Teaching the Media with Mouse Woman:
Adventures in Imaginative Education
by
Kymberley Stewart
M.A., Simon Fraser University, 2004
Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the
Curriculum Theory & Implementation Program
Faculty of Education
Kymberley Stewart 2014
SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY
Summer 2014
Approval
Name:
Kymberley Stewart
Degree:
Doctor of Philosophy (Education)
Title:
Teaching the Media with Mouse Woman:
Adventures in Imaginative Education
Examining Committee:
Chair: Allan MacKinnon
Associate Professor
Mark Fettes
Senior Supervisor
Associate Professor
Kieran Egan
Supervisor
Professor
Michael Ling
Supervisor
Senior Lecturer
Lynn Fels
Internal/External Examiner
Associate Professor
Faculty of Education
David Jardine
External Examiner
Professor
Faculty of Education
University of Calgary
Date Defended:
August 20, 2014
ii
Partial Copyright Licence
iii
Ethics Statement
iv
Abstract
Concerns have been expressed for decades over the impact of an increasingly
media-saturated environment on young children. Media education, however,
occupies a somewhat marginal place in compulsory schooling, and its theorists
and practitioners have given relatively little attention to the question of how to
teach the media to elementary school children. This question is explored
through an auto-ethnography and métissage spanning more than twenty years
of media use, media studies, and media education.
Three shifts in emphasis are particularly central to the thesis. The first is a shift
from a protectionist to a more open, albeit critical stance with respect to
children‘s media use. The second is a shift from conceiving of media education
in terms of a pre-packaged curriculum towards the co-construction of learning
experiences with the students, guided by Egan‘s theory of imaginative
education. The third involves learning to slow down and take time to dwell with
the questions and activities inspired by an imaginative focus on media.
By tracing the personal and professional growth and struggles of one passionate
media educator, the thesis seeks to illustrate the educational issues that the
field of media education needs to engage with, if it is to develop into a more
dynamic and influential field of theory and practice. It also offers a situated,
experiential perspective on the practice of imaginative education that highlights
its close ties with other voices and traditions in educational philosophy, and
connects it with the ethos of métissage as a research praxis.
•
Keywords: media education; imagination; pedagogy; reflective
practice; métissage; auto-ethnography
v
Dedication
To all the Mouse Wo(men) and Mischief Makers
who have inspired me to revel in the art of being lost
vi
Acknowledgements
The words I find in this acknowledgment will never match the gratitude and
love I feel for those who have been a part of this journey to write this thesis. It
has become a transformational process that and I will never forget.
Dr. Mark Fettes: Our paths crossed a decade ago while I was looking for a new
academic home. You‘ve provided not only a home in a new field, but a
foundation for my future career of teaching and researching. Without your
support I never would have found the courage to find my voice and I would have
probably fallen into the path of writing a thesis for others, instead of for myself.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for making my vision a reality. You
were truly my guiding spirit during this process.
Dr. Kieran Egan: Our paths crossed even longer ago when I was first inspired by
your work to look more closely at imagination. Over the last decade you allowed
me to be intertwined into the world of the Imaginative Education Research
Group.
Dr. Michael Ling: I am so very thankful for all the impromptu, hallway
discussions that poked and prodded my understandings and perceptions. I love
that our media lives merged with anthropology and now education; you keep my
inner Seinfeld alive and well in my academic world.
Dr. Lynn Fels and Dr. David Jardine: I cannot thank you both enough for making
the culminating conversation about my thesis so meaningful and memorable.
Your words and commitment to the conversation will help me move this
starting piece forward/sideways/inward.
Dr. Vicki Kelly: My behind-the-scenes committee member—the one person who
always seemed to find me at my most vulnerable and always knew exactly what
to say to keep me going. I hope our lives and work find a way to weave into one
another.
vii
My new home provided by Mark and Kieran in the IERG office provided me with
life-long friends and colleagues who fostered my inquiry into educational
practice and drive to understand IE to new depths; while always keep me
smiling—much gratitude to Annabella Cant, Veronica Hotton , Stacey Makortoff,
Melanie Young and Tannis Calder—you are my Mischief-Makers in the most
loving way. I will miss being able to spin my chair around in IERG and see your
smiling, loving, thoughtful faces.
My gratitude to teachers and researchers
working with IE extends far beyond the walls of the IERG office; I will forever be
indebted to the passionate, thoughtful, inspirational teachers/researchers in
LUCID—thank you for allowing me to be part of your journeys. Your tenacity,
strength and love has helped me more than you‘ll ever know.
To Brian Gohkle and Elaine MacKee who have been gifts to understanding
Waldorf education and Steiner: I am forever grateful for the hours of
conversations, practices, and queries. To my extended Waldorf family: Thank
you Jen Dodds for daily updates on how to juggle life and work that kept me
going/laughing; to the parents who so thoughtfully helped with pick-up and
playdates for Tayme while I worked and to Stephanie for keeping me healthy
and focused. Thanks to Kathy Sherrell for the years of study-dates at various
campus around the Lower Mainland.
And of course, thanks to my Mom and Dad who helped me become the student I
am today, who reminded me that no matter what the journey entailed, I could
follow my dream of becoming an educator; and to my Babas who remain with
me daily and always remind me to find love and ingenuity in all that I do.
Dana, my love: Thank you for nurturing me in all the ways that have made it
possible to complete a dream of finishing my PhD.
You‘ve made raising a
daughter, finishing a PhD and starting a career all possible with your patience
and love.
And finally, thank you to my darling daughter Tayme, who has been my muse
for learning to stand still, finding wonder and mystery again in life and learning
to find balance… just like Mouse Woman.
viii
Table of Contents
APPROVAL ................................................................................................................................................. II
PARTIAL COPYRIGHT LICENCE............................................................................................................... III
ETHICS STATEMENT ............................................................................................................................... IV
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................................. V
DEDICATION ............................................................................................................................................ VI
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................................................... VII
TABLE OF CONTENTS .............................................................................................................................. IX
CHAPTER 1. WALK THIS WAY ........................................................................................... 1
KARMA CHAMELEON ................................................................................................................................ 1
TAINTED LOVE .......................................................................................................................................... 5
TAKE ON ME, TAKE ME ON .................................................................................................................... 12
HERE COMES THE RAIN AGAIN/ FALLING ON MY HEAD LIKE A MEMORY/ FALLING ON MY HEAD
LIKE A NEW EMOTION ........................................................................................................................... 19
EXPRESS YOURSELF ............................................................................................................................... 22
COURAGE… ............................................................................................................................................ 26
…COULDN’T COME AT A WORSE TIME.................................................................................................. 26
IF YOU DON’T KNOW ME BY NOW ......................................................................................................... 30
HOLD ME NOW, STAY WITH ME ............................................................................................................ 35
CHAPTER 2. WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE ............................................................ 38
LET THE WILD RUMPUS START ............................................................................................................. 38
THE FOREST GREW AND GREW ............................................................................................................ 41
THE WALLS BECAME THE WORLD ALL AROUND ................................................................................. 44
AN OCEAN TUMBLED BY… .................................................................................................................... 50
…WITH A PRIVATE BOAT FOR MAX...................................................................................................... 54
TAMED THEM WITH THE MAGIC TRICK ............................................................................................... 63
ROARING MY TERRIBLE ROAR AND GNASHING MY TERRIBLE TEETH................................................ 67
SAILING BACK THROUGH NIGHT AND DAY… ....................................................................................... 72
…AND IN AND OUT OF WEEKS, AND ALMOST OVER A YEAR ............................................................... 74
ix
CHAPTER 3. KNOWING IS HALF THE BATTLE ........................................................... 76
WAH-WAAAH-WAH-WAH .................................................................................................................... 76
WHAT’S UP, DOC? ................................................................................................................................. 80
HERE I COME TO SAVE THE DAY! ......................................................................................................... 89
GO-GO-GADGET .................................................................................................................................... 94
TRANSFORM AND ROLL OUT! .............................................................................................................100
GOTTA CATCH 'EM ALL! ......................................................................................................................105
CARE BEAR STARE...............................................................................................................................111
REBOOT ...............................................................................................................................................119
CHAPTER 4. DO… OR DO NOT. THERE IS NO TRY .................................................. 125
HELP ME, OBI-WAN KENOBI. YOU'RE MY ONLY HOPE....................................................................125
A JEDI’S STRENGTH FLOWS FROM THE FORCE..................................................................................133
MANY OF THE TRUTHS WE CLING TO DEPEND ON OUR POINT OF VIEW .........................................138
The media as agents of cultural decline .................................................................................................. 140
The media as popular art forms .................................................................................................................. 144
The media as aids to learning, disseminators of knowledge and experience ......................... 147
The media as agents of communication .................................................................................................. 148
NAMED MUST YOUR FEAR BE BEFORE BANISH IT YOU CAN .............................................................150
WEEK 1: PATIENCE YOU MUST HAVE MY YOUNG PADAWAN ..........................................................157
WEEK 2: WHEN YOU LOOK AT THE DARK SIDE, CAREFUL YOU MUST BE .......................................165
WEEK 3: YOU MUST FEEL THE FORCE AROUND YOU .......................................................................169
WEEK 4: TRULY WONDERFUL THE MIND OF A CHILD IS .................................................................172
WEEK 5: A JEDI MUST HAVE THE DEEPEST COMMITMENT ............................................................174
AFTER TUNE OUT WEEK: HONOUR LIFE BY LIVING ........................................................................178
YOU MUST UNLEARN WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED.............................................................................182
CHAPTER 5. THE REVERSE PEEPHOLE ...................................................................... 185
THE DEAL ............................................................................................................................................185
THE BARBER ........................................................................................................................................189
This woman is bending my mind into a pretzel ................................................................................... 190
Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason ..................................................... 192
x
I can't go to a bad movie by myself. What, am I gonna make sarcastic remarks to
strangers? .............................................................................................................................................................. 195
THE STRIKE .........................................................................................................................................203
Locating importance: ................................................................................................................................. 203
What is emotionally engaging about the subject?............................................................... 203
How can it evoke wonder? ..................................................................................................................... 203
Why should it matter to us? ................................................................................................................. 203
A Festivus for the rest of us ............................................................................................................................ 205
Finding binary opposites:........................................................................................................................ 205
What abstract and affective binary concepts best capture the wonder and
emotion of the topic? What are the opposing forces in your ―story‖? ................. 205
It's a Festivus miracle ....................................................................................................................................... 209
Organizing the content into a story form. ................................................................................ 209
The First Teaching Event ........................................................................................................................ 209
And now as Festivus rolls on ......................................................................................................................... 211
Finding the story: .......................................................................................................................................... 211
What‘s ―the story‖ on the topic? How can you shape the content to reveal its
emotional significance .............................................................................................................................. 211
THE PARKING GARAGE .......................................................................................................................214
No, no that's a Toyota ...................................................................................................................................... 216
You should always carry a pad and pen .................................................................................................. 218
Right here at the mall....................................................................................................................................... 219
THE NON-FAT YOGURT ......................................................................................................................221
May I suggest the possibility that you're faking? ................................................................................ 223
Well, the yogurt verdict is in.... FAT! .......................................................................................................... 223
THE LITTLE KICKS ..............................................................................................................................225
Half of show business is here ......................................................................................................................... 225
Conclusion: ......................................................................................................................................................... 227
How does the story end? How do we resolve the conflict set up between the
binary opposites? .......................................................................................................................................... 227
Evaluation: ......................................................................................................................................................... 227
How can one know whether the topic has been understood, its importance
grasped, its content learned?............................................................................................................... 227
xi
The zoom-ins, the framing. I was enchanted ......................................................................................... 227
Do you even know what this scene is about? ......................................................................................... 229
THE PITCH ...........................................................................................................................................230
I think we really got something here......................................................................................................... 230
Who says you gotta have a story? ............................................................................................................... 231
See, this should be a show. This is the show ........................................................................................... 231
Well, as I was saying, I would play myself............................................................................................... 232
THE PILOT ...........................................................................................................................................233
CHAPTER 6. BRINGING ORDER BACK TO THE WORLD ........................................ 235
PORCUPINE HUNTER ..........................................................................................................................235
THIS, OF COURSE, WAS MOUSE WOMAN ...........................................................................................239
YOU WILL SEE WHAT YOU WILL SEE ..................................................................................................242
FOR THINGS WERE STRANGELY SATISFYING .....................................................................................245
THE SMALL HAD VANQUISHED THE BIG .............................................................................................250
DO NOT SPIT INTO THE SEA ................................................................................................................252
TO STRENGTHEN SPIRIT POWER FOR THE JOURNEY ........................................................................257
SOMETIMES I THINK I’M A MUDDLEHEAD MYSELF ...........................................................................264
COPPER CANOEMAN ...........................................................................................................................269
THE MAGICAL HAT .............................................................................................................................274
TOWN OF THE BEAR PEOPLE .............................................................................................................278
THE VANISHED PRINCES ....................................................................................................................282
THE GOLDEN FEATHERS ....................................................................................................................286
First Feather: Imagination............................................................................................................................. 286
Second Feather: Theory and Practice ....................................................................................................... 286
Third Feather: Inner Work............................................................................................................................. 287
Fourth Feather: Living in the In-Between............................................................................................... 289
ONE PARTING GIFT OF WOOL .............................................................................................................290
REFERENCES .......................................................................................................................... 292
xii
Chapter 1. Walk This Way1
Karma chameleon2
Zack3 stares quizzically at me with his big blue eyes. Actually, each curl on his
head also seems to be staring at me in the same questioning manner—albeit
from all sorts of angles. He sits up straight, cross-legged and knee-to-knee with
his neighbours, like the 20 other grade three children in the large circle.
―Do you know where SFU is?‖ I ask.
Heads nod and shake around the circle.
―Wayyy up the mountain. That is where I go to school. Yes… I am STILL a
student.‖
Eyes widen in astonishment, smirks grow on small faces.
These smirks are something I can handle. It is the disapproving
ones from family and friends, often followed by the question, ―So,
when are you done?‖ that I dread.4
1. Aerosmith, ―Walk This Way,‖ Toys in the Attic (New York: Columbia Records, 1975); covered by
Run-D.N.C. on their album Raising Hell (New York: Profile/Arista Records, 1986).
2. Culture Club, ―Karma Chameleon,‖ Color by Numbers (London: Virgin Records, 1982). "The song
is about the terrible fear of alienation that people have, the fear of standing up for one thing.
It's about trying to suck up to everybody. Basically, if you aren't true, if you don't act like you
feel, then you get Karma-justice, that's nature's way of paying you back.‖ Boy George, cited by
Fred Bonson, The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits (New York: Billboard Books, 2003, 5th ed.).
3. Names are pseudonyms except in cases where peers, teachers or students, having had the
opportunity to read what I have written about them, have given permission to use their real
names.
4. Various styles denote various voices. This one represents my present voice looking back, or an
inner dialogue in the moment being recounted.
1
―Well, as Mrs. Comeau5 has told you, I am not only a student, but I am also a
media researcher. I have a big problem, though; I want to research kids‘ media
culture, but there aren‘t many kids your age on campus, so I have to head down
the mountain here to your school. Mrs. Comeau has very kindly let me spend
the next few months with you in your classroom in hopes that I can learn more
about kids‘ media culture. Is that OK?‖
Heads nod around the circle.
―And maybe, while you are teaching me, I can also teach you what I have
learned, from my university classes, about media from my university classes.‖
I didn‘t tell them (but I will tell you) that it wasn‘t only the university
classes that had taught me about media; being a child of the late
70s and early 80s had also schooled me well in media culture.6
Perhaps you grew up at a different time, or in a different way, so let
me paint a picture of my youth for you. Those days, so long ago,
were filled with stories narrated by giants, monsters in trash cans, a
stone-age family; small plastic blue men, strawberry-shortcakesmelling dolls, and babies from the cabbage patch were among my
regular playmates.
Later, and much to the chagrin of my parents, music began to take
center stage in my life and my musical tastes quickly moved past
Kenny Rogers and Boney M to glam rockers like Cinderella and
5. Jude Comeau, the grade 3 teacher I worked with for three years (2005-2008); see Chapter 5.
6. ―Pinar and Grumet (1976), among others, have suggested we revisit the dynamics of our
schooling and our practice in order to come to an informed and more conscious
understanding of the educational process. Their currere is an ever-energizing look at the past
to inform current and future practice. Van Maanen (1990) and Haggerson (2000) consider the
original text as the practical story of a lived experience to be examined for its multi-faceted
content. For me the look backward informs my professional life. Current understandings
allow fuller interpretations of earlier experiences. My limited reflections in no way reach the
bounds of the possible, but they are the beginning of a practice that can be perpetually reexamined in light of new consciousness.‖ Peter Hilton, ―Autobiography and Poetry‖ in
Pedagogies of the Imagination: Mythopoetic Curriculum in Educational Practice, edited by
Timothy Leonard & Peter Willis (Springer, 2008), 111. (Cited sources in bibliography.)
2
Motley Crue. Soon I was happily up to my heavily eye-lined eyes and
puffy, over-sprayed hair in the world of screaming rock.
Although my parents spent a lot of time rolling their eyes at my
choices of music, hair styles and the ever more numerous popculture artifacts in my room, they rarely stopped me from
embedding myself in these various worlds. And those worlds, in
turn, embedded themselves in me, permanently shaping my
language as well as the way I interpret experiences.
Is this unusual? I don‘t think so.
I am fairly certain that I am not the only one who hears Seinfeld
phrases (or other pop culture references) in my head on a daily
basis. And if you, the reader, have not experienced this
phenomenon, then I will have to apologize in advance for the
oddities of intertextuality that have found their way into the cracks
and crannies of every coming chapter.
So get your fingers ready to Wikipedia any unknown pop culture
references, and if you are my mediated kinfolk and already know
the references—then High 5!!
―Does anyone have any questions about…‖
Before I can finish my sentence, Zack‘s arm shoots up, his face scrunches
together, his body hunches forward, and in a very animated way, he asks:
―Why do you wear all black and have pink hair and that thing in your eyebrow?‖
I am shocked.
Jude, my amazing classroom colleague and mentor, looks mortified.
Some students roll their eyes; others hide their smirks in their hands.
3
I hesitantly say, “Well, that‘s a good question. I guess it‘s just my style. We all
have our own style and I guess this is mine.‖
That ends our exchange. But Zack‘s heartfelt inquisition is infectious. After class
while driving back up the mountain, I wonder: Was that OK? Did it satisfy the
genuine curiosity which seemed to exude from his entire body, not his mouth
alone?
Why DO I dress like this?
Did I frighten the children?
Should I change? Conform? Just be normal?
What is wrong with me? Why skulls, cross bones, and the stainless
steel in my face?
Kermit, undeniably the wisest of frogs, enters into this internal dialogue—OK,
OK, technically, I suppose, it‘s the puppeteer behind the frog who I heard say...
[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them.
They remember what you are.7
Hmm. What am I? What do I convey? Can the kids relate to me? Zack‘s question
is certainly not the only time the issue of how I manifest myself has come into
question. Korean job hunters forced me to take the bling out of my face before
they deemed me ‗respectable‘ enough to hire, and even my traditional Babas
(Ukrainian grandmother and great-grandmother), while still accepting me,
expressed concern about the ‗thing in my face‘.
In my version of media education, trust and authenticity are essential. I want
children to open up and be truthful about their media use. I don‘t want to be the
Soup Nazi8 of media education, dictating what students can or cannot do in
7. Jim Henson, It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider (New York: Hyperion,
2005).
8. The Seinfeld Scripts, ―The Soup Nazi‖ (Episode 115), accessed July 7, 2013,
http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheSoupNazi.htm.
4
their leisure time, shouting ―No TV for YOU!!‖ and ripping the remote control
out of their hands. I want us, the students and myself, to uncover the trickiness
and the taken-for-granted aspects of media, particularly advertising.
Zack‘s unexpected question led me to wonder:
Am I part of the curriculum I am teaching?
And if so, what does this mean for my research?
Tainted love9
By the time I met Zack and his peers, I was well versed in media research. In the
process of gaining my MA, I had built a neatly packaged research agenda
informed by—
—ahem, pardon me while I change my voice and posture, adjust my ascot tie
and get comfy in my well-stuffed armchair—10
[c]oncerns for verification, truth, and precision…something that
can be tested, packaged, imparted, and sent like bricks across the
country to build knowledge structures that are said to
accumulate.11
Verification—meant statistical significance.
Truth—meant objectively proven.
And precision—meant developing procedures that could be replicated from
place to place, classroom to classroom, child to child.
9. Ed Cobb, ―Tainted Love,‖ cover by Soft Cell (London: Some Bizarre, 1981). The song begins,
―Sometimes I feel I've got to/Run away I've got to/Get away…‖—words that connect with my
feelings of where I belong in the field. Wikipedia, ―Tainted Love,‖ accessed June 2, 2014,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tainted_Love; song lyrics accessed June 2, 2014,
http://www.lyricsondemand.com/onehitwonders/taintedlovelyrics.html.
10. When I use terms like these, I imagine myself shifting into the role of Alistair Cookie, Cookie
Monster's alter-ego when hosting "Monsterpiece Theater" on Sesame Street.
11. Elliot Eisner, ―The Promise and Perils of Alternative Forms of Data Representation,‖
Educational Researcher 26 no. 4 (1997): 7.
