze and reeds. More valuable than reaching a particular destination, readers experience an ecological journey. Why use children's literature? Picture storybooks use illustrations to extend, clarify, complement, or take the place of the words. Pictures are consistent with the text to help tell the story. Picture storybooks also have in-depth plots which lead to critical and thoughtful reading as they feature roundly developed characters who make moral decisions and contemplate the reasons for their decisions. Huck et al (1987) argue, AIn a literary story the author has time to develop the characters into fully rounded human beings. The reader knows the nature and pressures of each individual and can understand and empathizes with the character (p.467)." As children experience story, they may begin to filter out some meaning for their own lives. This allows children to organize and shape their own thinking about life as they follow through story, the lives of others. More importantly, literature provides a lens through which children can examine their own lives, their own experiences, their own cultural realities and viewpoints (Eeds & Hudelson, 1995). Literature also allows them to enter into realities that are different from their own. When they do this, they broaden their own perspectives and extend their humanity by considering ways of thinking and making sense of lives other than their own. Canadian educators are vexed that traditional book-based publishing models based on serving libraries and schools is being replaced by the media-market model that sells entertainment to the masses readily available at global ventures, i.e., Wal-Mart, Superstore or Shopper's Drug Mart, and some are finding their way to the shelves of the Saskatoon libraries. Companies that sell Ahigh end" picture story books may find themselves not able to justify their existence for libraries are finding it difficult to stretch their dollars to meet the demands of both books and the computer technology and school libraries, too, see that these books are not in demand. It becomes clear that in the global world, Disney, one of most powerful media conglomerates, promotes cultural homogeneity with a stranglehold on consumers (Giroux, 1999, p.157) including shaping the landscapes of young readers. You may ask are media activities really teaching reading? When children play computer games or view children's TV programs where there is text on the screen, parents may feel relieved that they are reading, or at least doing something that can be called "edutainment" (Crawford, 1994). Edutainment is the fusion of education and entertainment offerings that invoke a pretense of education functions to please parents who think their children are engaged in literacy learning. Invoking education serves as a means of legitimizing many media pursuits that might otherwise be regarded as overly indulgent fun. In many of the interactive computer reading games, the player hears a recorded child's voice reading, such as "We went to the beach, just Grandpa and me." Then there is an animated sequence where the player gets to use the mouse, clicking on objects all over the screen like a treasure hunt to see what will make noise and what will move. It's very appealing and hip as the player looks for hypermedia links on the screen that follows a new pathway in the story plot. Children often spend a good 10 minutes trying out the one screen before moving on to the next. The next what? Surely not the next page in an unfolding story. If you wanted to a read the story you wouldn't be messing around with the screen in the game for 10 minutes – you'd move from one screen to the next to keep the plot moving rather than fragmenting the threads. If you wanted the story, one would assume that you'd read the book, in fact. What the children really want to do is to play the game, see what moves and makes noise, and go to the next screen to see what moves and makes noise there. What is really happening in many of the reading games is that children are playing a captioned video game, a story in fragments and not having an experience with reading. In this way children are immersed in associative thinking rather than sequential learning of an unfolding story. On the other hand, it is more useful for a child to hear a story read-aloud than listen to a computer voice or as TV character. The greatest part of the learning experience lies not in hearing the words of the story but in the interaction with the reader. As educators, we need to sound the alarm and draw attention to the results of TV's quick-cut, fast-action format on young children which appears in TV, videos and computer games which may lead to a decrease in imaginative play, non-involvement in play materials, low frustration tolerance, poor persistence, and a confusion about reality and fantasy. Even programs like Sesame Street or Barney where the context moves so quickly, leaves no time for the response or reflection that are an important part of a child's learning experience. Does prolonged experiences with these kind of programs lead instead to a shortened attention span, a lack of reflectiveness, and an expectation of rapid change in the broader environment. Why? Animation (as in Disney videos) is a denaturalized fiction which does not deal authentically with real social life or interactions B usually it is a parade of flashes. Instead of developing paths to the understanding of personal experiences and modern social life, the disconnected images and messages dig deeper channels to fantasy. On the other hand, narrative in children's literature is a means of negotiating the broad patterns of thought and feeling; it is through early experience with stories that young children gain an intellectual framework within which they can integrate experience and perception. In children's animation, narrative works the other way as it is a sequence of scenes strung together like a storyboard. Various encounters might cause confusion for young viewers as the camera may cut back and forth or what is called panning between different aspects or perspectives of an event rather than involving an interweaving of character, plot, and theme holistically. Neil Postman (1992) warns that media viewers may have great difficulty