5
All this added up to the idea that the only way to do good research is by
conducting it in a certain way. This paint-by-numbers style formula actually
made my job as a researcher easy! I am the researcher and they are the
researched and the relationship between ‗us‘ is not of interest.
Indeed, I had learned that good researchers should be as invisible as humanly
possible. Throughout the years, so many of my professors had spent a great
deal of time training me to defer in my writing to those with more experience;
often denoted by their credentials. In fact, I was instructed by most to never, I
mean never, use I in an academic paper. It seemed that the researcher was of
little consequence to the process of research.
Despite the disregard for the researcher that I had been taught, I couldn‘t shake
Zack‘s question. For him, who and what I, the researcher, am obviously
mattered.
Why was this intuitive conviction about who and what I am in the process of
research something that mattered so much?
Enough!!! This was neither the time nor the place to be a rebel. I would be
labeled a misfit—and I knew from past Christmases, thanks to Rudolph the RedNosed Reindeer and his friends (remember the jolly prospector and scary
Abominable monster?), that there is just one place where misfits end up: on a
lonely island, not on the podium being hooded with a funky, floppy PhD hat.12
Time to bite my tongue, hold my breath, and just go with the flow.
I‘d spent my whole life practising for this, after all. So why try anything new
now?
12. In the classic Christmas TV show, Rudolph leaves home after being disowned by his family.
Travelling wIth Yukon Cornelius, a joyful silver and gold prospector, and a Yeti-like monster,
he unexpectedly bumps into The Island of Misfit Toys—a place where unwanted playthings
with cosmetic or physical flaws go to live until homes can be found for them. Wikipedia,
―Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (TV special),‖ accessed July 7, 2013,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_the_Red-Nosed_Reindeer_(TV_special).
6
Dad and I were inseparable buddies till I started school—when I began to make
friends of my own size. Before that, I was his shadow, which meant that when
he went duck hunting, I went duck hunting.
Mom packed me a peanut butter and Saskatoon berry jelly sandwich, cut it in
half, stacked them neatly to make them fit into my little red plastic lunch box
and sent me off with Dad in the big red pick-up truck with its fancy 70‘s
wooden paneling. Being that I lived about as far north in Edmonton as possible,
it didn‘t take long before we hit wilderness and I could crack open my little red
lunch box and dive into my sandwich.
First, however, we needed to find ‗our spot‘. We wandered through the kneehigh grass until the ground softened and we were near the lake.
I was happy to be on an adventure.
I was happy to be with Dad.
I was happy when we heard distant quacking coming closer to us. Yahoo, ducks!
But before I could see the flecks of their green heads or hear the flapping of
their wings, Dad instructed me to ―Get down, so they don‘t see us‖—although I
only heard GET DOWN and like the good, obedient little girl I was, I hit the
dirt—literally flat down, little button nose buried, arms and legs spread out like
an X, breath held as to not make a sound.
Dad missed his shot. He was distracted and laughing at me. My dirt-dusted
face, eyes just covered by fringe bangs—that never lay down because of
stubborn cowlicks—looked up at him in dismay. Why was he laughing? I was
TOLD to not be seen or heard, and I took it seriously.
This tactic of being still and blending in would come in handy later on, when I
had started school.
7
Sitting at the long table in Grade 2, I am getting more and more
anxious as the book approaches. Each reader is to read one small
paragraph and hand over the book.
Oh, oh, here it comes. I tentatively grab the book from Jannie, my
best friend, and begin reading—or stuttering, rather, over words.
There is some mumbling and a few chuckles from both my Grade 2
peers as well as the Grade 3s. Worst of all though is when the older
kids begin to say the words for me, even before I‘ve tried them out
myself—I guess they anticipated I would have problems.
I want to hit the dirt and hide.
I remember that moment vividly; as I passed the book, I silently vowed to NEVER
read aloud again. Never!
For the next four years my vow remained intact. I did exactly what the teachers
said; I never fussed or asked questions. I spent a great deal of time helping and
volunteering for anything in hopes this would excuse me from reading aloud;
there was no way I was going to be humiliated again. My strategy worked
beautifully, until my nosy Grade 6 teacher somehow saw through my good-girl
disguise and realized my reading level had not progressed past that bitter Grade
2 reading session.
I had been caught, finally; but in the meantime I had become an expert in
staying low, out of sight, and as quiet as a mouse—what I thought a ‗good
student‘ was meant to be.
That good-student persona transferred well into the research arena. I entered
Jude‘s class with a plan; a very simple, clean, quiet plan which followed those
well-drilled rules about good research. These third grade children had never
been exposed to any discussion of media in their classes before, so I would
create a program, teach it, capture and then analyze the students‘ responses.
This would give me the precious ‗before and after data‘ I would need to justify
and validate my curriculum material. To gather the data, I would, of course,
8
incorporate multiple interviews, focus groups, surveys, pre and post-tests—you
know, the typical stuff, nothing fancy—and voilà, research done!
Except I hadn‘t reckoned on Zack, and all the other Zacks I would face. Although
I had spent a great deal of time looking at mountains of research of media
studies and media education research, no one seemed to highlight the difficulty
of conducting interviews and focus groups with young kids. It was not only
difficult (OK, impossible) to get into their heads, it was even more difficult to
assess what parts of my conversations with them came out of their desire to
please me as the teacher/researcher and what parts were their own unfiltered
thoughts and feelings. Throwing adults into the conversational mix of kids and
their media use resulted in a strange brew of brutal honest as well as adultfriendly responses—and often it was difficult to unravel which was which.
This strange concoction of questions of face jewelry, symbolic violence, and
media meant the classroom was not like the neat, nicely boxed ‗realities‘ seen in
research journals. It was much more messy, complex, dynamic and full of
surprises, which meant each day the tension between my planned research
agenda and the actual research widened into a great chasm and I, like Elastigirl,
was stretched to the max trying to hold onto each side.13
Gradually, I began to see that the original plan needed to vastly change. It was
not just a ‗before and after‘ project anymore. It had morphed into something
bigger, yet smaller. Bigger, in that I was now seeing the magnitude of the
complexities of classroom teaching. My project was no longer a simple act of
bringing content into the classroom and transmitting it to the children; it was
much, much larger and more intricate than I had expected; intricate in ways that
involved me as well. Yet, the project was getting smaller at the same time.
Smaller in that I was having to let go of old ideals of replicability and objective
truth. Maybe my grand scheme wasn‘t to create a massive boxed program, but
to explore what was happening in the little microcosm of Jude‘s classroom. This
13. Elastigirl, the superheroine mother in Disney/Pixar‘s animated movie The Incredibles (2004),
―can stretch any part of her body to great lengths, and mold it into several shapes and sizes.‖
The Disney Wiki, ―Helen Parr,‖ accessed July 7, 2013, http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Helen_Parr.
9
meant, whatever I was discovering during the research phase would not look the
same for another researcher/teacher, or another class, even if the content; we
decoded it in our own way.14
This Lewis Carroll-like morphing of the project was provoked and illustrated by
discussions with Jude, including the description of a few days in a typical week
that she provided for me one day…
14. Stuart Hall famously shifted the focus of audience research with his examination of encoding
and decoding—the notion that audience are actively participating in the understanding of
media messages; e.g. Stuart Hall, "Encoding/Decoding," in Media Studies: A Reader (2nd ed.),
edited by Paul Morris and Sue Thornton (Washington Square, NK: University Press, 2000), 5161. I suggest that curriculum content can be understood in a similar way—which may be part
of why boxed programs and the search for replicable results often lead to disappointment.
10
Hi there friend!
Read your email and chuckled. This has to be one of the craziest weeks for
us!!!!!! We have some things we HAVE to complete by Friday at 3:00 and I‘m
concerned we won‘t fit it all in!!!
Wed.
9:00-9:15
9:15-10:30
RECESS
10:45-11:15
11:15-12:00
NOON (for me
1:00-1:30
1:30-2:30
2:30-3:00
STAFF MTG.
Handwriting
Special Presentation for the school
Self Report for Report Cards
Music
a Staff Committee Mtg.)
Spelling
Math plus a group of Gr. 5s in to survey us
P.E. (practicing our dance for the Festival)
Thurs.
9:00-10:20
Monthly Assembly
RECESS
10:45-11:15
Choir Practice for Primary Days of Music
11:15-12:00
Math
NOON (Special Luncheon)
1:00-2:30
Primary Days of Music with visiting schools
2:30-3:00
Library/Planners
*Issue report cards**
Fri.
9:00-9:15
9:15-9:40
9:40-10:30
RECESS
10:45-11:00
11:00-12:00
NOON
1:00-2:00
2:00-2:15
2:15-3:00
P H E W!!!!!!!
Handwriting
Weekly Spelling Test
Reading Activity
Planners
Special Assembly: Retirement
Art (we think!) and special treat of ice cream sundaes
Clean up for Spring Break
As you see it must not work to sew the books this week. My proposal is to do this
the Monday OR Tuesday afternoon of the week we return; the dates are March 20
and 21st. How does that fit in your schedule? We can then plan for the next lesson
to be Thursday afternoon??? This is the lesson prepping them for the weekend
diary.
Let me know what you think.
jude
11
The chaos of life in school and the classroom was baffling but exhilarating. Any
form of writing about it would be quite sanitized compared to the lived
experience. Bit by bit, I began to grapple with what this might mean for my
research, and my thesis.
Take on me, take me on15
You see, I never really felt I had a home in academia. I had ventured far and
wide into various disciplines, pursuing my interest in media and children‘s
culture, ending up with an odd mixture of anthropology, linguistics, media
studies, and now curriculum development. Although I loved every minute of this
discipline hopping, it did leave me feeling alone and a bit of a foreigner in the
various fields. I could pick up a bit of the local lingo and culture, but I wasn‘t a
native ______ (fill in the blank… anthropologist, linguist, media specialist). This
field-hopping meant that I didn‘t have a solid background in one academic
arena…too many interests leaving me scattered and lost.
Stand still.
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you
Are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
15. A-ha, ―Take on Me,‖ Hunting High and Low (Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 1985); song lyrics
accessed July 7, 2013, http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/aha/takeonme.html.
12
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still.
The forest knows
Where you are.
You must let it find you.16
I am confused. Is he saying that the raven and the wren will talk to
us if we just learn to listen?
I‘ve sat in woods before. This activity only encouraged me to make
lists of ‗things to do‘ in my head or ‗things I‘d rather be doing than
sitting on this stump and enjoying nature‘. Not much enjoyment
when I hate bugs and suffer from arctophobia—a fear of bears. I
am much happier sitting in classrooms; but obviously not everyone
sees it my way.
Truly, what does he mean by stand still? Is it a physical, mental, or
spiritual reference, or maybe even a metaphor for something
completely unrelated to standing in a forest looking at raven and
wrens?
If I was ONLY a researcher (not a teacher wanting to do research, or maybe a
researcher wanting to teach—it was all very blurred) then maybe I could stand
STILL.
I needed/wanted to be both. I had to find a way to observe the classroom
(research field) and take notes, but also be the main attraction—it was, after all,
my project and I had to teach it. Researchers can surely stand still, like a fly-onthe-wall, and this was perfectly fine. But I couldn‘t imagine what would happen
if the teacher stood still in order to also become the researcher—I wasn‘t The
16. David Wagoner, ―Lost,‖ Collected Poems 1956-1976 (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press,
1976).
13
Great Gazoo17, I couldn‘t freeze frame the classroom to run to the back and take
notes; I was forced to juggle students, curriculum, teaching, as well as mental
note-taking of critical incidents.
My mind was spinning, who the hell has time to stand STILL?? Was it possible to
be fully present in both worlds?
If, indeed, I have to stand still, and learning to listen is to be my
goal, then I need a guide. Perhaps a field, a methodology, a person,
a group of people? Who can help me be less lost?
With increasing clarity, I knew I had to leave the mainland, and search for an
island of misfit researchers who had the stamina and courage to go against the
tide of ‗clear instructions‘ that didn‘t seem to fit my situation anymore. An
island of researchers who recognized the messiness of research/teaching and
might have also tackled questions similar to those bubbling up from Zack‘s
inquisition, about who I am in the research. And who might have asked, isn‘t it
more authentic to note our presence than try to anticipate what is happening in
the hearts and minds of those we research?
As I struggled to find a space, I was learning to stand still, slow down, and let
the shape of the research change from its rigid structure to one of more fluidity,
allowing for listening to happen. Meanwhile, grad school continued to tell me to
get my ass in gear and ‗get ‗er done‘. This tension was with me at every move;
my understanding shifted with every change in pace.
I needed a bit more patience.
The institution needed patience.
17. The alien from The Flintstones who could ‗freeze-frame‘ situations to help Fred and Barney out
of the difficult fixes they often found themselves in.
14
All we need is just a little patience…
…need some patience, yeah
could use some patience, yeah
gotta have some patience, yeah
all it takes is patience,
just a little patience
is all you need18
According to Eliot Eisner, patience and persistence can pay off.
In the early seventies, when I turned to the arts and humanities as
sources of research method and my students and I started to do
research using educational connoisseurship and educational
criticism, we were expected by most of my colleagues to write
extensive justification for so personal an approach. Times have
changed—although I must confess there are still some faculty
holdouts. The difference is that while in earlier times I could not
ignore them, today I can. The climate has changed.19
Similarly, Denzin and Lincoln (authors that would pop up every time I searched
for qualitative research methods) assured me that things had actually turned in
the field. According to them, things had changed so much so that we‘d hit a
seventh or even eighth significant shift/movement. This was both surprising
and heart-warming. They define the Seventh Movement as: ―messy, uncertain,
multi-voiced texts, cultural criticism...more flexible forms of fieldwork, analysis
and intertextual representation‖20—all of which seemed to fit nicely with my
evolving thoughts about classroom research. It actually provided me with a
glimmer of hope that I was not a total misfit and that there might be a home out
there that was a bit less well kept, allowing for a bit of chaos and complexity—a
home I could understand.
18. Guns N‘ Roses, ―Patience,‖ G N‘ R Lies (London: Geffen Records, 1988); song lyrics accessed
July 13, 2013, http://www.metrolyrics.com/patience-lyrics-guns-n-roses.html.
19. Eisner, ―The Promise and Perils,‖ 5.
20. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, ―Introduction: The Discipline and Practice of
Qualitative Research,‖ The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3rd ed. (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage, 2005), 79.
15
Yet a path leading from these general descriptions to a methodology I felt
comfortable with was far from easy to find. Over thirty years since I was eating
dirt on the banks of a northern Alberta lake, and since the arts and humanities
began to turn towards qualitative research, I still felt the pressure of the
positivist research agendas of the past. To deal with this pestering tension I
began to delve away like a little gnome, pointy hat and all, and slowly gained a
collection of quotes and clues to justify my inkling that nice neat boxes were
quite inadequate when it came to researching and capturing the experiences of
children.
One such clue came from Tom Barone, in his remark that ―researchers had
steadily recovered their human voices.‖21
Had it been lost? Had I adopted a non-human voice?
Initial observations at PC-Bangs indicated that this computer using
environment had become male-dominated with few female users
present at any given time of day. I found that most of the clientele
seemed to be university aged, with some middle school and high
school students and few elementary students. The media audit
results in Table 8 (see Appendix 9) indicated that 54% of
elementary, 84% of middle school, 76% of high school and 97% of
university students had recently visited a PC-Bang. 22
Yikes! It looks like I not only lost my human voice, I adopted a robotic one. The
118 pages of my Master‘s thesis seem to miss the reality of my time in Korea.
They don‘t capture the heart-pumping moments as I skulked around the PCBangs, driven by a ‗need‘ to record the game genre and approximate age of
players. There is no mention of the super-stealth powers I gained so I would
not disturb the players—I did, after all, stand out, being a foreign woman in a
very male-dominated Korean gaming space. Nope, didn‘t get a chance to tell
that side of the story.
21. Tom Barone, Aesthetics, Politics and Educational Inquiry (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 318.
22. Kymberley R. Stewart, Informatization of a Nation: A Case Study of South Korea‘s Computer
Gaming and PC-Bang Culture, MA thesis, Simon Fraser University (Ann Arbor: ProQuest/UMI,
2004; Publication No. MR03635), 69.
16
And the robot continues... let‘s see, 54% of elementary students used the PCBang—lovely stat but what does it mean? Does it tell the story of the Grade 2
student walking into a dark PC-Bang on a sunny Sunday afternoon with his fouryear-old brother? Can the reader envision this little boy walking up to the desk
and reaching way up to put his 1000 won on the counter? The teen behind the
counter peers down and directs the little ones to computer number five. Does it
tell us how the older brother had to boost his little brother onto the huge
computer chair, carefully aiming him into the center as the chair gently swings
from side to side? Does it embody the care he took to initiate his baby bro into
the StarCraft world where they most likely played against young male university
students needing a break from studying? No, my MA thesis only tells you that
over half of the elementary students surveyed went to the PC-Bang—well, yahoo
for statistics!
A non-human voice was indeed achieved; a writing style that had taken me years
to master. Actually, it was more than just a style of writing, it was an adoption
of lexicon and structure—a tone—a persona. It was a way of speaking that
never found a place in my day-to-day life; it only existed at times when I needed
to fit into the academic world. But now that I was teaching in the outside world,
this divide between academic and non-academic worlds caused me angst; it
didn‘t suit me well.
And perhaps it never did. This could help explain why my Master‘s thesis, in all
its mechanistic glory, dripping with the sweat and tears of a year of fieldwork
overseas and two years of hacking away at the keyboard, sits and collects dust
on the library shelf. I haven‘t even been able to unbind/dissect it enough to
extract chunks to send to journals for a wider audience. The words seem to be
stuck in the thesis format—so stuck that I‘d need an exorcist to set them free
for a wider audience. The only one to read them (outside of the hardened
academics on my committee) was my 98-year-old Baba.
The fact that no one else read my thesis, no other relatives or friends, saddens
me. The life-changing experiences of living overseas with my family and
17
investigating a new phenomenon in children‘s media culture had been buried in
burgeoning boxes and proliferating percentages.
And here is the scary part…
…my MA thesis was considered GOOD by the normal standards of thesis
writing!
Digging further into the field of quantitative research, I discovered others
shared my sentiments:
Wait a minute. Is this the way I want to tell the story? In an
abstract mode, where I describe macro-structural trends and speak
as omniscient narrator in the third person voice for and about
postmodernist and poststructuralist writers, my words
legitimatized by the authority of citations? This vocabulary, so
familiar and comfortable to scholars, is inaccessible to readers
outside the academy. Most people do not speak this way. Even as
a member of this tribe, I sometimes feel alienated by this way of
talking.23
I read this passage again and again, letting the word alienated linger.
I tried to fit in and not stand out.
Be creative, but not too creative.
Be daring, but not too daring.
Essentially, I tried to play their game.
Isn‘t that what I‘ve been told my whole life? Be quiet, obey the
rules—all in hopes of reducing alienation.
This time, I vowed, it would be different. I would use my stubbornness, which
kept me silent for so long in school, to embrace the island of misfits. I would
attempt, with all my might, to leave behind the mechanistic voice in order to
23. Carolyn Ellis. ―Evocative Autoethnography: Writing Emotionally About Our Lives,‖ in
Representation and the Text: Re-Framing the Narrative Voice, edited by William G. Tierney and
Yvonna S. Lincoln (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 115.
18
embrace the voices and relationships in the kayaks, canoes, buses, planes, feast
halls, lecture halls and classrooms where my research took place. I knew in my
heart that these connections, changes, transformations, chances to be enraged
and enlightened, are essential to who I am as a researcher, teacher and writer.
I want to become a speaker, a storyteller.
I want to recapture a human voice, and, at the same time, with that
humanity I want my research—my story— to remain valid and
trusted in the field of qualitative methodologies.
Ready or not — here I come...
Here comes the rain again/ Falling on my head like a
memory/ Falling on my head like a new emotion24
The rain pours down as I hop, not-so-gracefully, over the puddles. Weighted
down by a backpack full of books and a laptop, I quickly duck under the canopy
and pull open the glass doors. A friendly face greets me as soon as I step onto
the soggy welcome mat, ―Hi Kym! Doing more writing today?‖
―Yes‖ I say sheepishly; seems like I‘ve been saying Yes forever now.
We chat briefly about the kids and I graciously accept a warm cup of matcha
latte with both hands, make my way to my spot (a barstool and table looking
out on the busy street), and unpack my gear. The music is happily unfamiliar
and soothing. More regular customers pop in, chat briefly, and hustle out to join
the constant flow of traffic outside.
I, however, sit, type, and stare.
And sit, type and stare some more.
24. Eurythmics, ―Here Comes the Rain Again,‖ Touch (London/New York: RCA, 1984); song lyrics
accessed July 7, 2013,
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/eurythmics/herecomestherainagain.html.
19
There is such frenzy around me; such a hurried state. Yet I am, for these few
brief mornings, excused from that life.
My eyes scan the sidewalk—suit-clad men, women in yoga pants, rosy-cheeked
children, noisy teens, and soggy dogs.
My eyes scan the road—blurred speedy vehicles, fountains of water, splashing
wipers, the movement outside my window onto the world blurs together under
my focus-less gaze. That is, until my eyes hone in on the word ‗Freedom‘ which
is scrawled across a nearby window. Between whizzing cars and bustling
pedestrians I am able to read: ―I know about one freedom and that is the
freedom of the mind‖ (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry).
I read the words over and over and let the resonant melody of the phrase wash
over me. It suddenly dawns on me— I am free.