with objectivity, with abstract and imaginative thinking. The reason is that TV or videos are not a real-life linguistic experience. There is a difference between an activity that requires nothing from the child mesmerized in front of a screen and one in which the child is able to involve her/himself actively. No matter what the content, staring into a TV screen is an activity involving nonverbal cognition; it does not encourage the sort of mental effort that forming one's own thoughts or feelings and moulding them into sentences requires. Today's society is constructed on the basis of convenience as demanded by an ever increasing lifestyle where TV, videos, and computers are rapidly becoming Achild sitters" or the other parent! If we look at the scope of children's popular culture not at the adult romanticized version of what children's culture is or should be, then we can begin to see that children spend a lot of their waking hours with Amedia friends" in virtual worlds rather than socially interacting with others. Children are viewing animated characters from TV and the video/computer games, comic books, videos, and toys – spin-offs from cultural-communication ventures. From early childhood, young readers become hooked into the world of consumerism through media texts that link their TV shows to what they read, eat, wear, play, and view. This saturation with media entertainment may be presenting children with a distorted view of the world by exposing them to concepts totally unsuitable for and in opposition to their stage of development. Do real activities, such as reading books, playing sports and engaging in social relationships, get displaced by computer or video gaming? Unfortunately they do. Many children feel close to the video characters, have a strong sense of their reality, and feel akin to them in spirit as between real friends. When queried by his teacher about what makes a friend Tony wrote in his writing journal:
What is Tony telling his teacher? It opens some questions about writing conversations. Do we deal with the problem of video game content by excluding them from classroom conversations or do we engage in dialogue? Do we teach children to question the prevailing social practices of the video games in a sustained critical manner or do we preserve the hegemony of the consumer market – video violence happens outside of school life? How about a reality check on video stories? Fairytales are potent because they do say something about real life, although perhaps in fantastical ways. Do video tales say something about reality, too? When asked to read aloud her story about a friend, Miranda who was born in Guatemala, showed her affinity for Britney Spears in a poem: Britney What is Miranda's reality? The fusing of entertainment and education blurs the boundaries between public culture and commercial interests finding expression in films, radio stations, television networks, and publishing which provide the Disney company with sites from which to promote its cultural pedagogy, the production of knowledge and values. What is less transparent for parents is that it commodifies culture and constructs children's identities within the ideology of consumerism. Girls want to look like Britney Spears and boys want to be like Action Men. Globally, Disney markets its spin-offs on toys, sports gear or videos or everything else connected to childhood as evidenced in the definitive document on childhood -The Sears Wish Book, Christmas 2002. In a global society, the children's culture is in flux. As a researcher, it has been my intention to engage in dialogue, reflection, and interpretation to seek to make what is implicit and tacit about the children's culture explicit to others. Culture is essential to any understanding of this body of work, a critical ethnography, for it describes the particular ways in which children as a social group live and make sense of their Agiven circumstances" and conditions of life. Besides defining culture as a set of practices, ideologies, and values from which children draw upon to make sense of the world, I recognize that cultural questions help me to understand who has power and how it is reproduced and manifested in the social relations that link childhood to the wider social order. Culture, i.e., the children's electronic network, is being analysed not simply as a way of life, but as a form of production through which monopolistic media conglomerates dominate and define Agrowing up" as a life script. From getting-a-child-ready-for-school literacy, getting-a-child-through-school literacy, and manoeuvring-a-child-to-join-the-consumer culture, childhood is commodified and exploited by the hegemonic practices of capitalist production, namely, the media companies. In so doing, hegemony is an active structuring of the experiences and cultural norms of children by Disney and others, who dominate the child markets with their goods, often with the intent to promote literacy learning with their spin-off Aedutainment books and games." Moreover, the pursuit of lucrative profits generate activities that often work against the deeply held cultural values of schools, families and communities as well as ignore sound theories on how children learn literacy. Frequently the materials are drill and answer-recall activities rather than require the learner to think thoughtfully or critically. What is essential to make explicit is that these markets supply a term of reference, i.e., images, visions, stories, ideals against which children, locally and globally, are expected to live their lives whether they live in Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia or Brazil. As children move in and out of virtual communities organized by representations and cultural forms from a narrow world--television, video and computer games, and children's books, they are being saturated with commercial interests. Although it is often not recognized, children depend upon commodity consumption not just for survival but for participation, identification, and inclusion in social networks. In this way, children often jockey their social standing by their talk about what they know about media icons and characters rather than talk about what they do themselves. Kline (1993) cautions about market goods that substitute for and displace the traditional patterns of family relations when he states:
Yet, the academic commentaries about childhood seldom query the consumer markets as part of a matrix of contemporary socialization or take into consideration how children learn these roles, attitudes, and attachments that reinforce the consumer culture. It may be less insightful to explain what children are not reading or why children are not participating in peer conversations, or not engaging in physical activities as a problem with the child rather than recognizing the precipitating role of the media culture. What are the possibilities? Perhaps the most pressing problem for both parents and the educational community is the determination of the place and importance of reading in the spectrum of leisure time activities, especially in light of all the emerging options in electronic media. It is clear that young readers will be spending more time in front of electronic screens in the future than they do now, but what will be the outcomes of this change? One avenue of inquiry that is suggested by the preceding discussion is the area of intervention. The media cannot be ignored by schooling but must be treated seriously as social practice and a social text (Luke, 1997, p.20). Hilton, (1996) and Dyson (1997) all argue that schools need to foster ways to listen and to value the many literacies and texts which help to construct children's identities in and outside of school. Will reading texts from an electronic screen, complete with multimedia accompaniments, continue to provide the same kinds of mental imagery associated with free reading in a quiet place? If not, how can computer use and game playing facilitate reading to provide for some "text time" in the leisure spectrum? There is a current wave of research activity regarding computers in the classroom, but few investigations have begun to examine the implications of new media on the child's relationship with print asking questions such as: Do global technologies influence the local literacies in Saskatchewan? Are global literacies colonizing and cultural stripping? The citizens of the future will need to be print literate, knowledgeable about math and science, and media and computer literate as well. There is every reason to believe that all of these activities can be synergistic, with traditional and new media presenting a cornucopia of child-enriching possibilities. It is time to open a dialogue. Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. (1998). Local literacies Reading and writing in one community. London, UK: Routledge. Barton, D., Hamilton, M. & Ivani…, R. (2000). Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context. New York: Routledge Crawford, M. (1992). The world in a shopping mall. In M. Sorkin (Ed.) Variations on a theme park (pp. 3-30), New York: Hill & Wang. Creighton, M. R. (1994). "Edutaining" children: consumer and gender socialization in Japanese marketing. Ethnology, 33, 35-52. Dyson, A. H. (1997).Writing superheros: Contemporary childhood, popular culture, and classroom literacy.New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Eeds, M., & Hudelson, S. (1995). Literature as foundation for personal and classroom life. Primary Voices K-6, 3(2), 2-7. Fishman, A. (1983). Amish literacy. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Giroux, H.A. (1999). The mouse that roared. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Heath. S. B. (1983). Way with Words. Cambridge, MA:Cambridge University Press. Hicks, D. (2002). Reading lives Working-class children and literacy learning. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Hilton, M. (1996). Manufacturing make-believe: Notes on the toy and media industry for children. In M. Hilton, M. (Ed.). Potent fictions Children's literacy and the challenges of popular culture.(pp.19-46). Huck, C., Hepler, S. & Hickman, J. (1987). Children's literature in the elementary school (5th edition) Toronto, ON: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston. Kline, S. (1993). Out of the garden.Toys and children's culture in the age of TV marketing. Toronto, ON: Garamond Press. Luke, C. (1997). Media literacy and cultural studies. In S. Muspratt, A. Luke & P. Freebody (Eds.), Constructing critical literacies: Teaching and learning textual practice (pp. 19-49). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Moll, L.(1992). Literacy research in community and classrooms. In R. Beach et al. (Eds.), Multidisciplinary perspectives on literacy research (pp. 211-244). Urbana, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English. Nespor, J. (1997). Tangled up in school.Politics, space, bodies, and signs in the educational process. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Neuman, S.B. & Celano, D. (2001). Access to print in low-incomes and middle-income communities: An ecological study of four neighborhoods. Reading Research Quarterly, 36,(1), 8-26 Postman, N. (1986). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. New York, NY: Viking. Shannon, P. & Goodman, K. (1994). Basal readers: A second look. Katonah, NY: Richard C. Owens Publishing, Inc. Seiter, E. (1993). Sold separately Children and parents in the consumer culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Street, B. (1995). Social literacies:Critical approaches to literacy in development, ethnography and education. New York: Longman Taylor, D. (1983). Family literacy Young children learning to read and write. Exeter, NH: Heinemann Educational Books. Taylor, D. & Dorsey-Gaines, C. (1988). Growing up literate: Learning from inner-city families. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books. Wason-Ellam, L. (1997). Video Games: Playing on a violent playground. In J. Epp & A. Watkinson. (Eds.) Schools, Complicity and Sources of Violence. (pp.72-93). London: Falmer Press. Wason-Ellam, L. (2002). Immigrant Children: Dialoguing in new software. In M. Wyness & A. Richardson, (Eds.) Exploring Cultural Perspectives, (2-19). Edmonton, AB: ICRN Press. Weiler, D. (October 1999). Toy story: in the lucrative licensing business, Canadian publishers are mostly stuck on the sidelines. Quill & Quire, 65(10), 18-19. |
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