Free to sit, read, write, and think.
I am in a very privileged position, maybe the most privileged position I will find
myself in for many years to come. I have the financial and personal freedom to
sit here on a rainy day and gaze at life around me. Oddly enough, this freedom
seems too often manifest itself as staring intently, yet softly.
This strangeness I exhibit, of sitting and staring outside or at my latte cup,
reminds me of a beloved Seinfeld episode.25
25. The Seinfeld Scripts, ―The Butter Shave‖ (Episode 157), accessed May 16, 2014,
http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheButterShave.htm.
20
Elaine and her on-again-off-again mechanic boyfriend, Puddy, are heading home
to New York after a disastrous trip to Europe. They have just finished making up
after a fight.
They kiss.
Smile.
And adjust themselves in their airplane seats.
Elaine starts reading while Puddy stares off, doe-eyed, into space.
Elaine: Do you want something to read?
Puddy: Nah.
Elaine: Well, are you going to take a nap or—
Puddy: Nah.
Elaine: You're just going to sit there staring at the back of a seat???!!
Puddy: Yeah.
Elaine tries to return to her reading, but can‘t quite comprehend his decision to sit
idly. She becomes infuriated with his ‗insane‘ actions and breaks-up with him in
the most dramatic fashion, right then and there.
I often wonder if the time I spend in contemplation, or the time spent trying to
find new words to describe my research, when I am staring outside or at my
latte cup, seem strange to others; do they see me as a Puddy? Am I a slacker in
our hustle-bustle world; am I the one who is in need of picking up the pace,
doing something active, engaging in the drive for the bigger, better, faster,
brighter, louder? Do I seem as free as I feel I am during these times of deep
contemplation?
Why do I sometimes feel guilty for engaging in a Puddy moment? Do people
feel pity for my Puddy-style existence?
I don‘t feel like a slacker. Thinking is hard work. And even when I stare at the
blank screen, people shouldn‘t feel pity for my seemingly lonely existence. I am
far from being alone. I know this.
21
Express yourself26
Informed by my desire to do something vastly different from what I had been
doing, my general strategy of literature research involved the following steps:
1) find the biggest book possible from the university library (this usually means
it is the most trusted, right?); 2) flip to the table of contents and/or through the
pages and find the wackiest title or phrase; and voilà—you‘ve found the perfect
place to start (if you are me that is).
Pursuing this strategy led me, eventually, to this particular quote:
During this time, life writing and auto/biography, although in
many places still the ‗bastard‘ child of academe (Weinberg, 2008),
―...have become more widespread as areas of theory and practice
in a variety of academic fields as well as in popular literature and
media‖ (Jolly, 2001; Kadar, Warley, Perreault, & Egan, 2005).27
Yup, you heard it—bastard child of academe! This most definitely caught my
attention. I decided I needed to follow up…
As a method, autoethnography combines characteristics of
autobiography and ethnography. When writing an autobiography,
an author retroactively and selectively writes about past
experiences. Usually, the author does not live through these
experiences solely to make them part of a published document;
rather, these experiences are assembled using hindsight (Bruner,
1993; Denzin, 1989, Freeman, 2004). In writing, the author also
may interview others as well as consult with texts like
26. Madonna, ―Express Yourself,‖ Like a Prayer (Burbank, CA: Sire/Warner Brothers, 1989); song
lyrics accessed July 7, 2013. http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/madonna/expressyourself.html.
27. Steve Weinberg, ―Biography, the Bastard Child of Academe,‖ The Chronicle Review, May, 9
2008, http://chronicle.com/article/Biography-the-Bastard-Child/9467; Margaretta Jolly,
Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms, (London: Fitzroy
Dearborn, 2001; Marlene Kadar, Linda Warley, Jeanne Perreault and Susanna Egan, Tracing the
Autobiographical (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2005); all quoted in Erika
Hasebe-Ludt, Cynthia M. Chambers, and Carl Leggo, eds., Life Writing and Literary Métissage
as an Ethos of Our Times (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 3.
22
photographs, journals, and recordings to help with recall (Delany,
2004; Didion, 2005; Goodall, 2006; Herrmann, 2005).28
In such passages, I found hope and courage that there could be space for the ‗I‘
that so desperately wanted to find its way into the written portion of my
research. Sure, I had lived/existed in my research before. I was the one in
Korea, I did the observations, it was my voice that the reader heard. But it was
robotized/sanitized. I wanted the messiness and chaos of research to show
through.
What is the point of autoethnography? In short, autoethnography
can be understood as a self-reflexive exploration of performed
selfhood that employs the self as exemplar in order to emphasise
embodiment, experiential understanding, participatory ways of
knowing, sensuous engagement and intimate encounter (Bochner
and Ellis, 2001).29
Ideas of self-reflexivity and the exploration of selfhood made perfect sense to
me, since I couldn‘t shake the feeling that no matter how close I stood against
the wall of the classroom, or how tightly I scrunched down in my seat at the
back of the class, I was still completely ‗in‘ the field.
Yet the blurring of boundaries in this self-reflexive research doesn‘t come
easily.30 I wanted to re-read and re-write fairy tales—I wanted to see/hear/feel
28. Jerome Bruner, ―The autobiographical process‖ in The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions
of Self-Representation, edited by Robert Folkenflik (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press,1993), 38-56; Norman K. Denzin, Interpretive Biography (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989);
Mark Freeman, ―Data Are Everywhere: Narrative Criticism in the Literature of Experience,‖ in
Narrative Analysis: Studying the Development of Individuals in Society, edited by Colette
Daiute and Cynthia Lightfoot (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004), 63-81; Samuel R. Delany, The
Motion of Light in Water (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Joan Didion, The
Year of Magical Thinking (New York: A.A. Knopf, 2005); Bud H.L. Goodall, A Need to Know: The
Clandestine History of a CIA Family (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2006); Andrew F.
Herrmann, ―My Father's Ghost: Interrogating Family Photos,‖ Journal of Loss and Trauma, 10,
no. 4 (2005): 337-346; all quoted in Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams and Arthur P. Bochner,
"Autoethnography: An Overview," Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative
Social Research [Online], 12 no. 1 (2010): 5, http://www.qualitativeresearch.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095.
29. Arthur P. Bochner and Carolyn Ellis, Ethnographically Speaking: Autoethnography, Literature
and Aesthetics (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2001), quoted in Nicholas Salazr-Sutil, ―Carnival
Post-Phenomenology: Mind the Hump,‖ Anthropology Matters Journal, 10 no. 2 (2008): 2,
http://www.anthropologymatters.com/index.php/anth_matters/article/view/34/61.
30. Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner, ―Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity:
Researcher as Subject,‖ in Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and
Yvonna S. Lincoln, (Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage, 2000), 733-768.
23
the tensions, not just the happy endings. I wanted a voiceover giving me insight
into the characters‘ true lives, behind the glitter and gold.
An autoethnographer must learn to move their/our gaze back and
forth—seeing the experiences now from a ―wide-angle lens,
focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of the personal
experience,‖ and then transitioning to an inward gaze, ―exposing a
vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract
and resist cultural interpretations."31
This back-and-forth-ness meant that once the data was collected and massaged
into story form, it was somewhat static and thus could be interpreted,
reinterpreted and messed with. This re-engaging with situations/events meant
a morphing and changing of my perspective. But it needed my patience to do
this; I needed time to let it live and linger with me before the complexity
revealed itself. This is where it all gets a bit tricky—I could analyze a story, then
I could analyze the analysis of the story, then… on and on... you get the point,
right?
Another important back-and-forth tension exists between the task of telling and
showing:
Autobiographers can make texts aesthetic and evocative by using
techniques of "showing" (Adams, 2006; Lamott, 1994), which are
designed to bring "readers into the scene"—particularly into
thoughts, emotions, and actions (Ellis, 2004, p.142)… "Telling" is a
writing strategy that works with "showing" in that it provides
readers some distance from the events described so that they
might think about the events in a more abstract way.32
I found, in fact, that I had yet to master the art of when to shut the hell up. In all
my work up until the PhD, I had been driven by the need for bigger, better,
faster numbers/data/programs. This way of being a researcher rarely entailed
slowing down and reflecting back/under/over/around… it was just a fast31. Ibid., 739.
32. Tony E. Adams, ―Seeking Father: Relationally Reframing a Troubled Love Story,‖ Qualitative
Inquiry 12, no. 4, (2006), 704-723; Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and
Life (New York: Anchor, 1994); Carolyn Ellis, The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about
Autoethnography (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004), 142; all quoted in Ellis, Adams and
Bochner, ―Autoethnography: An Overview,‖ 11.
24
forward thrust at break-neck speed. Now, however, I began to appreciate this
process of slowing down and re-engaging with text (beyond a spell check). With
this came the ability to make more connections, see more ah-hah moments,
unpack more layers, and experience new connections with each rendition or
remembering exercise—quite the novelty.
It seemed, in fact, that this practice of ebbing and flowing could accommodate
new questions in the research: questions of ―identity and self-hood, of voice and
authority, and of cultural displacement and exile.‖33 More than a self-analysis
exercise, it could offer a more holistic and, dare I say, truthful research
method—truthful in its capacity to acknowledge and embody messiness and
complexity. Yet I did not find it an altogether comfortable approach. I
wondered, for instance, whether privileging my own voice would mean I was
drowning out others. Or, conversely, whether marrying the first Prince
Charming among research methodologies, the one that seemed to fit with my
dreams, would still lead me to lose my own voice—since I would still have to
sculpt my writing to fit their template, even if the template now accepted ―I‖.
Marshall McLuhan, one of my intellectual heroes, warned us that adopting a
theory would directly alter the questions we ask, the analysis we find, the
results we write. He endorsed, like Ferris Bueller, a desire to live free of the
boundedness of -isms.
I did have a test today. That wasn't bullshit. It's on European socialism. I mean, really,
what's the point? I'm not European, I don't plan on being European, so who gives a crap if
they're socialist? They could be fascist anarchists - that still wouldn't change the fact that
I don't own a car. Not that I condone fascism, or any ism for that matter. Isms in my
opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an ism—he should believe in himself.
I quote John Lennon: "I don't believe in the Beatles—I just believe in me." A good point
there. Of course, he was the Walrus. I could be the Walrus—I'd still have to bum rides off
of people.34
Bumming rides off of people means I don‘t have to commit to one -ism or
-ography. Is this what I am looking for? Do I have a voice? Can I find a voice?
33. Deborah Reed-Danahay, Auto/ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social (Oxford: Berg,
1997), 3.
34. John Hughes, Ferris Bueller‘s Day Off (Paramount Pictures, 1986).
25
Courage…35
My Taekwondo instructor yells at me, ―Kihap!‖
―What?‖
―Kihap—yell from the inner part of your body to create strength‖.
Yah, right, this dude really doesn‘t know me. I don‘t yell. I don‘t
make a scene. Kicking in silence is good enough. My kicks without a
yell are as strong as they are going to get!
―Do it! Kick, and exhale a sound that comes from your gut. This will give you
strength in your kick! Kick! Exhale! Yell! Kym, your kicks are weak.‖
―AI!”
…couldn’t come at a worse time36
Wrestling with my experiences, with the data I was collecting in Jude‘s class, I
seemed (at various times) to have the courage to write a story, to use my own
voice, to be vulnerable and explore playfulness in writing with some assurance
that it would still be considered research/academic text. These were moments
when I released and just typed as I would talk, or typed as I would expect a
storyteller would type. Times when I felt I could give away a piece of me, my
secrets, my lived experiences.
He said shut up37
35. The Tragically Hip, ―Courage (for Hugh McLennan),‖ Fully Completely (London: MCA, 1992);
song lyrics accessed May 1, 2013, http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Courage-lyricsTragically-Hip/64CC816F84A3D49948256C870021C362.
36. Ibid.
37. Til‘ Tuesday, ―Voices Carry,‖ Voices Carry (New York: Epic Records, 1985); song lyrics accessed
August 8, 2013, http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/tiltuesday/voicescarry.html. (Also subsequent
quoted lines.)
26
And then something would pull me back. I would hear a voice telling me that
this way of writing isn‘t valid, verifiable, credible—this isn‘t how a researcher
should write. AND this definitely isn‘t the way a PhD thesis should be written.
This is NOT academic. I would feel stupid for trying to use my voice. Feel like I
did in kindergarten when I forgot to bring a Show and Tell item, but didn‘t want
to tell anyone. I sheepishly walked to the back and rummage through my
backpack pretending to look for something, then say, oh I must have left it at
home. The voice tells me I am a fraud, pretending to have something I don‘t.
I wish he would let me talk
But, my old way of writing didn‘t seem to work anymore. I couldn‘t just cut and
paste from course papers which was seemingly common practice in grad school.
The papers didn‘t have a human voice. The words used to describe the events
in more ‗academic‘ third-person terms didn‘t accommodate the richness of my
experiences in the classroom, couldn‘t expose the connections and growing
relationships that had now become the central point of my thesis. If I was
forced to revert back to the old ways, I could envision that every stroke of the
keyboard would sound a death knell for the lived experiences I had in the
classroom. I had vowed against doing that.
He said shut up
Who was telling me this? Who was telling me to shut up? Was it the
quantitative researchers who had been held in such high esteem for so long? I
didn‘t know. But what I did seem to know was who it wasn‘t—it wasn‘t the new
authors I was reading. These authors wore such brave faces, and would not
dismiss my attempts at finding a new voice! Was it other grad students or profs
who had gone the more traditional route? Did I care more about what they were
saying than I did about my experiences in the classroom? I had the backing of
my committee with their endless amounts of patience, guidance and support,
and a little push now and then, to follow my heart and continue to write in a
way that felt so right—yet…
27
Oh God, can't you keep it down, voices carry. Oh, voices carry.
Yet, it was difficult. As a researcher I was bound by the great code of research to
write what I saw, what I heard, and describe the phenomena around me in as
much detail as possible. But what if the phenomena were happening inside of
me? I knew the importance of relationship—of the role that so many
people/texts/images/experiences have played in shaping me. I knew that each
of these relationships, whether traumatic, scary, strange, familiar, loving or
challenging, played a major role in my research, learning and teaching, and as I
wrote, the depth and life of these relationships were showing themselves to me.
I knew in the deepest crevices of my heart that those who had shaped me were
echoing within me, my work, and now I wanted their echoes to reach the reader.
But how could I write this? Could my reflections and ponderings really be
considered valid?
I was hoping the field of autoethnography would give me a huge high 5 and say
‗Yah dude, go for it. Tell the story as it was fully experienced.‘
But when I looked at criticisms connected with narrative inquiry/
autoethnography (or other methods that privilege lived experiences in story
form), I could hear that voice telling me to shut up again….
If you are a storyteller rather than a story analyst then your goal
becomes therapeutic rather than analytic.38
Good point. I did not want my thesis to be a diary entry or a therapy session. I
wanted to write my story so others could live through my words and find the
courage to try something new in the classroom. Yet neither did I want to live in
an endless spiral of analysis, forced to hang onto words and worry about when
to let go. My words needed to live for themselves, rather than be analyzed to
death.
And what about ‗authenticity‘? According to the critics:
38. Ellis and Bochner, "Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity,‖ 745.
28
Autobiographical accounts are no more 'authentic than other
modes of representation: a narrative of a personal experience is
not a clear route into 'the truth', either about the reported events,
or of the teller's private experience (...) 'experience' is constructed
through the various forms of narrative.39
If research is about digging to find some truth or authenticity in the experience,
then how can it be written to convey that authenticity? This criticism was
directly linked to the fears that burdened me. I found I had to backtrack and
ask: What is research really for? Is the goal to be the first to say certain words,
to make certain connections? Or maybe research just needs to start a
conversation. Is this what I think? Is it just about starting a conversation rather
than giving some definitive ‗result‘ that shuts others up? If it is a conversation, I
will have to acknowledge that the words I speak may not be the truth or
authentic for everyone involved; they are ‗my‘ words from ‗my‘ perspective.
No single narrative can ever represent the final statement of the
Other, the final personification of the Other. As philosophers
would no doubt warn, the danger of a moral relativism forever
lurks in the accounts of children and adults alike. Who is to say
what the ―real‖ story of any person may be? Indeed, each of us
lives with an infinite number of narratives, stories within stories,
any one of which we might share with a researcher, friend, or even
stranger. We only imagine that others‘ lives are constituted of that
one telling tale (English, 2000; Usher and Edwards, 1996).40
Rather than a Cartesian dualism, where either the researcher‘s voice is
privileged over others‘ or others‘ are privileged over hers, I wanted to let all
these voices coexist. Acknowledging this multiplicity was a way to unpack my
ontology, to comb through my memories looking for critical incidents that could
help me understand what drove me to ‗need‘ imaginative education and what
drove me from faculty to faculty, from city to city, in order to answer a simple
question: what role does media play in the lives of children today?
39. Paul Atkinson and Sara Delamont, "Rescuing narrative from qualitative research," Narrative
Inquiry 16, no. 1 (2006): 166.
40. F. W. English, ―A Critical Appraisal of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot‘s Portraiture as a Method of
Educational Research,‖ Educational Researcher, 29, no.7 (2000): 21-26; R. Usher and R.
Edwards, Postmodernism and Education (London: Routledge, 1996); both quoted inThomas J.
Cottle, ―On Narratives and the Sense of Self,‖ Qualitative Inquiry 8 no. 5 (2002): 538.
29
This might not be what others consider research. Yet, such claims gradually
strengthened my belief that even if I only told my own story, others would be
able to hear and recognize similar voices in their lives. My goal would be to help
readers/teachers/researchers see imaginative media education as a complex
theory and practice, not as a rubric to check off with classroom activities.
If you don’t know me by now41
Autoethnography opened up the possibility that I could explore my role, as a
media researcher, in the classroom in a more meaningful way. But I still feared
that it did not really fit as perfectly as I had hoped. The way I wanted to write
the stories and the way I wanted to practise intertextuality went beyond what I
had found in the autoethnography literature.
Then someone mentioned the word métissage. A quick search on Google, and I
was pleasantly surprised that hits came from scholars who either lived or were
living on my previous stomping grounds: Edmonton, Lethbridge, and now
Vancouver. One of the first articles I picked up really ―hit home‖—that is, hit
the area I lived in right after our second trip to Korea, the Commercial Drive
neighbourhood of Vancouver. Jordan and Hasebe-Ludt write about ―dwelling
in/on the Drive,‖ and I am really drawn to their idea of home, since this seems
to be a recurring theme in my exploration of methodologies.
In this conceptualization around place, we are mindful of
Heidegger‘s distinction between notions of dwelling (‗wohnen‘) and
building (‗bauen‘), the latter referring to the relentless
preoccupation of colonial and modernist enterprises of
constructing new and better living spaces, whereas the former,
original meaning of dwelling refers to a way of (already) being
present in a place, of being aware of what already is present in this
place, an attunement that is necessary for any kind of new
knowledge to emerge: ‗Only if are capable of dwelling, only then
can we build‘ (1975, p. 160). In the Canadian colonized space we
inhabit, in the many other colonized places that are part of our
41. Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, ―If You Don‘t Know Me by Now.‖ Cover by Simply Red, A New
Flame (London: Elektra Records, 1989); song lyrics accessed Nov 10, 2013,
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/simplyred/ifyoudontknowmebynow.html.
30
global heritage (Chambers, 2009), in the curriculum we work with
and which these narratives are part of, it seems evermore urgent
to consider these notions of dwelling.42
Whether they meant it or not, I fit myself into this definition—well, fit my
struggle to find a place to call a methodological home into this dichotomy of
wohnen and bauen. I had experienced that ―relentless preoccupation‖ with
constructing a bigger and better space, with imposing criteria of validity and
verifiability on my experience. Yet as I learned to stand still in the forest, so to
speak, I had gained attunement and presence, and come to a new kind of
wonder and awareness with respect to research as a kind of truth-telling.
Reflecting and bringing together these multi-worlds, we framed
out interpretive hermeneutic inquiry around life writing as one of
the contemporary literacies of the global and local commons
(Hasebe-Ludt, 2008). We believe that the way we use this praxis in
our work can be an appropriate and vibrant method as well as a
theoretical approach. It is, for us, a way of theorizing from our
praxis, to investigate and interpret the lived curriculum or currere
(Aoki, 2005; Pinar, 2004) of educators and their students in and
outside of schools in particular sites and to attend to the
importance of place stories (Blood, Chambers, Donald, & HasebeLudt, 2009). More specifically, by paying attention to the small
details and relational components of what goes on in the daily
lives of children, their parents, their teachers, and others that are
part of their life worlds, narratives that are indicative of this place
and the time emerge—narratives that empower the writer and
speaker to become literate in meaningful ways, and to become the
kind of truth tellers that our time urgently needs (Smith, 2006).43
42. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (A. Hofstadter, Trans.) (Toronto: Harper & Row,
1975), 160; Cynthia M. Chambers, ―Building Dwelling,‖ Presentation at The 4th Biannual
Provoking Curriculum Conference, Ottawa, ON. May, 2009; both quoted in Nané Jordan and
Erika Hasebe-Ludt, ―Dwelling in/on the Drive: Life Writing in a Mixed and Mixing Commons,‖
Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 28, no. 1 (2012): 283.
43. Cynthia Chambers, Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Carl Leggo and Antoinette Oberg, "Embracing the
World, with All Our Relations: Métissage as an Artful Braiding," in Being With A/r/tography,
edited by S. Springgay, R. Irwin, C. Leggo, and P. Gouzuasis (Rotterdam/Taipei: Sense
Publishers. 2008), 58-67; Ted Aoki, ―Teaching as In-Dwelling between Two Curriculum
Worlds," in Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki, edited by W. F. Pinar
and R.L. Irwin (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005), 159-165; William F. Pinar, What Is Curriculum
Theory? (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004); Narcisse Blood, Cynthia Chambers,
Dwayne Donald, and Erika Hasebe-Ludt, ―Aoksisowaato‘op: Place and story as organic
curriculum,‖ presentation at The 4th Biannual Provoking Curriculum Conference, Ottawa, ON.
May, 2009; David Geoffrey Smith, Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth; Globalization,
Empire and the Crises of Pedagogy (Rotterdam/Taipei: Sense Publishers, 2006); all quoted in
Jordan and Hasebe-Ludt, ―Dwelling in/on the Drive,‖ 282-283.
31
Reading more about métissage I realized it was a very close cousin of autoethnography—perhaps even the praxis of autoethnography, as Vicky Kelly
suggests.44 And perhaps a counter-praxis to the division of qualitative research
into various ‗isms‘ or camps, leading to a decrease in the dialogue that is so
central to these methodologies. Métissage researchers ask:
How can we speak to each other,
learn to live well with each other and on the earth,
and teach our children to do the same,
in the face of the entrenchment of our differences?45
So, could this be another way to think about the intertextuality that seemed to
be at the core of my research? Could I be a couch-surfing researcher; could I
live fully in my mediated Seinfeldian world as well as in the holistic, lower case
‗s‘pirituality of Rudolf Steiner, and still have enough of myself to spend
meaningful time in the world of phenomenology, hermeneutics and various
other ideologies that were deemed academic?
Métissage is a word drawn from various sources, many associated with the
negative connotation of a ‗half-breed‘. Yet its meaning of ‗mixed-blood‘ has been
used by Lionnet (1989) and Zuss (1997) as an ―alternative metaphor for fluidity,
and a creative strategy for the braiding of gender, race, language and place into
autobiographical texts.‖46 The metaphor of braiding/weaving is central to
métissage as a praxis, evoking the strength and integrity of a world of
intertextuality; ―a writing praxis that enables researchers and their audiences to
44. Dr. Vicki Kelly introduced my supervisor, Dr. Mark Fettes, to métissage, and he passed the
term and literature on to me.
45. Cynthia Chambers, Dwayne Donald and Erika Hasebe-Ludt, ―What is métissage?‖ Educational
Issues 7 no. 2 (n.d.), accessed May 17, 2014,
http://einsights.ogpr.educ.ubc.ca/v07n02/métissage/pdf/whatis.pdf.
46. Francoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender and Self-Portraiture (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press,1989); M. Zuss, ―Strategies of Representation: Autobiographical
Métissage and Critical Pragmatism,‖ Educational Theory 47, no. 2, (1997): 163-180; both
quoted in Chambers, Donald and Hasebe-Ludt, ―What is métissage?‖
32
imagine and create plural selves and communities that thrive on ambiguity and
multiplicity.‖47
There it was, the key components of a methodology that I had been looking
for—an acknowledgment that I didn‘t have to be pure in some way. The desire
for a pure and untainted space, language, and form of research was a powerful
and sometimes irresistible force I had often felt in times of chaos. Over time,
however, I had learned to stand still, take notice, and treat the chaos as a
powerful stranger. I had begun to ask to know it in different way, rather than
either pretending that it didn‘t exist or wishing it was something else. It had
become a partner in dialogue.
Stories are also sites of learning to live well in relation to each
other and with the earth. These texts generate knowledge about
repressed cultural and individual memories, traditions and mother
tongues. We see literary métissage as a hopeful act initiating a
―genuine dialogue with the dominant discourse(s)‖ in order to
transform these discourses, thus ―favoring exchange rather than
provoking conflict‖ (Lionnet, 1989, p. 3). Particularly for
curriculum theory and practice, we see literary métissage offering
the possibility of rapprochement between mainstream and
alternative curriculum discourses.48
Métissage, at this point, is the couch I am deciding to crash on for the time
being. And in my own way—for I have not found other examples, in the
métissage literature, of the intertextuality that is so primary to my own
understanding: media.
Métissage, at this point, is providing me the space to explore the chaos of
teaching/researching in a different way. A form of dwelling, based on the
conviction that standing still is not a Puddy move.
47. Cynthia Chambers, Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Dwayne Donald, Wanda Hurren, Carl
Leggo and Antoinette Oberg, ―Métissage: A Research Praxis,‖ in Handbook of the Arts in
Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues, edited by J. Gary
Knowles and Ardra L. Cole (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008), 142.
48. Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices, 3; quoted in Chambers, Donald and Hasebe-Ludt, ―What is
métissage?‖
33
Métissage, at this point, lets me give voice to those that have let me become me,
all those loved layers of my past and present, privileged via a creative and
playful inquiry.
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.49
49. David Whyte, ―Everything is Waiting for You,‖ Everything is Waiting for You (Langley, WA: Many
Rivers Press, 2003).
34
Hold me now, stay with me50
And now to our cookie-eating host who prefaced many great adventures with a
summary of what was to come…
―Good evening, welcome to Monsterpiece Theatre. Me Alistair Cookie…
―The following presentation is story of shake-ups, confusion, delight and
bewilderment of one grad student who found clues, or clues found her, to
make sense of the role that media, education and imagination can play in
our lives. Follow her as she sails, falls and forages into new fields. Enjoy.‖
So what adventures have I to share with you in the following pages? After
leaving high school I moved to a new city and started university and, as
expected, I met many Wild Things along the way (Chapter 2). These encounters
helped shift my position academically, emotionally and physically, from reader
to researcher and from the foothills of Alberta to the child-friendly streets of
South Korea and the thick, green, lush rainforest of Vancouver, where I began
my apprenticeship in the field of media studies.
Knowing Is Half the Battle (Chapter 3) follows the story of how my initial
questions narrowed and focused, from vague ponderings of media effects to
specific research questions about Canadian families‘ media use. Soon I was
riding out onto the battle-scarred field of media education, light sabre in hand.
In Chapter 4 (Do… Or Not Do. There Is No Try) you‘ll read of how I ventured
across the Second Narrows Bridge and into North Vancouver elementary schools
for my first media risk reduction project.
The questions this raised for me led me through The Reverse Peephole (Chapter
5) into the field of education. The line between researcher and teacher began to
vanish in the smoke clouds of prescribed learning outcomes, testing, parental
expectations, paper making, spy training, and alien landings; all of which
50. Thompson Twins, ―Hold Me Now,‖ Into the Gap (London: Arista Records, 1983); song lyrics
accessed May 3, 2013, http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/theweddingsinger/holdmenow.htm.
35
gradually became perfectly connected, as I began to dig deeper into the vast
undiscovered layers that had once seemed a normal part of my pedagogy. No
neat answers here—more like Jokey Smurf‘s boxes of surprises that blow up in
your face, yet you continue to accept presents from him each time you meet.
And so I found myself on a wild northern shore in Bringing Order Back to the
World (Chapter 6), surrounded by a thicker and lusher forest that prompted me,
as no other environment has, to stand still—to remember that the trees are not
lost for Raven and Wren. This time my understandings, fears and questions took
on a more mischievous quality: I had found a new guiding spirit. Whispers from
Mouse Wo(men), and from others in the canoe where she crouches beneath
Raven‘s tail, accompanied my everyday moves—from setting foot into
Tahyaghen school, to walking through mossy glades or across sand-strewn
beaches.
As I contemplated these adventures of place, time and space, I struggled with
how to represent the many voices in my canoe/head. 51 Their polyphonic chorus
seemed set more on causing me great grief than on enhancing me with
superhero powers capable of knocking over problems with a single turn of my
head. Only, as I slowly learned, to let go of my paralyzing fear that often
stopped me in my tracks, I began to understand why I often felt out of place,
alienated or confused in many fields. The place I felt most comfortable, most
authentically me, was rooted in a culture often ignored in academia—a culture
that had given me a language, understanding of the world, and comfort with
peers—media culture! Think back, if you dare, to a time when the Duke boys
slid through their car windows, eating lunch without watching The Flintstones
was a punishment, and on Sunday evening the family gathered to hear stories
from great Uncle Walt—and you will get a glimpse of the foundations of my
adulthood and my research self.
51. Mr. Canoehead was the most famous character created by Four on the Floor, a sketch
comedy series which aired on CBC Television in 1986. A quintessentially Canadian superhero,
he was hit by lightning while portaging his aluminum canoe, which became permanently
welded to his head. As a crime fighter, he would capture criminals by turning around so that
the canoe knocked them over. Wikipedia, ―Four on the Floor,‖ accessed May 29, 2014,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_on_the_Floor.
36
In the end, it was the strength of the classroom, of my relationships with the
Zacks of this world, which helped me to find and trust my voice. Zack‘s heartfelt
inquisition was indeed infectious; it led me to create a thesis that is sometimes
crass, and a bit strange, but as authentic and as close to who I am as a writer,
student, researcher and teacher as I can possibly get, at this point.
―Tonight, me very excited to bring you all-time favorite thesis, ‗Teaching
the Media with Mouse Woman…..‘ Me not seen it yet, but me very excited to
see how it turns out.‖52
52. A reference to the ―Gone with the Wind‖ episode of Monsterpiece Theatre (1988), introduced
by Aliastair Cookie with the words, ―Tonight, me very excited to bring you all-time favorite
movie, ‗Gone with the Wind.‘ Me not seen it yet.‖ See Kelly Kawano, ―10 priceless Moments in
Monsteriece Theatre history,‖ Word and Film Blog, accessed July 7, 2013,
http://www.wordandfilm.com/2011/11/10-priceless-moments-in-monsterpiece-theaterhistory/.
37
Chapter 2. Where the Wild Things Are53
Let the wild rumpus start
So, here I am sitting awkwardly on a cold gym floor, along with fifteen other
undergraduate students. Our eyes closed—well, flicking now and again to make
sure we aren‘t the ONLY ones sitting with eyes closed on a cold, gym floor. I
fidget, attempting to get comfortable, not really knowing how long we‘ll have to
sit. The instructor clears his throat followed by the flap of paper…
‚The night Max wore his wolf suit
and made mischief of one kind and another
his mother called him Wild Thing.
And Max said ‘I’LL EAT YOU UP.’
So he was sent to bed without eating anything.
That very night in Max’s room
a forest grew and grew
and grew until his ceiling hung with vines
and the walls became the world all around…‛
I know this story. Suddenly I am no longer a scared first-year student sitting with
strangers on a cold floor. I am seven years old again—sitting with the hard
metal bedframe against my back, knees tucked in propping up an oddly-shaped
library book and the green shag rug surrounding my bare feet.
‚And an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max
and he sailed off through night and day
and in and out of week and almost over a year
to where the Wild Things are.‛
53. Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Thiings Are (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). All subheadings
in this chapter are taken from the story.
38
Dan, the PhD student who is teaching the class, places the book down, rises to
his feet and motions for us to do the same.
‚And when he came to the place where the Wild Things are
they roared their terrible roars
and gnashed their terrible teeth
and rolled their terrible eyes
and showed their terrible claws!!‛
He roars and swipes his hands-turned-into-claws towards us. In response, we
roar our very best undergraduate-wild-thing roars, we stomp our brand-newrunning-shoe-clad feet, and we face our classmates for the first time—with a
roar, a smirk and nod.
‚Till Max said ‘BE STILL’
and tamed them with the magic trick
of staring into their yellow eyes without blinking once
and they were frightened
and called him the most wild thing of all...‛
We freeze, and wait with bated breath.
‚‘And now,’ cried Max, ‘let the wild rumpus start!’‛
Our cue! We start rumpusing, as only first-years students can. With each WildThing rendition we become fiercer, more vibrant and more Wild-Thing like—
from strangers to a pack of ‗wild things‘ in 10 minutes… amazing!
And how liberating it was to stomp—particularly when I was not alone.
Why did we all do this so whole-heartedly?
Did we just do what we were told because we were first years?
Or was there something about the story that connected with us?
Was it the fairytale tone of it? We too had all just left home, we too
were envisioning a new life of independence, traveling nights and
days, and encountering new strange beings.
39
Or was it the movement, the playfulness of it all?
I never thought about moving/dancing/thrashing to a book. Music, now that
made sense. Not only did programs like Video Hits and Good Rockin‘ Tonight
find a stable place in my TV program rotation, but videos were also becoming
part of our play culture. Neighbourhood friends and I would spend hours
creating music videos to our favourite tracks in the backyard and basement.
This, however, came to an abrupt halt in Grade 6 while happily recreating
Darling Nikki by Prince. We were trying to figure out a particular line to
incorporate into our dance.
―Mom, what does ‗Masturbating with a magazine‘ mean?‖
…Oh good lord, my poor mom! I don‘t remember making videos much after
that point. Yet, here I was as an 18 year old enjoying interpretive thrashing and
stomping, but this time to a book. Appropriate or not, the interpretive
experiences felt very similar—joyful, creative and at times complex.
The more I thought about this lesson of Dan‘s, the more I was intrigued how
different it was from what I would have done as a teacher. The future classroom
of my dreams would have resembled the many classrooms of my past—the
teacher sitting on a cute little chair, holding the book ever so perfectly to show
the pictures to all the wee ones sitting cross-legged on the floor. Dan shook this
image to pieces the very first day, provoking us to feel mystery (sitting on the
floor with eyes closed), act out (the drama of wild things), move (stomp and
slash at each other) and speak (well, growl—which was more vocal than I was in
other classes). The simple task of reading a book was stripped of the normal
static stance I thought it would take; I experienced not only something to add to
my teaching box, but a new way of being a teacher.
Like the crazy chocolate mint, that surprises me every year by finding a new
sprouting place in our garden, Dan planted a seed that has unexpectedly
popped up here and there as I‘ve traveled through various academic fields. I‘ll
never really know what his intended impact was. Was it to get us to dance, or to
reconceptualise teaching?
40
As we awake refreshed from our dreams, better able to meet the
tasks of reality, so the fairy story ends with the hero returning, or
being returned to the real world, much better able to master life.54
I do know for certain that Dan had to fight for this class to even exist at the
university. This I know because mid-way through the term he told me of the
struggles he had endured. This, too, was odd, wonderful and very memorable—
that a prof would actually take the time to sit and chat with me on a weekly
basis, even listen to my ideas.
By the end of the course, I had successfully gotten a group of grade 6s to flop,
flip and hop around like pop rocks as a way of talking about chemical reactions.
I could have photocopied the worksheets from the science book, but Dan, and
our multiple conversations, had pushed me into totally new ways of lesson
planning and teaching—moving, story and play!
The forest grew and grew
Year 1 was over. I decided to not stay in Lethbridge for the summer, but come
back to the comforts of home in Edmonton. All my friends had opted to remain
there, and I had to answer a lot of question about whether or not I would be
heading back down south in the Fall. Absolutely! I had done my homework and
figured out that U of L was the place to go if you wanted to become a teacher. I
had a mission to accomplish, and nothing was going to stop me.
Old Baba flips carefully through the black construction paper photo album—
each picture neatly tacked to the paper with these mini, foil, frame corners. Her
crooked fingers point to brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles; I don‘t know any of
them. Then she comes to an image of a woman standing beside a solemn faced
young girl. She points repeatedly on the picture.
―This vas MY teacher‖—her emphatic pointing now finds a home on her
heart. ―My teacher.‖
54. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New
York: Vintage Books, 1976), 63.
41
―How old are you?‖
―Grade 6. I vanted to stay long, but my Daddy came to school and said I
had to leave. My teacher vanted me to stay. I vas good at school. I could
have stayed. I vanted to be a teacher. Daddy said ‗no,‘ I had to leave to
come help with the babies at home. He took my hand and took me away
from school.‖
She touches the picture again. My teacher.
I stare into this young girl‘s eyes, trying to see Old Baba. I can‘t. Neither Baba
nor her teacher are smiling. Of course, very few images in the album are of
happy, smiling people—but maybe it is Baba‘s voice now, 85 years later, that
taints the image and makes her seem sadder than she may have been.
I never really thought about Baba as a young girl. She was always my Baba—she
was close to 70 when I was born and always had grey hair and the matryoshka
doll shape she had today. But this image, and this story, stood out—and I began
to contextualized the hundreds of little chats we had over time. Old Baba would
always be the first to ask about school, making sure I was doing well, making
sure I was still going to be a teacher. She would spend every morning and
evening watching the children leave and return from school and commenting on
how lucky they were—particularly the girls who were allowed to wear jeans to
school.
Ahhh… it all started to make sense now. She was forced to give up her dreams
of finishing school and becoming a teacher, and now it seemed her greatgranddaughter might fulfill them. My shoulders began to sag a bit more with
the weight of needing to please Old Baba.
Her love and longing for more education skipped her own daughter. A wilder
and more boisterous rendition of Old Baba, Young Baba often bypassed any
discussion of school and headed straight into stories of running away at night
to meet boys and then heading to the community hall for the dances—not that
it was a fast or a quiet get-away in a horse and carriage! She would, of course,
42
have to deal with the wrath of Old Baba in the morning… but that didn‘t seem to
stop her gallivanting.
These pleasures, however, were to remain hers… ―Kymberley! Don‘t be like me!‖
My Babas are/were the most important people in my life, besides my parents.55 I
have always answered, and oddly enough still answer to them. ―What would the
Babas say?‖ lingers in my thoughts when faced with family, school and work
decisions. They always guide me: stay in school; teach!
The stay in school part is something my mom heard over and over. This most
definitely influenced her, against many odds (coming from a single mom, living
in subsidized housing) to finish high school. Dad… well, Dad found working at
a gas station more financially rewarding than the classroom and dropped out
not far into grade 9. From him, I always got the same speech as from Young
Baba— ―Don‘t do what I did‖. He wanted me to get a real job, which meant
teaching.
―Being a teacher is the perfect job for a woman.‖
You are home early in the day, have weekends and the summer off—you know,
for the kids!
Besides ―go to University‖, not much else was said. I was the first or, depending
on which side of the family you look at, the only (grand)child to go to university.
Thus, laden with optimism and well wishes (and very little else since no one, not
even I really knew what I was getting myself into), I sailed off in a private boat—
well, a small white Chevy Sprint—to the lovely university in the coulees of
southern Alberta, with great hopes of diving into teacher-training courses.
However, I was either misinformed or didn‘t read the fine print, so when
registering I was completely destroyed by the idea of having to endure three
years of ‗other‘ classes before entering the teaching program.
55. Both Babas were alive when I started the PhD program, and although both have since passed
away, they ‗are‘ in this work just as much as they ‗were‘ in this work.
43
Soon I became a pick-a-part expert, cobbling together classes in an attempt to
rapidly check off as many ‗requirements‘ as I could to get to those long awaited
Education classes. Driven by my need to get the most out of each class, I often
attempted to see how this content would help me teach elementary kids.
Socialism and Marxism—nope, not gonna help—Drop! Thankfully, this strategy
waned as the terms wore on, partly because I was starting to enjoy classes for
their content and partly because I could barely keep up with the material, never
mind try to re-conceptualize it for little kids.
In the meantime, I could focus on how to teach, since what to teach had to wait.
Teaching at the university didn‘t seem too hard—stand and deliver, tell students
which pages to read in the textbook, give them worksheets and exams. Some of
our instructors had mastered the head-down writing-and-talking-to-theoverhead-projector pose, while others preferred the talking-to-the-board-andwriting-frantically-with-tiny-pieces-of-chalk stance (don‘t forget the chalk-handprints-on-the-ass accessory—always a must!). These two poses seemed to
mostly cover it.
Thank you Dan. At least you gave me a new pose to add the repertoire.
The walls became the world all around
I lie in bed with butterflies in my stomach that pester me till my alarm goes off.
After months of mostly useless, odd, torturous classes I am finally entering a
classroom of sweet, little kindergarten children. This was such an unusual gift—
at other universities you had to wait to get into the Ed program before they
shipped you out to schools. But my little university in the coulees wanted to
give us (and probably themselves) a heads-up on our abilities in the classroom
before we became Education students. See, homework pays off—I knew this
was the best place to go!
I arrive at the school and make my way to the large kindergarten classroom.
Ahhh… it is just what I dreamed of—play stations around the room (water,
sand), the listening corner with big DJ styled headphones, adorable tiny round
44
tables, and of course the storytelling chair in front of the laminated letters on
the floor for the children to sit on. It‘s perfect.
Even my supervising teacher, Mrs. B, seems perfect. I stare at her as she helps
the children file into the classroom. Even after 30 years of teaching she still
smiles from ear to ear as the little children enter the class.
Two weeks in, I am happily sitting at a tiny table with three hard working little
ones. This particular morning is letter tracing day. I glance around the table,
and my gaze stops at Jared, a sweetheart with severely-diminished eyesight,
who is struggling to match the curves of the letter ‗B‘. Even the almighty tongue
is not providing enough help. His pitiful big, blue eyes, made even bigger by the
pop-bottle glasses, leave me with no choice. I lean over and begin helping him
trace the letter.
Mrs. B, who is spending much of this alphabet lesson wandering from table to
table, approaches me, leans down, and says, loud enough for Jared to hear:
―Jared can do this himself. I know he can, he is very good at tracing letters. You
don‘t have to help him.‖
I am mortified. I sink lower in my tiny chair. I want to escape!
On the drive home, I replay the scene incessantly in my head.
Why was I wrong? How was he going to learn if I didn‘t help him?
Maybe SHE is doing things wrong! After all, she has been there for
over 30 years. Maybe she doesn‘t know how to do things the ‗new‘
way.
They‘re so little. They need help. Lots of it. They don‘t know their
letters and I do—so, I have to help them, to teach them. Isn‘t that my
role?
I try to remember a time when I didn‘t know something. Ahhh… the shoe-lace
incident. Sounds like a D-rated horror flick.
45
Kindergarten, 1978. Shy kid, shoelace undone.
Cannot find the courage to ask for help, but cannot walk around like a dork with
shoelaces trailing.
Foot on chair, tongue protruding, loop over loop…
OMG she‘s done it! Shoelace tied for the first time all by herself!
My understanding begins to shift.
Oh wait… Jared needed to feel the exuberance of doing it on his
own. Mrs. B wanted to let him know that tasks like this, which may
seem impossible, are actually possible.
…OK, OK, it was MY fault in the class. Mrs. B was right after all.
Now, there‘s a wrench in my teaching philosophy—how the hell am I supposed
to know when to dive in, when to move back? How did Mrs. B know? She
wanted them to struggle, to work on their own. This made sense. But how
much should they struggle? When will the struggle impede the final product,
because isn‘t that is what is needed—the complete letter coloured in, to give to
parents, to hang on the fridge, to prove I am teaching the children something?
Has Mrs. B learned how to do this through her extensive experience
in the classroom? Was she once like me, but over the years she saw
the potential of students and their abilities and slowly began to trust
them?
Or was she following a strategy/theory I didn‘t know about? Had
someone like Piaget, or others whose names were often thrown
around in classes, created a chart or notes on students‘ abilities and
when to intervene?
If so, how could I get hold of it?
I was confused. I wanted to trust the kids but didn‘t know how. I had just spent
a term reading Locke, Hobbes and a bunch of other wordy, confusing dudes, and
the only thing I remembered was ‗blank slate‘. This was opposite of what I saw
46
in Mrs. B‘s classroom. Even the little girl with fetal alcohol syndrome was asked
to struggle and was not ‗babied‘ or treated like a blank slate. No matter what,
Mrs. B fully trusted the abilities of the children, and in return they had no choice
but to trust themselves and their abilities.
So do all kids come to school with ‗stuff‘ on their slate? And what
stuff? How do I know?
I was clear on the notion that society needed to trust teachers to do the job they
were trained for: to take care of the children and educate them ‗properly‘. After
this incident with Jared, I saw I was missing a part of the trust equation. The
students not only had to trust me; I had to trust them.
We inhabit a climate of trust as we inhabit an atmosphere and
notice it as we notice air, only when it becomes scarce or
polluted.56
Day One. ―Welcome to Physics, take a seat and here‘s the exam.‖
What? How odd. Whatever… Do what I can.
Day Two. ―Based on the marks from the exam on Tuesday I will be assigning
seats‖.
He starts to call names and points to seats. The front row fills up. Dean, our
resident genius, is right in front.
I am really confused. Shouldn‘t those who did poorly—like me—be given a front
row seat? What is going on?
―Kym, Dawn and Cheryl—at the back.‖
We grab our papers, with big red F‘s on them and move to the last row behind our
classmates.
―No, at the BACK.‖
What? We look at one another, and with teen-aged riddled guffaws stomp up the
stairs and sit in the very last row of the lecture theatre. There are four empty rows
between us and the last row of students.
Oh, so that‘s how the game is played. It‘s on! You think my high-top stair stomp
was annoying today; you just wait for next class.
56. Annette C. Baier, Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1995), 98.
47
And you think I will suddenly have the urge to learn physics as I sit with my best
friend completely isolated from others?
Ha!!
I gather the ten little ones and we make our way to the resource room, which
has just been cleared of chairs at my request. The students pour in like little
ducks, and I lead them to the middle of the room and ask them to take a seat on
the floor.
Dr. White comes in, looks around in a disorientated fashion and leaves.
Shit! What do I do? I can‘t abandon the kids—oh, that wouldn‘t look good on
my evaluation. As I begin to flutter about, he comes back with a chair.
Dumb, dumb, dumb! I knew I was getting evaluated, but I completely forgot to
think about where he‘d sit. He plops down his chair at the back to the back of
the room. I give a sheepish smile. ―Sorry.‖
He opens his notebook and nods for me to start.
―So today, we are going to talk about seasons. What season are we in
now?
―Spring!‖
―Yes, and what happens to all of the flowers in the spring?‖
Silence.
―Do they grow?‖
―Yes!‖
―Let‘s all grow like flowers!‖
Puzzled looks.
48
I move from my kneeling position to squat with my feet flat on the
ground, knees to my chest and head tucked in. Slowly, ever so slowly, I
begin to rise and expand.
―Ahhhhhh!‖
I bring out a picture of a flower garden from my Spring envelope and ask them
to tell me what else happens in spring, what do they do in spring, what is new
and exciting? We make our way through the seasons, and I happily take a
backseat as the students take centre stage. They dance, skate, collaboratively
create a huge snowman out of invisible snow, and gracefully float like falling
leaves with elated excitement.
I don‘t have a story like Wild Things, but the seasons could be my story for
today.
Near the end, as the birds need more space to fly, they end up involving Dr.
White (whether he wanted to be involved or not) by dancing around his chair
with flapping arms and cheesy grins.
He smiles, takes notes, but I am really more concerned about controlling the
flapping and running. The kids are happy.
―OK, fly back to me my little birds.‖
Thankfully they are drawn back to their positions like little magnets.
Whew, first lesson by myself over. First evaluation, over.
I still have the clunky VHS tape somewhere in storage. Never watched it.
Selfishly, I want to live with the feeling I had as the lesson was taking place. I
don‘t want to taint it with by counting the number of times I said ‗um‘ or ‗ok‘. I
want the flappy birds and smiling faces to linger with me.
49
I got the written comments from Dr. White later and knew I did fine—well, more
than fine. That was enough for me—a pat on the head without ruining my
memory with video footage.
An ocean tumbled by…
I was compelled to go to the university in the coulees by my love of teaching.
But two years later, my love of a cute, blonde, rocker led me back to Edmonton.
The transition was made easier by the fact that I feared my grades were not
good enough to get into the highly competitive education program at U of L.
Although I had received top honours in the pre-practicum—only one or two
were given out per year, or so we were told—those other courses continued to
haunt me and my GPA.
Filled with twitterpated love, I didn‘t even flinch when the program counselor
told me I‘d have to take more courses before applying to Education. My 1993
fall term looked bright: Educational Psychology 163; History 260 (Canadian
history); Educational Gymnastics 360; and Educational Foundations 310. All the
courses were pretty self-explanatory… except educational foundations, which I
had heard was boring as hell—my friends‘ exact words, I believe. Something
about the history of education in Canada; but the books I was told to buy at the
bookstore seemed to tell another story.
Kieran Egan, Educational Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)
David Orr, Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern
World (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992)
Donald Oliver, Education, Modernity and Fractured Meaning: Toward a Process
Theory of Teaching and Learning (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989)
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show
Business (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985)
It turned out that Joe, the recent PhD graduate teaching the course, was unlike
any professor I had had.
50
―The way this course has been taught in the past is ridiculous! There is so
much missing from education courses here, and I want to help you find
your way through the minutiae of it all by presenting the ideas and
materials in a new way!!‖
Ridiculous? Minutiae? New way? Who was this guy??
I was intrigued and also scared. I was a very unquestioning child—particularly
when it came to authority figures. I often blindly accepted the knowledge ‗given‘
to me by the teacher, played the dutiful game of conformity—and as a result I
succeeded in school. At this point as a university student, I had also become
somewhat proficient at navigating the world of coursework. What would happen
to me if the game changed?
Telling children and then testing them on what they have been told
inevitably has the effect of producing bench-bound learners whose
motivation for learning is likely to be extrinsic to the task—
pleasing the teacher, getting into college, artificially maintaining
self-esteem. 57
Joe WAS different. First his pose was new to me—he faced us, for the majority
of the class, famously moving from one side to the other, forward and back… it
was an extravaganza! He did, like other profs, keep chalk in hand and would
occasionally launch at the board to scribble down words I had never heard of
before: ontology, pedagogy… and then miraculously make connections between
our everyday lives and these head-scratching terms and phrases—always
injecting some cynicism and snide remarks, of course.
During the first week of classes he even asked us a simple, yet disturbing,
question:
―How many times in your schooling experiences has a teacher asked you
‗What do YOU think?‘‖
57. Jerome Bruner, On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand (Cambridge, MA: Belknapp Press of
Harvard University Press, 1964), 123.
51
Well holy hell, I never thought of that before. In my experience, questions from
teachers were usually geared towards pulling answers out of students—well, out
of the smart ones or those with good memories. The rest of us sat by and
waited—this is how the game was played.
A half-century ago, Stevens (1912) estimated that four-fifths of
school time was occupied with question-and-answer recitations.
Stevens found that a sample of high-school teachers asked a mean
number of 395 questions per day. High frequencies of question
use by teachers were also found in recent investigations: 10
primary-grade teachers asked an average of 348 questions each
during a school day (Floyd, 1960); 12 elementary-school teachers
asked an average of 180 questions each in a science lesson (Moyer,
1965); and 14 fifth-grade teachers asked an average of 64
questions each in a 30-minute social studies lesson (Schreiber,
1967).58
But Joe didn‘t mean this Q-and-A mode of class; he wanted to know how often
teachers opened up the discussion for a real in-depth look at what students
actually thought.
Why had our voices as students, our opinions, confusions and
musing been muted for so long? Was it a matter of trust?
Why was I never comfortable answering questions? Why was I
always scared about being wrong?
58. R. Stevens, ―The question as a measure of efficiency in instruction: A critical study of
classroom practice,‖ Teachers College Contributions to Education, no. 48 (1912); W. D. Floyd,
An Analysis of the Oral Questioning Activity in Selected Colorado Primary Classrooms, Doctoral
dissertation, Colorado State College, 1960; J.R. Moyer, An Exploratory Study of Questioning in
the Instructional Processes in Selected Elementary Schools (Doctoral dissertation, Columbia
University, 1966); J.E. Schreiber, Teachers' Question-Asking Techniques in Social Studies
(Doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa, 1967); all quoted in Meredith D. Gall, ―The Use of
Questions in Teaching,‖ Review of Educational Research, Volume 40 Number 5 (Dec. 1970),
707.
52
I remember Grade 1.
We are all lined up for recess. The teacher is in front, the row of us behind
anxious to leave.
My friend Brandon‘s hand shoots up for the third time.
―Enough questions, Brandon, you don‘t have to always talk. We don‘t always want
to hear Brandon Broadcaster.‖
Laughter. And Brandon has become Brandon Broadcaster forever.
There is no room for questions in a finely tuned educational machine.
We have all been muted.
Joe let us ask questions and talk about our understandings, and when he asked
us something, he wasn‘t always fishing for confirmation of what he had said.
He truly wanted to know what we thought, not what we thought he wanted us to
think.
This could be unsettling, mind you, as I let Dana know.
―Joe‘s insane! He went on and on today about how bad concerts are. What
the hell is he talking about? How can he say that? It isn‘t like a movie
where people sit and stare—they dance, yell, sing, rock out. He‘s an idiot!‖
Joe had this keen ability to disrupt everything. Sometimes I agreed—but
music?! No way…!
And it got worse. Next it was… Disney!
Like most of the people I knew, I LOVED Disney. I collected Disney
paraphernalia (hoodies, pants, cups, etc), even into high school. My Disney
identity was part of who I was.
Like a fish in water, an individual's personal and social identity is
so bound up with the consumer culture that it becomes difficult to
53
reflect on the broader questions of how we came to be in this
aquarium.59
But Joe had, over time, earned my trust; I couldn‘t not consider his arguments.
Additionally prompted by Postman, who provided pages and pages of evidence
of the takeover of our lives by the entertainment industry, I began to agree with
his concerns about childhood and the issues children faced today. Joe and
Postman together had me spinning by the end of 1993. My ‗happy‘ mediacentric childhood was soon lying in a mound of ashes.
How had the media industries duped me all these years? How had I
been so stupid to buy into it all? And literally bought into it!
Had corporate hands moulded and shaped my narratives, play, and
understanding of culture when I was a child? Did they still have a
grasp on me?
…with a private boat for Max
All these ideas about children‘s language and game play led me to the famous
work on child lore by the Opies—Peter and Iona. 60 For the first time I really
began to understand the important role parents, educators and teachers play in
the transmission of songs, games and lore; AND the power of transmission from
kid to kid.
I have such fond memories of these kid-to-kid transmissions. Mom never sang
to me (I have little to no recollection of any nursery rhyme or songs passed on
from my family), but boy do I remember the kid ones and how devious we felt
singing these songs.
59. Stephen Kline, Out of the Garden: Toys and Children‘s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing (New
York/London: Verso, 1993), 29.
60. ―A radical change in the approach to collecting children‘s lore came about in the 1950s with
the work of English husband and wife team, Peter and Iona Opie. For their Lore and Language
of Schoolchildren (1959) and Games of Street and Playground (1969), the Opies collected
directly from their young informants, without the filter of adult memory.‖ Sylvia Ann Grider,
―The Study of Children‘s Folklore,‖ Western Folklore, 39 no 3, ―Children‘s Folklore‖ (Jul. 1980),
164.
54
Miss Susie had a steamboat,
the steamboat had a bell,
Miss Susie went to heaven
and the steamboat went to—
Hell-O, operator,
Please give me number nine
And if you disconnect me
I‘ll kick your be—
‘hind the yellow curtain,
there was a piece of glass,
Miss Susie sat upon it
and broke her little…61
The Opies guided me to realize that these simple little songs/stories that we
shared with one another in the backyard were not a product of my friend‘s older
sibling‘s fabulous imagination (although that is what I thought as a kid!); they
had a history, a life outside of my North Edmonton neighbourhood (though I
now see we did put a little bit of Edmonton flair on it).
[O]ral lore is subject to a continual process of wear and repair, for
folklore, like everything else in nature, must adapt itself to new
conditions if it is to survive.62
I remember reciting such verses, committing them to memory, and then
attempting to say them as fast as we possibly could—and the absolute thrill
when we found someone to teach them to! Parents never knew these little
songs or stories; it was completely up to us to pass them on.
61. As the Opies‘ research would lead us to expect, there are various versions of this song. In my
Edmonton version, for example, it was ―yellow curtain,‖ but Wikipedia has ―‘frigerator‖.
Wikipedia, ―Miss Suzie,‖ accessed May 25, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Susie.
62. Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of School Children (Glasgow: Oxford University
Press, 1959), 9.
55
The school-child‘s verses are not intended for adult ears. In fact
part of their fun is the thought, usually correct, that adults know
nothing about them.63
The Opies talked about the importance this lore played in communication. It
was a means, they suggested, for young children to socialize, but also to rebel—
to assert their autonomy. If children had difficulty finding the language to
express their feelings, when among themselves they could rely on this lore, and
burst into rhyme of no recognizable relevancy, as a cover in
unexpected situations, to pass off an awkward meeting, to fill a
silence, to hide a deeply felt emotion, or in a gasp of excitement.
And through these quaint ready-made formulas the ridiculousness
of life is underlined, the absurdity of the adult world and their
teachers proclaimed, danger and death mocked, and the curiosity
of language itself is savoured.64
The Opies affirmed the value and significance of things that I loved, but had
never read about—nonsensical rhyming, tongue twisters, urban legends. Oh,
how I loved urban legends! Sleepovers were nothing without a little storytelling,
and I was always amazed that other people‘s family experiences had been so
exciting—and SCARY.
Have you heard about what happened once when my friend‘s aunt was
babysitting…?
She was all alone and she kept on getting phone calls…
―Do you know where the children are?‖
—yikes!!
It didn‘t take me long to realize the impossibility of all of my friends having the
same friend‘s aunt with the scary situation. I soon realized it was ―just a story,‖
but that didn‘t diminish the excitement of the telling, or of imagining all the
what ifs that came with it.
63. Ibid., 1.
64. Ibid., 18.
56
AND THEN THE SIMPSONS WENT AND RUINED IT!
In 1990, with Tree House of Horrors, the Simpsons TV show launched its first
Halloween special. In classic Simpsons fashion, it picked up on popular
culture—in this case, the same spooky stories that brought my friends and me
closer—and turned them into a product that belonged to Lisa, Bart, Homer and
the rest. From that day on, a child could no longer tell that story about their
aunt or aunt‘s friend‘s friend… it had become a Simpsons story. Again, pieces of
my childhood were being stripped away and sold back to me, and I hated every
moment of it.
The Opies refuted the premise that literacy and the pervasive mass
media were destroying the traditional of children. We know today,
of course, that the media even help to diffuse many traditions .65
But are traditions diffused by the media still the same traditions?
My last paper for Joe was titled, ―Effects of Electronic Media on the Lives of
Children and Their Society.‖66 From the Opies, I had moved on to Bruno
Bettelheim, who like Postman had a lot to say about what was being lost in the
age of television.
Electronic media has obtained enough power that it has caused
children to put aside some important aspects of being a child.
Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment (1976), states that
―today many of our children are far more grievously bereaved
because they are deprived of the chance to know fairy tales at all‘
(p. 24). This shows that not only are televisions, computers, video
games and soon virtual reality capturing the interests of the
children but are also monopolizing their time. Story, in the sense
of children sitting down and listening to an oral interpretation of
an ancient tale, has become a luxury of children. The stories
today‘s children are most familiar with are those stories seen on
television. The television as storytelling mechanism can cause
fragmentation and distortion of reality. The stories as a means of
providing morals, lessons and values are masked by distracting
65. Sylvia Ann Grider, ―The Study of Children‘s Folklore,‖ Western Folklore, 39 no 3, ―Children‘s
Folklore‖ (Jul. 1980), 164.
66. In one last life-changing contribution to my education, Joe failed me on my ‗written the night
before‘ final paper, and then gave me an extension and time to rethink everything and rewrite
the paper. The questions it raises have shaped my career ever since.
57
visual effects. The electronic media has changed storytelling from
an oral art form to a visual passive form.67
Take that! No mincing words there!
Joe‘s comment is handwritten in black ink alongside my words.
―Sort of like the substitution of processed meat where once a diet of game
prevailed.‖
Ummhhmm… yah, kinda like that.
The paper was a struggle to write; there was so much that I wanted to talk about
and yet so much I didn‘t know. You can see that I was focused on a shift in
kids‘ culture, from something I felt was more natural, involving the family and
the immediate environment, to something much more sinister involving
electronic media.
The loss of childhood innocence is a major issue in society. It
seems to be ignored by educators and other members of society.
Coupled with this problem of the loss of innocence is the loss of
imagination. Stories provide a child‘s imagination with a means of
verification. When stories connect with the images child possess,
they will explore their imagination for alternatives to an oral story.
This ability of a story to promote or engage imagination becomes
and important aspect in the child‘s life. Electronic media has
produced passive views, instead of active listening. Neil Postman
(1985), in Amusing Ourselves to Death, observed that ―television
arranges our communication environment for us in ways that no
other media has the power to do‖ (p. 78). This ability of television
to arrange our communication assists the deterioration of the
child‘s imagination… 68
There was something about this topic that fired me up like no other topic ever
had. I felt this tremendous need to save children from the corporate evils. To do
whatever I could to stop this travesty.
67. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, 24; quoted in Kymberley Lowe, ―Effects of
Electronic Media on the Lives of Children and Their Society,‖ paper for Educational
Foundations 310, University of Alberta (Fall 1993).
68. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New
York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 78; quoted in Kymberley Lowe, ―Effects of Electronic Media.‖
58
Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about
itself… [H]ow television stages the world becomes the model for
how the world is properly to be staged.69
One Michigan State University study in the early eighties offered a
group of four- and five-year-olds the choice of giving up television
or giving up their fathers. Fully one third said they would give up
Daddy.70
Let‘s face it, Postman and his fellow critics weren‘t so good at promoting
optimism. They had me convinced that TV was shifting and changing kids‘ lives,
but I didn‘t know what I or the schools could do about it—UNTIL we started to
read Egan‘s Educational Development.71 Although he didn‘t specify how I could
help save the children from corporate evils, I did find ideas in his work to give
me hope again.
Overall, there was a lot in Egan‘s work I didn‘t understand. I didn‘t have a good
grasp of the history of educational theory, so the discussion of Piaget and
Erickson was lost on me. (I had had a brief introduction to Piaget in my first
year physical education class at U of L; the fact that I called him Pia-GET says a
lot about my level of understanding.) But I did understand the stages that Egan
set up, and greatly appreciated having a bit of a grasp on the wilds of childhood.
The Mythic Stage: Approximate ages, 4/5 to 9/10 years
The Romantic Stage: Approximate ages, 8/9 to 14/15 years
The Philosophic Stage: Approximate ages, 14/15 to 19/20 years
The Ironic Stage: Approximate ages, 19/20 through adulthood
To be truthful, I pretty much fixated on Mythic and Romantic, since I wanted to
teach early elementary children and, well, that was all I had time for since the
term was ticking away and I still had to figure out my final paper. Anyway, the
characteristics of these stages fitted perfectly with what I was worried about:
the mass media—the current storytelling medium.
69. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 92.
70. Pete Hamill, ―Crack and the Box,‖ Esquire Magazine 113 no.5 (1990), 63.
71. Kieran Egan, Educational Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
59
Egan emphasized the importance of stories and story form in these early forms
of understanding. This helped me to unpack the mystique of television, the
jaw-dropping, drooling engagement I saw and felt with television programming.
I had read that this ‗engagement‘ was often a false engagement, that the TV rays
rendered our brains inoperable—the same brainwaves were recorded while we
slept and when we watched TV. Some argued that at least the kids were
learning. But were they? Or were they just there sitting? I couldn‘t explain it; I
couldn‘t reconcile the engagement or hold it had on ‗them‘ and ‗me‘ with the
negative implications I kept reading about. If it was so bad, why did we watch?
Egan helped me make sense of this. He explained that TV producers hadn‘t
tapped into a unique part of the child‘s psyche; they had just paid attention to
what children liked and how they viewed their world. They told stories.
The story form and its power of engaging interest can be used to
communicate content that requires only a few seconds. The U.S.
Children's Television Workshop's show Sesame Street constantly
exemplifies this use of the story form in teaching almost anything,
from recognition of the letters of the alphabet to appreciation of
the social values of sympathy and kindness.72
He walks in with staff in hand and a long cape. The children peer up from
their cross-legged story-listening position on the rug. He is a large man
even to me, so I can‘t imagine how big he must feel to the kids.
He eases himself into the story-book chair, flipping the cape and letting it
drape over the back.
But he has no book!!!
He begins the story of the wizard making a large magic potion. Imagining
a huge shelf of magical ingredients in front of him, he gently picks up each
bottle, smells, swirls, and then pours it into the massive, invisible cauldron
in front of him.
72. Ibid., 26.
60
Each time he asks the children to help stir. Without even blinking they
do—stirring, smelling, and scrunching their noses with a suggestion the
concoction may not be working so well.
Now this is storytelling. Even I am caught up in the story and the
storyteller‘s ability to entrance the little ones.
I am in awe at how unashamed he is to be so fun-loving and foolish. The
children on the other hand have sunk into his story; they stir and add to
the brew with great enthusiasm. There is brewing and tasting for the rest
of the day as the children mimic the movements he introduced.73
Much more than is the case for an adult, children‘s imaginative life
colors and changes their environment with a meaning derived
from within. Piaget has expressed this well in the observation that
at this age there is 'a sort of confusion between the inner and the
outer, or a tendency to fix in objects something which is the result
of the activity of the thinking subject. 74
Was it the content or the way he did it? Egan explained it was a bit of both—
first the level of commitment the storyteller had, and then the story of mystical,
magical proportions. He suggested that we, as teachers, were responsible for
bringing stories and story form into the elementary curriculum, recognizing that
the children were at stages of development that were not incomplete, but
complete in their own ways—we had to TRUST them!
73. ―Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker‘s art is good enough
to produce it. That state of mind has been called ‗willing suspension of disbelief‘. But this
does not seem to me to be a good description of what happens. What really happens is that
the story-maker… makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he
relates is ‗true‘: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are,
as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, then spell is broken; the magic, or rather art,
has failed.‖ J.R.R. Tolkien, ―Children and Fairy Stories,‖ in Tree and Leaf, (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1964), 114.
74. Egan, Educational Development, 12. The reference is to Jean Piaget, 'Children's Philosophies,'
Handbook of Child Psychology, ed. C Murchison (Worcester, Mass.: Clark University Press,
1931), 377-91.
61
The world provides not only knowledge as such, but the things in
the world that the child perceives and experiences become
concepts the child thinks with; that is, the child uses the world to
think with.75
My reading of Egan left me with new ideas for curriculum development and new
hope for schools. Reinforced by my readings of the Opies and Bettelheim, I was
becoming certain that bringing stories, traditional, folklore, in their noncommercialized versions into the classroom would provide alternatives for the
students and thus inoculate them against the one-dimensional Disney versions
they were continually inundated with. Which would mean I‘d have to dig up
older fairy tales that had not yet been commercialized and didn‘t have images
already attached to them. Older games and songs, too—so the kids could hear
something besides…
Big MAC, Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE, Milk SHAKE…76
Egan‘s emphasis on storytelling reinforced something else for me. I had become
certain that the interconnectedness of child and teacher was needed—that
human relationship in its non-mediated version was a better way to educate.
But this didn‘t mean I couldn‘t learn to play the media‘s game!
The use of
stories, games, songs wasn‘t only a way to inoculate; according to Egan, it could
be a way to develop children‘s understanding of the world and themselves.
Myths and fairy stories both answer the eternal questions: What is
the world really like? How am I to live my life in it? How can I
truly be myself? The answers given by myths are definite, while
the fairy tale is suggestive; its messages may imply solutions, but
it never spells them out. Fairy tales leave to the child‘s fantasizing
whether and how to apply to himself what the story reveals about
life and human nature.77
75. Egan, Educational Development, 14.
76. A 1991 study of double dutch skipping songs revealed that out of 56 recordings of double
dutch chants, 23 were the Big Mac song. Research into the lineage of this song indicated that,
starting in the late 1970s, McDonalds would post the lyrics in local newspapers as a lead up to
sponsoring a double dutch competition. Ann Richman Beresin, ―Double Dutch and Double
Cameras; Studying the Transmission of Culture in an Urban School Yard,‖ in Children‘s
Folklore: a Source Book, edited by Brian Sutton-Smith, B., Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson,
and Felicia R. McMahon (Logan, UT: Utah State Up, 1995), 75-91.
77. Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, 45.
62
Tamed them with the magic trick
Scene: An inner-city elementary school in north Edmonton. As a budding
classroom volunteer, I enter the building in a fighting mood. Within minutes, my
Postman-induced view of education goes into overdrive as I tour the school with
the principal.
―We have just invested a great deal of our funding into updating the AV
equipment and computers for the school.‖78
The problem… does not reside in what people watch.
The problem is in that we watch.79
This line has become my lead-in to any conversation regarding my studies. The
idea that everything that made us human, everything that helped us to become a
community, has been tossed away because we had become TV zombies, plagues
every conversation I have.
Yes I know; TV zombies sounds extreme.
But does sitting like a drooling slug in front of a flickering box seem
at all fully human?
Yah, didn‘t think so.
Next, the AV room: a small room at the back of library, packed to the ceiling
with VHS tapes and littered with TV/VCR combo units. The principal smiles; I
am sure I am grimacing.
―Nice.‖
78. ―Two primary reasons are given for plugging schools into the National Information
Infrastructure (NII; called ‗the information superhighway‘). Plugging-in is required to prepare
students to be highly skilled highly paid workers in the economy of the future; and it is
essential for reforming schools into institutions that will produce students who can think and
solve problems.‖ Monty Neill, ―Computers, Thinking and Schools in the New World Economic
Order‖ in Resisting the Virtual Life, edited by James Brook and Iain Boal (San Francisco: City
Lights, 2000), 181.
79. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 160.
63
Orr‘s voice is triggered:
The content of our curriculum and the process of education, with
a few exceptions, has not changed. We had added computers to
the scene, but mostly to do things we did before, only faster.80
Yes Orr, I know.. shhhh.
Then the gymnasium, which should have been a hub of activity, but looks more
like a grave yard for old, low-tech toys. Bounce-less basketballs, worn skipping
ropes and broken down gymnastics equipment bear mute witness to past
glories.
―Ha ha‖, say the shiny new VHS-TV combos. ―We have destroyed you
all!!‖
No matter where I look in the classroom, I am blinded with hatred for the TV,
the VCRs and the computers.
Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run,
Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run.
You better run all day
And run all night.
Keep your dirty feelings.81
No good can come of this! The kids are bored—it‘s because of the
stupid videos they are watching. The teachers are panicked—it‘s
because they have no training on the computers yet were told they
MUST use them. The kids are acting up—it‘s because…
Oh wait… I could blame the technology for everything, but there
are more things going on here than meet the eye.
―You know this area, right?‖
80. David Orr, Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World (Albany,
NY: SUNY Press, 1992), 83.
81. Pink Floyd, ―Run Like Hell,‖ The Wall (New York: Columbia Records, 1980); song lyrics
accessed Nov. 28, 2013, http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/pinkfloyd/runlikehell.html.
64
―Uhmmm, yah… my Baba lives around the corner.‖
―It is considered an inner city school, right? So you really can‘t ask for much
from the students.‖
Shot through the heart,
And you're to blame.82
[T]eacher trust is systematically associated with student
socioeconomic status; the larger the proportion of poor students
in the school, the lower teachers' perceptions of trust. ... This
distinction suggests that poverty has a large negative influence on
the social relationships between students and parents, and the
teachers who serve them. Cultural differences that arise from
differences in economic class seem to be harder to overcome in
the establishment of trusting relationships.83
Mrs. B where are you?
Who the hell cares if they wear the same clothes every day? Torn
jeans, rock shirts, high tops—sounds like the perfect uniform for
grade 6.
Suddenly, because they are poor, they are incapable of learning or
caring or of having an opinion.
And how will the rooms of TVs and computers help them? The
damn teachers don‘t even know how to work the tech!
Done! I am sooo done!
I had spent the past year trying to get friends and peers to see the evils of
television and computers. Many people agreed with some of what I said, but
ended up saying, ‗Yah but I am fine,‘ or ‗Really, what can we do?‘ OK, maybe the
82. Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora and Desmond Child, ―You Give Love a Bad Name,‖ Slippery When
Wet (Chicago: Mercury Records, 1986), song lyrics accessed May 9, 2014,
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bonjovi/yougiveloveabadname.html.
83. Roger D. Goddard, Megan Tschannen-Moran and Wayne K. Hoy, ―A Multilevel Examination of
the Distribution and Effects of Teacher Trust in Students and Parents in Urban Elementary
Schools,‖ The Elementary School Journal 102, no. 1 (Sept. 2001): 13.
65
average person couldn‘t do a damn thing… but teachers, now they could
actually do something.
Now I was in the one sanctuary I hoped would understand the importance of
stories and childhood play, and was faced with this! Rooms full of media, with
teachers and admin hoping it would solve problems they had run out of
solutions for.84 If I was unable to convince friends and family, how was I going
to convince the principal, fellow teachers and school administers that their
chosen path towards the technologically-driven school was misguided, insane,
or stupid?
‗Children do not play the way we used to,‘ says the principal… and
former nursery school teacher with over thirty years of teaching
experience. ‗I don‘t mean outdoor play particularly. Outdoors
they‘re still vigorous. They still climb and run and use bikes and
wagons. It‘s inside play that has changed. You don‘t get as much
dramatic play as you used to. Children are more interested in
sitting down with the so-called educational material at a very
young age. They don‘t seem to have as much imagination, either
in verbal expression or in the ways they play or in the things they
make.‘ 85
I already knew my ‗radical‘ ways would not be well received in the school. But
that didn‘t faze me as much as knowing I would not be heard. I would be
powerless and voiceless against the wave of media in schools that was starting
to rise.
I walked out of the elementary school and decided there is no way in hell I am
going to be a teacher. What could I accomplish? What use would it be to be
angry? What good would that do the students?
84. ―A softer claim for the necessity of computers is that because of the way the economy relies
on computerization, only via computers will it provide access to materials and knowledge that
will facilitate higher-order thinking in academic areas for many more children. … Despite the
absence of funds, it is claimed that teachers working in poor systems will be able to get this
complex operation functioning. However, if teachers had the time, training, and support to do
this, they could reorganize their classroom for inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking,
understanding and problem-solving—with or without computers. They don‘t succeed for a
number of reasons: too many students, lack of resources and knowledge, and standardized
tests that militate against thinking. Somehow, though, the computer will be the means to
make the instructional leap.‖ Neill, ―Computers, Thinking and Schools,‖ 186.
85. Marie Winn, The Plug-In Drug; Television, Computers and Family Life (New York: Penguin
Books, 2002), 83.
66
Done! Done with Ed. Now I needed to find a new home.
How about Anthropology and Linguistics? I‘d heard there were jobs in speech
pathology—that‘s like teaching; and anthro, study of people… well, I‘d like to
study people. People and media, that is!
Roaring my terrible roar and gnashing my terrible teeth
So, I was thinking about doing a paper on the role of TV in children‘s oral
language patterns for the final?
Linguistics Prof: What do you mean?
Well I‘ve noticed that children, as well as adults, often use catch phrases
from TV in their everyday language and I wonder what impact this has
had on their language development and creative language use.
Linguistics Prof (in a less than encouraging tone): Oh, I‘ve never noticed
this!
What? Where have you been? Where do you live? What do you do
when you get home? Doesn‘t TV dialogue automatically pop in your
head on a daily basis? Wow, am I crazy? Do I even belong at
university?
(sheepishly) Uhhmm… I hear this quite often from friends and kids…
Linguistics Prof: Well, I guess you can look at this, although I don‘t know
anyone who will back you up.
―Doh!!‖ (Homer Simpsons-style)… I don‘t know anyone from the
literature to ‗back me up‘. This was just an idea I had, what do I do
now?
I left my prof‘s office wondering if I was the only one who heard TV dialogue in
my head. Even in a linguistics class, where the topic was Oral Language and Folk
67
Culture, media was completely left off the discussion table. But how could we
talk about oral language and folk culture when those greedy corporate yahoos
had taken over oral culture and re-created folk culture? Huh??!!
I had to prove my point. I had already abandoned my dream of becoming a
teacher to follow my gut feeling about media; I wasn‘t going to stop now.
In her book The Plug-in Drug, Marie Winn had nicely combined the theory of
media effects with real life examples. Taking my cue from her, I decided to
study Dana and his roommates. It was a prime anthropological site—four male
undergrads, all coming from TV-rich families, all with parents who were also
raised on TV. If my inkling was right, I would find that we, the second
generation of TV viewers, had adopted TV script into our language—a
phenomenon I proudly called teletalk.
For the next few weeks I listened carefully to my four subjects chatter, looking
for any indication that TV script had become a part of their everyday language.
It didn‘t take me long before I felt I had proved my point.
Take Homer Simpson‘s famous ‗Doh‘ as an example. This term had gone from
playful mimicry in our classes of December 1989 and early 1990, when The
Simpsons first started, to an unnoticed constant in many of Dana‘s roommates‘
sentences. Every response to a mistake or accident seemed to be a very loud
‗Doh‘!
Other famous lines were common, from the Simpsons, Star Trek, and other
shows. Questions asking who did what got the response, ―Wasn‘t me, man.‖
When something needed to be done, the line would be ―Make it so.‖ Now this
was not all the time, but more than you‘d imagine. Sometimes the phrase was
applauded for its cleverness, but most often it was just ‗there‘; just part of the
language.
My research was half-assed in that I didn‘t get ethics approval, my subjects
didn‘t know they were subjects, nothing was recorded… we were basically
68
friends hanging out, and I just decided to spy on their language use. Although it
wasn‘t ‗good‘ research, it sure provided me with the data I felt I needed to start
to look in the library for someone to back me up.
I met my prof again in order to convince her that my ideas were valid, original,
and a possible area to write my paper on.
blah, blah, blah ‗doh‘…
blah, blah ‗what you talking about Willis?‘….
It‘s everywhere in our language and I am thinking that it is going to get
worse and maybe even change the way kids play.
Linguistics Prof: Their play? How?
Well, if a child has given a He Man and a Skeletor doll, they would play
with them the way they see the characters act on TV. He Man, being the
good guy, would always win and Skeletor, the bad guy, would continue to
lose and vow to get him next time. The voices the child would use in the
play would be the same: He Man would have a confident commanding
voice and Skeletor would have a nasally voice. He Man and Skeletor
wouldn‘t be friends; they wouldn‘t go on a deep sea adventure together
because the children would just mimic their characters from TV. They are
enemies: that is the way it IS because it has been dictated by the show.
Linguistics Prof: I see kids playing all the time and I don‘t see this.
I refused to believe her. I know what I saw/heard/lived.
What is wrong with her? Why can‘t she see this? Is it only me and
my friends? We can‘t be the only weird ones…
Could we be ‗those kids‘ that the teacher at the inner school talked
about? Or maybe it was a generational thing? Was she too old, too
removed from kid culture?
69
As I had discovered, I was among the first generation to reap the consumer
rewards of the Reagan deregulation era of the 1980s.
[I]n 1981 President Reagan appointed Mark Fowler chairman of the
FCC [Federal Communication Commission}. … Unlike his
predecessors, who saw the FCC as an agency that had a specific
and exceptional obligation to safeguard America's children from
unfair broadcasting practices, Fowler believed that 'television is
just another appliance... a toaster with pictures'. Armed with this
electrifying insight, Fowler set out to deregulate all commercial
programming, striking down in the process all regulations
regarding commercials in children's television.86
In fact, my toy box provided an archaeological site for an examination of the
influx of marketing to children in the 1980s. At the bottom was a collection of
no-name dolls, stuffed animals and Lego. Closer to the top, however, could be
found a series of well-marketed toys. Among them, of course, were my beloved
Strawberry Shortcake doll and a gaggle of little blue figurines. If it wasn‘t for
Reagan and his crew I would have been stuck with my non-smelly, big-headed
Raggedy Ann that was now shoved to the bottom of the box.
My Strawberry Shortcake doll was the first sought-after item that I finally got
for Christmas in 1980 when I was seven. American Greetings, the makers of the
doll, were not only successful in creating a full-length cartoon program (for all
intents and purposes a full-length commercial); they were among the first to
merge the worlds of TV programming (with 3 Strawberry Shortcake TV specials)
and image licensing for toys. My own crush ended with the doll, but for real
fans there were many more products available: sticker albums, clothes, a video
game by Parker Bros. entitled Strawberry Shortcake Musical Match-Ups for the
Atari 2600, and many more.87 This billion-dollars-plus image of a sweet doll and
her berry friends opened the doors for various other toy companies hoping to
take full advantage of the new deregulation.
86. Robert L. Schrag, Taming the Wild Tube: A Family's Guide to Television and Video (Dallas,
University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 54.
87. Wikipedia, "Strawberry Shortcake," accessed June 12, 2012,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_Shortcake.
70
It is not too difficult to see why both the toy companies and the
broadcasters are so fond of this arrangement. The broadcasters
get free programming for the traditionally unprofitable children's
viewing slots. Hence, any commercials they sell in those time
periods are pure profit. In exchange, the toy makers get to air
half-hour-long commercials to pitch their line of toys.88
In this vein, let us not forget the Cabbage Patch Kids—the phenomenon that
sent my Baba to her neighbourhood Zellers to stand in a long line, along with
hundreds of other women, in hopes of gaining access to the most sought-after
doll of 1984. Luckily my Young Baba didn‘t have to endure the scrambling,
stampedes and fist fights of the Christmas rush; it was May, so she was a bit
safer in the quest for my baby Annabella than she would been a few months
earlier.89
With each craze came a nicely packaged 22-minute cartoon easily found on our
local TV stations on Saturday morning. Not only did we own the toy, but we
could learn from the show how the marketers envisioned them moving, talking,
interacting—entrenching us more firmly in a culture that came with the toy.
How could a child with a GI Joe doll, Rainbow Bright or Care Bear create new
narratives for these dolls/toys when the character‘s language, character and
interactions had already been introduced via TV shows? I guess I didn‘t have as
much confidence in the resilience of kids in the face of fun and engaging
cartoons.
88. For more on toy-based programs, see Darrel D. Muehling, Les Carlson and Russell N. Laczniak,
―Parental Perceptions of Toy-based Programs: An Exploratory Analysis,‖ Journal of Public
Policy & Marketing 11, no. 1 (1992): 63-71.
89. Wikipedia, "Cabbage Patch Kids," accessed June 12, 2012,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabbage_Patch_Kids. I still remember carefully packing my
Cabbage Patch Kid, along with my homework, and taking her happily to school. Alas, my
grade four teacher had a fragrance sensitivity and couldn‘t stand the baby-powder smell. My
four friends and I we were asked to keep our babies at home from that day on. How could he
do this? We had birth certificates and everything for them. What on earth did he expect us to
do at recess? We sulked and remained angry with him, and his annoying sensitivity, for about
a week. Eventually, of course, a new trend hit and the powdery-fragrant babies made their way
to the toybox.
71
Was this a problem? Yes it was! Postman had warned of meaninglessness, of
fragmentation, of an increase loss of culture. This was definitely where my
concerns started. I was being tied to a culture that was driven not by my best
interests but by interests nursed by corporate gluttony. Something needed to
change! I needed to write this paper even if she didn‘t believe me. I needed to
prove to her that I was on to something.
The fact that I could not convince my professor did not deter me. It only
reinforced the need for more research, and from that point I never really
stopping looking for people to back me up.
Sailing back through night and day…
Hot summer day in Calgary—nothing much to do besides wait for the band to
hit the stage at 7:00.
I wander into a bookstore. As usual I flip through the books, looking for topics
or authors of interest. A book with old toys and a rocking horse on the cover
catches my eye.
Out of the Garden: Toys and Children‘s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing, by
Stephen Kline.
I stop at the acknowledgements for some odd reason.
Raising children can be a radicalizing experience… From the start
my son Daniel made a major contribution by first inspiring and
then informing the critical argument which is forwarded in this
book. It was his fascination with Voltron and Transformers which
first alerted our family to the real ‗power‘ of children‘s toy
marketing and helped us to recognize not only the importance of
toys in children‘s lives, but the need to understand and criticize
what was happening in children‘s cultural industries.90
90. Stephen Kline, Out of the Garden: Toys and Children‘s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing (New
York/London: Verso, 1993), vii.
72
What??!! ! Who is this guy? Why haven‘t I come across his work
before?
I turn the page.
…we got a vague impression that his imaginative play was being
framed by television: the battle arrays and formations, the
language and voices, the endless ritual line-up of forces and
motorized sounds, laser attacks and battle cries, which all parents
must now endure, began to create in us a general discomfort with
that the market offered children.91
OMG I needed this book! I barely had enough money for food on the trip, but
this took priority! He backed me up.
This oh so brief look at Dr. Kline‘s work gave me a deep sense of vindication. I
knew my inklings were right! He had evidence and a WHOLE BOOK dedicated to
this topic—and get this: he was Canadian, talking about Canadian children and
their Canadian media environment!
My undergrad was done. Grad school was in my thoughts—not a clue what it
would entail, but I had met some pretty amazing grad students who sat and
read and wrote lengthy papers on whatever they wanted. This seemed as good
as it was likely to get, since what I wanted didn‘t seem to exist in any classroom.
Kline‘s book mapped out my future. The West Coast. Simon Fraser University.
Dana would have to drop what he wanted and follow me.
The first person I emailed with news of my plan was Joe.
91. Ibid., viii (bold added by author).
73
…and in and out of weeks, and almost over a year
Within a few months in 1996, our lives took the most amazing twists and
turns…
our wedding in May…
convocation in June…
and leaping on a plane in September for a year-long adventure in South Korea.
BUT before heading to Korea, Dana and I were forced (for visa reasons) to stay
over in Vancouver for a week. This was a perfect opportunity to test out
whether my two worlds could thrive together in this coastal environment.
We hit CD release parties, heard our favourite band play, and we even spotted
band members ‗just hanging‘ out at pubs during the middle of the week. Whoo
hoo—so far so good.
Next the university. We hopped on the 135 bus from downtown and rode and
rode and rode…. not actually knowing when it was going to stop. Remember
folks, this was before Google Earth!
Having finally arrived on top of the mountain, we navigated our way through the
concrete maze to Dr. Kline‘s office. I was a bit worried. I had never met a prof
who wasn‘t already my instructor. It felt more like a job interview than a
meeting. The pressure was on!
The meeting went well. Steve listened to me jabber on and on about how we
needed to educate parents because young kids were dealing with so much more
today. I wanted to do two things: teach teachers about media effects research,
and teach parents (even in prenatal classes) about the dangers of heavy media
use.
74
It was a unique experience: no struggle to make myself understood, no hand
waving or turning to walk away. Steve actually knew what I was talking about—
he spoke my language. He was happy to endorse my application for the MA
program and talked about a potential research assistantship in the Media
Analysis Lab. Absolute success!
But I had one more stop to make. Kieran Egan was a professor in the Faculty of
Education; when I told Joe of my plans, he‘d suggested I meet with Dr. Egan as
well. Seemed reasonable since it was the combo of Postman and Egan that had
started me down this new career path.
This time things did not go so well.
For a start, I called Dr. Egan, Dr. Kline—doh!
Dr. Egan listened kindly to my jabbering on about media and kids, and parents
and prenatal classes. He seemed politely unimpressed.
Finally he smiled and said, ―I think Communications is a better fit.‖
I had to agree. We shook hands and parted ways… for now.
75
Chapter 3. Knowing is Half the Battle92
Wah-waaah-wah-wah93
Forty little grade one students pile into the classroom. Some spot their desks
and make a beeline for them; others spot me and stop in their tracks. The deer
in the headlights syndrome.
Do I stay or do I go now??
I am sure my stare has the same panic-stricken tinge—I don‘t speak a lick of
Korean, have only been in the country for a day, and here I am in a classroom…
with no materials…
no lesson plan…
no textbooks…
only instructions to teach for 50 minutes, oh yah, and chalk…
and an inner voice yelling—
―don‘t wipe your chalk-covered hands on your ass, don‘t wipe your
chalk-covered hands on your ass!!‖
I write my name on the board. Turn around. They stare.
92. G.I. Joe catch phrase. Wikipedia, ―G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (1985 TV series),‖ accessed
June 5, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_is_half_the_battle.
93. You know, like the Charlie Brown teacher. Pretty sure that is what I sounded like to the little
Korean grade 1s. Recording available at The Internet Archive, ―Peanuts: Teacher voice,‖
accessed June 5, 2014, https://archive.org/details/PeanutsTeacherVoice.
76
This is most definitely a futile attempt at communicating, since my name ‗Kim‘
is the most popular surname in Korea.
What else? What else!! I scan my memory—think Kym, think!! You are in grade 1,
what would you like?
Songs!
I take a deep breath…
―A, B, C, D, E, F, G....‖
Ohhhhhhh, my singing voice is HORRIBLE! I NEVER sing, even when
I am in the car, alone. The poor little kids‘ ears.
A little girl, with perfectly round glasses, sitting in the front row, smiles and
starts to sing along. Others chime in. Whew! At least it was something.
I spend the rest of the class picking up random objects around the room and
saying the English name. More futile attempts at communicating.
So I smile, they smile, we all smile—time‘s up!
I found out that Dana had his own connection to the kids—taekwondo. He
spent the first day on the little stage, in front of the board, performing various
kicks—much to the delight of the class. He would call them by their English
name and then ask for the Korean name. He even gave a few of the tkd kids a
chance to show off their skills. It was easy to pick them out—they were the ones
wearing uniforms.
Our first day of teaching is done—now the scramble to figure out how to fill the
rest of the week… weeelllllll… the year. So we spend the night rummaging
through the corners of our memory to uncover stories, songs, drama exercises,
games—anything we could pull together that didn‘t involve money or materials.
Our goal was to keep the kids engaged. (Didn‘t want them to be bored—we,
after all, were relying on these jobs and didn‘t want to get fired the first week.)
77
Much to our surprise, we also had to keep the kids physically ‗in‘ the
classrooms. Running out or climbing through the windows seemed to be the
number one pastime of the grade 4s. And not to forget—we also needed to
teach them English…
After a few weeks, our teaching was somewhat under control (well, let‘s call it
happily chaotic) and we could turn our attention to settling into our new home.
In many ways, Korea in 1996 seemed to be years ahead of Canada; in other ways
it reminded me of my childhood. We arrived to find spectacular high-rise
apartments, fashion five years ahead of Edmonton, and a unique
communication trend—pagers. The pager craze and computer cafés felt new
and modern, but the television industry in Korea—well, that remained quite
stunted. No cable, programming turned off at lunch and ended at midnight.
And… no video game consoles. If you needed a vg fix you were sent on a trip to
find a small arcade at the nearest amusement park.
Basically, it was a completely different home and outside-the-home environment
than we had in Canada; and it provided a very plausible explanation for why
kids flooded the streets day and night, bringing back memories of my own
childhood. Kids in Korea had freedom to play like we‘d hadn‘t seen in years.
Pum-Jun, our friend‘s three year-old brother, would run home ALONE (6 blocks)
to get his favourite truck or a snack, and then happily skip back to his mom‘s
hair salon waving and saying hi to other family-run businesses along the way.
Gaggles of kids often played soccer, chasing games, jacks and clapping games
on crowded car-filled backstreets. Even at school, we‘d see all sorts of ‗old‘
games—skipping, clapping, chasing, ball games and songs. (We figured out
pretty early that the kids would suddenly become eager to learn English when a)
we asked to play one of their games and they needed to explain the rules to us,
or b) we wanted to teach them our games.)
The anger and angst (moral panic) I felt about kids and kid culture was gone.
Besides the monthly threat of not getting paid, we felt completely safe and at
78
ease walking around and being outside the home. The kids obviously felt the
same way. They didn‘t need a saviour; they were completely fine on their own.
But there were straws in the wind.
One cold evening in November as I walked home from work, I saw a Bongo truck
(half-tonne) driving around the neighbourhood near the school. Usually these
trucks were used to sell vegetables or fruit; they would slowly meander through
the streets with a loud speaker advertising their products: ―Bananas… 200 won,
bananas… 200 won‖ (much like a North American ice-cream truck). This truck,
however, was different; it had a wall of televisions on the back.
Like its fruit-totting counterparts, the truck slowly rolled around the vast, multistory apartments. A parade of children followed it, as if behind a Pied Piper. As
the truck came to a stop, the children began jostling for position in order to
gaze at the tower of TV screens.
Things were about to change—cable was making its debut in Chonju.
I left Korea that summer with a heavy heart, despite what had been a joyful
year. Concerned with the growing home media environment, I worried that the
street play and kid culture I loved would disappear.
That was 1997.
79
What’s up, Doc?94
After a year in Korea we were certain we‘d be able to face pretty much anything.
Arrival home in Alberta was quickly followed by another departure, as we
packed up a dilapidated U-Haul, said good-bye to family and friends, and spent
a day and a night winding and twisting our way out West, to a small mountain in
Burnaby. Although we didn‘t know what to expect in our new home, we did
know what we wanted to bring from our time in Korea: 1) more fighting and 2)
a strong sense of community.
The first thing we did was start a club—a taekwondo club on campus. We had
trained hard in Korea to earn our black belts, so now had the power and black
belt cards to go it on our own and start a club. This new club and our new
home on campus, with other graduate students and young families, helped
embed us in the culture of SFU and created the community-feel we loved so
much in Korea. This expanding community meant I got a new job—babysititing.
It helped that I didn‘t have classes in the fall so I had more time than most other
students and I was more than happy to hang with little kids all day long.
I also took a part time job as a Mad Scientist—yes this job actually exists. It was
a traveling science program/show. Although I wasn‘t a scientist, and playing
with some of the mini explosions freaked me out, I was happy to get back into
the schools. My long hiatus from the Canadian school system, since U of A, had
helped me cool off; when I finally walked back into the schools in the Lower
Mainland, I was in a much less hostile mood. It also helped that I was the one
bringing in the cotton candy for the kids—literally. (Centrifugal forces, right?)
The School of Communication also felt like a home, even though the grad
committee in the school of Communication had written a big fat NO on my
application to the MA program. I found another way to take classes: PostBaccalaureate. No matter what, I would pursue my dream of media research
and media education. Just look at the classes I could choose from:
94. Bugs Bunny catch phrase. Wikipedia, ―Bugs Bunny,‖ accessed June 5, 2014,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugs_bunny.
80
Understanding Television, Children and Media, Quantitative Research Methods,
Digital Culture… I never knew courses could be so perfectly suited to me. For
the first time, this felt like a place I wanted to be—not a place I needed to be
BEFORE I got to the place I wanted to be.
1998 was a year of new beginnings: finally after 1.5 years I was back in the
classroom as a student. By December my need to understand kids‘ media
culture was even more imperative, for our small, one-bedroom apartment on the
mountain had become a tiny bit more crowded. We called our new daughter
Tayme.
And in between, I had begun the slow transition from a reader to a researcher
under my first real academic mentor, Dr. Stephen Kline. Steve.
Sitting in Steve‘s office, staring at his floor-to-ceiling book collection, I feel
content.
So many of these books are the ones I gravitated towards as I search for
ways to justify my inklings about media and kid culture. This is the library
of an ally.
Even better, he has a lab!
Steve‘s book (the one that changed my career trajectory) was enough of a
credential for me, all on its own. But there was so much more on his CV, right
from the beginning.
1977 Ph.D. Psychology, London School of Economics, UK.
Thesis: ―Structure and characteristics of television news broadcasting: their effects
upon opinion change‖
I had found someone else who mixed his fields. I could see the influence of
psychology in the term effects, and the influence of political economy in the
term structures. And then I took note of the date: 1977. The beginning era of
81
glam rock (thank you T-Rex, David Bowie and New York Dolls)—and also a very
contentious time in academia.
[T]wo battles were being waged simultaneously—one
methodological, between qualitative and quantitative methods; and
the other theoretical, between functionalism and structuralism.95
Where did Steve position himself on this battlefield? How had his work been
shaped by the tensions in the social sciences over the previous two decades?
Did he have someone to guide/teach/support him? His thesis supervisor,
perhaps?
Hildegard Therese Himmelweit, née Litthauer (1918 – 1989) was a German
social psychologist who had a major influence on the development of the discipline
in Britain. … She taught at the London School of Economics from 1948-83. From
1964 she was the first Professor of Social Psychology in Britain, founding
LSE's social psychology department and, in effect, establishing the discipline on the
university curriculum. She greatly enhanced our understanding of the
contemporary world through her research, in particular through two studies. As
director of the Nuffield Foundation television inquiry from 1954-58 she
contributed to the understanding of television's impact in society, the subsequent
book Television and the Child (1958) establishing her reputation in Europe and
North America. Her work in the field of political psychology greatly strengthened
the understanding of human decision-making by voters as she and her team
studied a group of young people over a 15-year period. The study was published
as How Voters Decide in 1981.96
Himmelweit‘s 1954-1958 study had helped to lay the groundwork for other
media researchers by looking at the role of TV in the lives of children before
and after it became a fixture in their homes—a unique study that would be near
impossible to replicate today.97 Her extensive research resulted in four themes
related to media effects: ―displacement effects (how children made their leisure
choices); programme content effects (children's perceptions of meanings);
effects on family life; and effects on children's emotions.‖98 The study was
95. Virginia Nightingale, ―Media ethnography and the disappearance of communication theory,‖
Media International Australia, Number 145 (November 2012, 94-102), 97.
96. Wikipedia, ―Hilde Himmelweit,‖ accessed May 21, 2014,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilde_Himmelweit.
97. A similar study was conducted in BC in the 1980s. Tannis MacBeth Williams, The Impact of
Television: A Natural Experiment in Three Communities (Waltham, MA: Academic Press, 1986).
98. Sonia Livingstone and Moira Bovill, Young People, New Media: Report of the Research Project
‗Children, Young People and the Changing Media Environment‘ (London: Department of Media
and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, 1999), 4.
82
significant in that it debunked many common myths, for instance that television
watching was harmful to eyesight, caused violence, or had other direct social
‗effects‘. This challenged contemporary media effects research, which at this
point was still very much embedded in a direct-effect model.
The Himmelweit Report caused a considerable stir among the
public and among broadcasters. Apart from the details of its
research, which in general disproved the more extreme fears about
the effects of the medium, it included a number of suggestions for
action by parents, teachers, and youth club leaders on how they
might make the best use of television to benefit the children in
their care.99
Although this work was done in the 1950s and the media environment has
changed substantially today, the way she conducted the research (bridging
qualitative and quantitative), her openness to exploring the environment (seeing
children as active rather than passive recipients of media messages), and finally
her active engagement with policy makers was echoed in much of Steve‘s work.
Among the policy changes that followed the report were measures to keep
unsuitable material out of view of children, which sparked conversations
regarding regulations and eventually led to the common 6-9 p.m. family viewing
time (with adult content after 9 p.m.) that we take for granted.
Yet this was only a piece of Steve. Bit by bit, I became familiar with the history
of media studies and the seminal role of the Frankfurt School—a group of
German thinkers who, beginning in the 1920s, ―developed a critical and
transdisciplinary approach to cultural and communications studies, combining
critique of political economy of the media, analysis of texts, and audience
reception studies of the social and ideological effects of mass culture and
communications.‖100
99. Ibid., foreword.
100. Douglas Kellner, ―The Frankfurt School and British Cultural Studies: The Missed
Articulation,‖ Illuminations: The Critical Theory Website, accessed May 21, 2014,
http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell16.htm.
83
They were the first social theorists to see the importance of what
they called the 'culture industries' in the reproduction of
contemporary societies, in which so-called mass culture and
communications stand in the center of leisure activity, are
important agents of socialization, mediators of political reality,
and should thus be seen as major institutions of contemporary
societies with a variety of economic, political, cultural and social
effects. … [This theory] articulates a major historical shift to an
era in which mass consumption and culture was indispensable to
producing a consumer society based on homogeneous needs and
desires for mass-produced products and a mass society based on
social organization and homogeneity. It is culturally the era of
highly controlled network radio and television, insipid top forty
pop music, glossy Hollywood films, national magazines, and other
mass-produced cultural artifacts.101
The Frankfurt school continued to expand its research and theoretical models
after its leading thinkers moved to the United States. Yet the political and social
struggles of the 1960s posed new challenges. The audience could no longer be
defined as a homogeneous mass—too many voices needed to be heard, having
long been marginalized (gender, class, sexuality, race tensions). There was also
new evidence to suggest that audiences were not as vulnerable and easily
influenced as once thought.
This was the context for the British Cultural Studies movement. Many of the
cornerstone authors of the field, like Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and
Stuart Hall, continued the critiques of pop culture and mass consumerist-driven
society as endorsed by the Frankfurt school, but they also sought to recognize
diversity and agency in audiences.
The initial project of cultural studies developed by Richard
Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E.P. Thompson attempted to
preserve working class culture against onslaughts of mass culture
produced by the culture industries. Thompson's historical
inquiries into the history of British working class institutions and
struggles, the defenses of working class culture by Hoggart and
Williams, and their attacks on mass culture were part of a socialist
and working class-oriented project that assumed that the
industrial working class was a force of progressive social change
and that it could be mobilized and organized to struggle against
101. Ibid.
84
the inequalities of the existing capitalist societies and for a more
egalitarian socialist one.102
Looking back, I can see the beginnings of my attraction to métissage in what the
Cultural Studies folks were doing.
Dick Hebdige‘s seminal work on music cultures—reggae and punk culture—was
among the first to blur the lines set out by academic circles.103 Not only was he
dragging the stuffy academics into the subbiest of subcultures, where safety pins
took on a whole new role—he also traipsed right over to anthropology to borrow
from Levi-Strauss the idea of ‗bricolage.‘
Levi-Strauss had used this term in the context of the sense-making capacities of
non-literate populations, suggesting that myths and stories helped people establish
the relationship between themselves and the concrete natural world around them.
Then Terrance Hawkes took this term a step further, claiming that bricolage was
a way to describe the ―‗multi-conscious‘ mind, able and willing to respond to an
environment on more than one level simultaneously, and constructing in the
process an elaboration and to use a bewildering complex ‗world picture‘.‖ 104
Now Hebdige came along and used this idea of bricolage as sense-making to help
establish the theory of appropriation of commodities and the role this played in
the subculture‘s ―symbolic ensemble which served to erase and subvert their
original straight meanings.‖ 105 Not only did this echo some of the Opies‘ ideas
about child lore, but it opened the door to more subversive forms of research and
its representation.
A subversion of common sense—a collapse of logical categories and binaries—―a
celebration of the abnormal and the forbidden‖ 106—and researchers can even be
open to the idea of safety pins in noses!
This shift in how audiences were viewed led, by the 1980s, to changes in the
way media research was conducted. The New Audience Research movement
relied more on qualitative studies, joining the ―ethnographic turn‖ inspired by
anthropology. The new focus was on the interpretation of the world from the
participants‘ perspective, while not disguising the role of the researcher. The
dichotomy of high and low brow culture dissolved, opening the door to more
inclusive studies of the role of media in people‘s lives.107
102. Ibid.
103. Dick Hebdige, Subcultures; the meaning of style (London: Routledge, 1979).
104. Terrance Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkely: University of California, 1977), 52.
105. Hebdige, Subcultures, 104.
106. Ibid., 105.
107. Though started by Hebdige, it wasn‘t until the 1990s, particularly in the US, that the field
expanded to include fans and fandom culture. Nightingale, ―Media ethnography,‖ 98.
85
This history allowed me to see Steve as aligned, at times, with the Frankfurt
School (aka critical theorists) and at times with the cultural studies folks. For me
there were great benefits—not only learning how to conduct research in a
variety of ways, but also being allowed to study a variety of subcultures. Steve
never raised an eyebrow when I wanted to study a new media environment. My
parents may have questioned it, friends may have thought it was odd and not
very university-like, but Steve… ―No problemo! Here‘s more literature to read to
help you.‖
Not that I agreed with him on everything…
Steve: ―After forty years of research academics and critics mostly agree
that television has helped to diminish the value of certain experiences in
children‘s lives, such as reading books, rhyming games, street play and
extended family meals—all of which seem to be among the activities
abandoned for the easy pleasure of the box.‖108
Yes! This is what worried me the moment I saw the TV truck tower winding its
way through the small, congested streets of Chonju.
But then I bring up Postman:
Neil: ―Twenty years ago, the question, Does television shape culture or
merely reflect it? held considerable interest for many scholars and social
critics. The question has largely disappeared as television has gradually
become our culture.‖109
Steve: ―It is also common for critics to blame television for this pattern of
cultural expression, as if the contemporary mood of easy pleasure and
immediate gratification were inherent in the technology itself.‖
OK, point well taken.
108. Kline, Out of the Garden, 316.
109. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 79.
110. Kline, Out of the Garden, 22.
86
110
But if Postman had been wishy-washy or neutral I would have ignored him when
I first read him in Joe‘s class. I loved that he was right in your face, telling you
how it is and scaring you to death. I loved those grandiose statements followed
by pages of cultural history to back up the claim.111
Neil: ―Children have virtually disappeared from the media, especially from
television. (There is absolutely no sign of them on radio or records…)… I
mean that when they are shown, they are depicted as miniature adults in
the manner of thirteenth and fourteenth century paintings. We might call
this condition the Gary Coleman Phenomenon, by which I mean that an
attentive viewer of situational comedies, soap opera, or any other popular
TV format will notice that the children on such show do not differ
significantly in their interests, language, dress, or sexuality from the adults
on the same shows.‖112
Steve: ―Postman‘s assumed homogeneity of television as a ‗mass‘ medium
leads him to ignore historical audience segmentation patterns and the
development of new audiences. His review of children‘s television
somehow completely overlooks the presence of Saturday morning
cartoons, the kind of children‘s programming that young children spend
much of their spare time viewing.‖113
I agreed with Steve, but still couldn‘t help but agree with Postman as well. I
recognized that kid culture exists and is influenced by commercial
programming ―lodged in a competitive market.‖114 At the same time, I did see
the disappearance of child-like characters on TV, in ads, in magazines, online.
111. Interestingly, I am now teaching first years about communications studies and spend all term
convincing them to not sound like Postman—to avoid a direct, media-effects approach… but
they so want to rely on this position. These direct and clear-cut models seem to be like
magnets for many of them, as they were for me.
112. Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 122-123.
113. Kline, Out of the Garden, 72.
114. Ibid., 74.
87
And I felt very certain that Postman‘s aphorism that ―television has gradually
become our culture‖115 was accurate.
With this came one of the biggest questions I had for Steve.
If TV has become our culture, then shouldn‘t we disrupt it?
What are you trying to accomplish in your video production classes?
Why would we, as media researchers, contribute to the entertainment
industry that is seemingly causing so much harm?
Even if that wall of TVs the Korean kids were drawn to had been showing truly
educational programming, I would still have feared for them—still wanted to
save them from the hours of wasted time spent staring at a screen. To my
mind, the street culture was far more educational than any program the TV
could possibly show.
115. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 79.
88
Here I come to save the day!116
Yo I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want,
So tell me what you want, what you really really want,
117
I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna really really really wanna zigazig ha.
I poke my head out the door and see five girls, all under the age of seven, with
hips swaying and fingers pointing, belting out the words.
―Call us by our Spice Girls names, Scary and Baby,‖ the two and four year olds
tell the older girls. ―Our moms do, so you should too.‖
For the past two weeks, babysitting or even just setting foot outside my
apartment, I have been inundated with ―Spice Girls did this,‖ ―they did that‖—
whoo-hoo—Girl Power!
Girl Power… ah yes… quite the motto for a new pop band of girls—and a
brilliant marketing ploy. The late 1990s was a new era for children. As Juliet
Schor observes, converging forces such as increasing spending, increased
commercial product options and shifting family patterns opened up a whole
new realm of marketing, as children acquired more direct influence over what
their parents chose to buy. 118 ―McNeal reports that children aged four to twelve
made $6.1 billion in purchases in 1989, $23.4 billion in 1997,‖ Schor notes.119
Global estimates of tween influence topped $1 trillion in 2002.
That persuasive power is why Nickelodeon, the number one
television channel for kids, has had Ford Motor company, Target,
Embassy Suites, and the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism as its
advertisers. (This explains why your child has been asking for an
SUV, a vacation to the Bahamas, and a Robert Graves teapot).120
116. Mighty Mouse catch phrase. Wikipedia, ―Mighty Mouse,‖ accessed June 5, 2014,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mighty_Mouse.
117. Spice Girls, ―Wannabe,‖ Spice (London: Virgin Records, 1996), song lyrics accessed May 29,
2014, http://www.justsomelyrics.com/222021/spice-girls-wannabee-lyrics.html.
118. Juliet B. Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (New
York: Scribner, 2004).
119. Ibid., 23.
120. Ibid., 23-24.
89
With the help of thoughtful marketers, these girls running, jumping and singing
down the residence hallways were positioned perfectly to become mini-Spice
Girls. Lured by the tagline of Girl Power, the kids were pretty much powerless.121
Fashion dolls, clothing, stationery, bed sheets, video games, and Spice Girlsbranded Polaroid camera, Cadbury Chocolate bars and Pepsi… anything could
be portrayed as positive and empowering.122
The 90s is also about more equalization between females and male
people. Because a lot of industries are predominately run by
males, and I think it should change and be more equal.
—Mel B (Scary Spice)123
According to her interview in The Georgia Straight, Mel B. believed that things
were changing. Really? Did anyone believe her? Didn‘t they know a father-son
production team organized/created the group that made her famous? Even the
songs about girls‘ empowerment were written by males. I didn‘t mean to judge—
a good media researcher wouldn‘t judge—but I couldn‘t help but feel
overwhelmed by the spectacle of this scene.
The Spice Girls had seemingly taken over these little girls‘ lives, their language,
their choice of clothing—all of which made them who they were.
Come a little bit closer baby, get it on, get it on,
'Cause tonight is the night when two become one.124
Ahhh I think my head is going to explode!!!!
There was even a few who were caught cutting up their shirts to mimic the
short-shirt look of the pop group.
121. ―Today‘s most sophisticated children‘s marketers operate by insinuating themselves into
existing social dynamics. They have nuanced understandings of how peer pressure operates;
identify trendsetters, influencers, and followers; and target each group with tailored
approaches. Fifty-eight percent of nine to fourteen year olds now say that they feel pressured
to buy stuff in order to fit in.‖ Schor, Born to Buy, 198.
122. Veronica Chambers, ―It‘s a Spice World. Again,‖ Newsweek 130, no. 19 (1997): 75.
123. Interview in The Georgia Straight, issue of Jan 22-29, 1998, 41.
124. Spice Girls, ―2 Become 1,‖ Spice (London: Virgin Records, 1996), song lyrics accessed May 29,
2014, http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/spicegirls/2become1.html.
90
Oh what will I DO if I have a little girl?!!
Surely nobody can feign surprise anymore that commercial
television fails to educate, inform or inspire our children. Nor
should we be startled when we find that children become jaded
with their toys and mimic in their play what they have seen on
television. Children are simply finding their place within our
consumer culture. But does this constitute a harm to children or
diminish or interfere with their maturation? Clearly not, for these
children are simply being socialized into the way of life of our
consumer culture.125
I wondered what young girls thought about the place of Spice Girls and Girl
Power in their lives. More intriguingly, I wondered what their mothers thought:
did they try to stop them, or did they themselves buy into the Girl Power tag
line? I wanted to figure out what was going on for the sake of the kids, but also
for my own curiosity—I did expect to be a mom sometime soon.
Thankfully my Children and Media course gave me a chance to study this
unfolding phenomenon. The instructor was Steve‘s PhD student; besides an
ingenious list of readings, she was guiding us towards developing our own
research projects—in a 3rd year course! Whoo-hoo—Research Power!
I recruited nine girls (aged six to eleven) and six mothers to take part in my
study. My research strategy was very eclectic—observations, interviews, surveys,
collect mass media artifacts—a hodge podge of this and that. I even, much to
the disgust of Dana, made him accompany me to the Spice Girls movie (at the
cheap theatre of course—there was no way I was giving Time Warner all my
money), so I could observe who was going to see the movie and their reactions.
All I wanted was data and it didn‘t really matter what form it was in. Well, let me
rephrase that—it needed to LOOK like data; you know, nice neat boxes,
numbers, and quotes. My data collection was actually becoming a bit of an
addiction, but I loved every minute of it; this was my first real project and I
wanted to proudly display my switch from reader to researcher.
125. Kline, Out of the Garden, 349.
91
After months of data collection I finally had results—some expected and some
very unexpected.
First, the kids seemed to be divided into fans and followers. Although they
looked outwardly similar, fans followed the pop culture trend and the followers
followed the fans. This was quite evident when asking the girls about their
connections to the Spice Girls. The fans knew their names, where they were
from, specific songs, etc. The followers, well…. kinda made stuff up on the fly.
One girl in particular was not allowed to watch Much Music or really any TV at
all, yet she was easily able to keep up with the Spice Girls chatter of her fan
friends.
This was comforting and scary at the same time.
Dana and I: ―We‘re going to keep our kid pretty TV-free.‖
Friends and family members: ―Are you crazy? The kid will totally be
behind all of the trends, they‘ll be left out.‖
Dana and I: ―Not likely, TV is so simple (at least cartoons and kid culture),
she‘ll/he‘ll figure it out. They don‘t need to be steeped in it for weeks to get
a handle on the characters.‖
Friends and family members: ―They‘ll be tagging along behind all the
other kids.‖
Dana and I: ―Maybe they‘ll be the leader and get the TV-head kids outside
playing—maybe THAT will be the trend.‖
So yah. Our kid would pick it up, or at least that‘s what my Spice Girls research
was telling me. But wow—was there no other way beside the TV/media way?
Why had these kids been consumed with Spice Girls?
Well… at least my question about role models helped to disrupt my perception
of total consumption. I asked who their role models were: Mom, friends,
teacher, followed by secondary role models: Bette Milder, Dad, Jesus and other
92
friends. Look at that, no Spice Girls—shocking! But still their play was
embedded in the Spice Girls world.
The second major surprise was from my assumptions about the moms. I had
assumed, based on the kids‘ play culture, that there was a lack of censorship or
regulation in many of the homes. The truth was… well, just different. Three of
the six moms gave a resounding NO when asked whether they thought the Spice
Girls were good role models—yet none seemed to be too concerned that the kids
were acting like Spice Girls, singing their songs, wanting their paraphernalia!
Why???
Well… the moms may have been anticipating what took place a few weeks after
the last interview. The word was that the Spice Girls had already run their
course, and the girls were moving on. Some had begun to listen to the Back
Street Boys: a male version of a similar marketing-driven story. What the hell?!
My research was already obsolete and I hadn‘t even handed in my paper!
Although, I knew trends moved quickly, this really took me by surprise.
Suddenly the laissez-faire attitudes of the mothers, who claimed to passionately
dislike the Spice Girls (and their images), made more sense: their daughters‘ love
for these mass-produced products would soon fade and they knew it.
My small project had made the issue of media use and role models in the family
still more complex.126 I ended up with more questions than answers…
Was it ok to have media shape the play culture of kids? Why had this
become the norm—for kids‘ play to be shaped by media?
Was this just a Spice Girls thing or did it happen often to these children?
Shouldn‘t the parents, as a group, step up?
If these were not good role models, why didn‘t they try to alter their kids‘
play? Why did they just give into the media culture? Did they see
something I didn‘t?
126. For a more in-depth look at the Spice Girls‘ impact on young girls, see Dafna Lemish, ―Spice
Girls‘ Talk: A Case Study in the Development of Gendered Identity,‖ in Millennium Girls:
Today‘s Girls Around the World, edited by Sherrie A. Inness (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1998), 145-167.
93
Go-Go-Gadget127
As I had heard in the SG study, parents seemed to be continually fearful that
their children would be left behind or off trend. It was the same message Dana
and I had received about shielding our child from television. And this wasn‘t
just about the latest music or toy craze. More and more, I was hearing parents
say their young kids ‗NEEDED‘ to learn how to use the computer for fear they‘d
be left out in the future. And their kids were only two or three years old!
I had begun to realize, through the courses I was taking, that this anxiety was
part of the whole history of media, starting way back with the printing press.
The literacy revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries paved the way for the
thriving magazine industry, beginning in the late 1880s, which so perfectly
heralded a symbiotic relationship between mass media and advertising, and the
centrality of both in modern societies. For example:
By seeking out advertisers and describing readers in terms of their
potential as consumers, women‘s journals also played a crucial
parts in developing what Edward Kirkland has called ‗the
feminization of American purchasing‘ reinforcing women‘s role as
consumer.128
Part of this trend was to portray media and advertising as health-promoting.
Messages about the building of a healthy nation were tied to marketing
messages targeted at individual consumers. We were told to alter our buying
patterns for the common good.
The welfare of individual bodies and that of the whole ‗social body‘
were quite explicitly connected. So, for instance, in 1931 the
Listener magazines stated: ‗Our bad food habits are responsible for
impairing our national capacity for work and output… The loss of
127. Inspector Gadget catch phrase. Wikipedia, ―Inspector Gadget,‖ accessed June 5, 2014,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_Gadget.
128. Mary Ellen Zuckerman, A History of Popular Women‘s Magazines in the United States, 17921995 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 60.
94
the nation‘s time through sickness disablement in industry now
averages no less than a fortnight per head per year.‘ 129
Radio promised the same thing, as the wires strung around the home and
neighbourhood gave way to a fixed piece of furniture (wood paneling and all).
New, authoritative voices found their way inside the home: the consumer arm,
the government arm and the industry arm of society all reached in via various
programs aimed at different demographics, all with the task of educating and
educating.
The Minister of Health delivered a radio talk entitled ‗Motherhood
and a Fitter Nation,‘ encouraging women to forge closer links with
the doctor, the clinic and the hospitals—whilst in 1934, a series of
lectures was transmitted on topics like ‗Strong Bones and Good
Muscles,‘ ‗Teeth and their Troubles,‘ and ‗Colds, Tonsils and
Adenoids.‘ 130
I saw that it was nothing new for us to look to new forms of media for guidance
on how to live our lives, or how our children‘s lives might be better than our
own. We had been encouraged to think this way for a century and more.
And then TV—oh, the TV, and its cunning ability to integrate itself into the
family. Take for instance that classic exemplar of children‘s educational
programming, Sesame Street…
Parents embraced ―Sesame Street‖ for several reasons, among
them that it assuaged their guilt over the fact that they could not
or would not restrict their children‘s access to television. ―Sesame
Street‖ appeared to justify allowing a four- or five-year-old to sit
transfixed in front of a television screen for unnatural periods of
time. Parents were eager to hope that television could teach their
children something other than which breakfast cereal has the most
crackle. At the same time, ―Sesame Street‖ relieved them of the
responsibility of teaching their pre-school children how to read—
no small matter in a culture where children are apt to be
considered a nuisance.... We now know that ―Sesame Street‖
encourages children to love school only if school is like ―Sesame
129. Shaun Moore, Media and Everyday Life in Modern Society (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2000), 51-52.
130. Ibid., 52.
95
Street.‖ Which is to say, we now know that ―Sesame Street‖
undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents.131
Ever since reading Postman, I‘d had a hard time looking at Sesame Street as
educational. OK, I was ready to concede that it might have helped the children
it intended to help—those whose parents might have been absent, the latch-key
kids who had a TV and no one else at home. OK, maybe the cartoon puppets
helped them learn their ABCs and 123s so they were more school-ready. But
what about those homes that had support, parents, siblings, relatives? What
were the effects of Sesame Street on them?
Hunting for evidence, I found a book called Sesame Street Revisited.132 Thomas
D. Cook and other researchers looked at the data from the Educational Testing
Service's original evaluation of Sesame Street, and noticed that the study didn‘t
take account of the role of the parents. When the little children entered the ETS
‗lab‘, they watched Sesame Street and then were tested on their knowledge. A
large majority of those who watched could name off letters and numbers. But
according to Cook et al., the real learning took place afterwards, when little
Johnny came out of the lab, most mothers asked ‗what did you learn in there?‘
and when the children talked about numbers and the letters, well then the
parents would review these terms, play with their child, talk to them. It was still
the family doing the educating.
Hell yah, take that Mrs. Sesame-Street-is-the-best-for-my-child.
Still, this wasn‘t how most parents thought about media, or how the media‘s
proponents did, either. All of the claims made for children‘s television
resurfaced in connection with the personal computer. It was an ―ideal conveyor
of information‖ and an ―important educational tool,‖133 that not only shared
many of the valued qualities of previous mass media forms, but had one unique
131. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 142-143.
132. Thomas D. Cook, Hilary Appleton, Ross F. Conner, Ann Shaffer, Gary Tamkin, and Stephen J.
Weber, Sesame Street Revisited (Ithaca, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1975).
133. Earl Rosen, Educational Television, Canada (Toronto: Burns and MacEachern, 1967), p. 78.
96
feature of its own—interactivity. With this capacity came a promise of education
like no other.
On April 11, 1970, Papert held a symposium at MIT called
‗Teaching Children Thinking,‘ in which he proposed using
computers as engines that children would teach and thus learn by
teaching.… Since computer simulation of just about anything is
now possible, one need not learn about a frog by dissecting it.
Instead, children can be asked to design frogs, to build an animal
with frog-like behaviors, to modify that behaviour, to simulate the
muscles, to play with the frog. 134
Here we were, 25 years on, and it seemed that the pressure to expose children
to this ―educational medium‖ was stronger than ever, particularly when
computers were said to promote creativity and learning through problemsolving games. 135
I regularly heard parents and educators express feelings of guilt about not
supplying their child with the mass media of the future. ―I don‘t have the
patience (or knowledge, or time) to sit down and teach him stuff. The computer
can teach things I can‘t.‖ And children sometimes seemed to agree.
A seven year-old put it, ‘the computer doesn’t yell…
Nor does it have favourites.136
This got me thinking to my first computer experience.
Hmm… I wonder if this early exposure helped make me computer literate?
See what you think.
There was ONE computer in our school, which was housed in the library.
The library not only held my favourite books. It also had the most electrifying 70s
orange carpet. LITERALLY electrifying—it made the hair stand up on our heads!
In order to control the energy of this carpet, we were taught, when turning the
computer on, to fish around the back side to find a screw to ground ourselves
before pressing the ON button.
134. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995), 199.
135. For a meta-analysis of 254 controlled evaluation studies on computers in the classroom from
the 1970s to late 1980s, see Chen-Lin C. Kulik and James A. Kulik, ―Effectiveness of
Computer-Based Instruction: An Updated Analysis,‖ Human Behavior 7 (1991): 75-94.
136. Patricia Greenfield, Mind and Media: The Effects of Television, Video Games, and Computers
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
97
So I learned to associate computers with, (a) the fear of wrecking them by pressing
the wrong button, and (b) the fear of being electrocuted.
As a consequence, I tucked my head down and avoided any connection with this
frightening machine.
Hmm… perhaps my obsession with media studies is really a kind of therapy?
I knew I needed to investigate this developing media environment. This time it
was my Digital Media course that provided the opportunity. The research
component of the course had two steps—two much more controlled and
constrained steps than the previous project. First a content analysis of popular
games. Second, observations with children playing games while I interviewed
parents.
The game I selected for a content analysis was a digital version of a very famous
toy—the Fisher Price farm yard/barn… remember when you opened the barn
door the cow went ‗MOOOOO‘.
The goal of the game was to help with children‘s animal recognition: ‗Where is
the Cow? ‘ and the child would was supposed to click on the cow and the cow
would say ‗MOOOO.‘
In fact, modern computer simulation techniques allow the creation
of microworlds in which children can playfully explore very
sophisticated principles. 137
Well, that was almost how it worked. Basically, the computer program would
ask ‗Where is the Cow? ‘ and you could pretty much click anywhere and the cow
would MOO and say: ―Here I am!‖
I was not impressed. What a waste of time. It made much more sense for
children to go outside and explore the lovely forest that surrounded Louis (our
student residence), meet other little friends, eat berries, bugs and even rocks in
the playground, and—a must in Louis—learn to walk up the slide in bare feet. Or
even to play with the real Fisher Price plastic barn.
137. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995), 197.
98
Cause I'm a 21st century digital boy
I don't know how to live but I've got a lot of toys
My daddy's a lazy middle class intellectual
My mommy's on valium, so ineffectual
Ain't life a mystery? Yeah 138
What was this so-called education program displacing from the child‘s every
day? What learning could really be happening outside the screen, but was
missed out on because the child was randomly clicking? There seemed to be
much more lost than gained.
I wished my project could help debunk all the myths that had been floating
round about computers—help with hand-eye coordination, fine or gross motor
skills, advantageous for future jobs, etc. I, however, didn‘t have four years or a
budget like Himmelweit or Livingstone. I just hoped the conversations with the
parents, listening to their reasons for the integration of computers into toddler
lives, would spark some critical thinking about this trend. Because that was
what I saw… a trend propelled by fear of being left out.
138. Bad Religion, ―21st century digital boy,‖ Stranger than Fiction (New York: Atlantic Records,
1994), song lyrics accessed November 9, 2014,
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/badreligion/21stcenturydigitalboy.html.
99
Transform and roll out!139
As my research experience started to develop, so did my understanding of the
media studies field. My beginning stance, embedded in my favourite bumper
sticker: KILL YOUR TV, seemed more and more impossible to maintain or to
justify. And it was about to get still more complex…
―The grant came in!!‖
Steve waves the piece of paper in the air.
We‘re set! Finally, a chance to do a full-scale research project.
Not like I haven‘t been doing ‗real‘ research for the past year, but this time
it feels more real.
It‘s not connected to class.
There is more than just ‗me.‘ Steve is here to guide and mentor me.
And—I am going to get paid for it.
How perfect!
Fisher Price had just created a set of new action toys called Rescue Heroes.
[A] new action toy as an antidote to the war like and controversial
‗warrior heroes‘ that have become popular recently (GI Joe, Ninja
140
Turtles and Morphin Power Rangers).
These new characters included firefighters, rock climbers and scuba divers.
They had a typical hero look to them—tiny waists, huge muscles; but they were
139. Transformers catch phrase (used by Optimus Prime). Teletraan I: The Transformers Wiki,
―Roll out,‖ accessed June 5, 2014, http://transformers.wikia.com/wiki/Roll_out.
140. Stephen Kline, ―Toys as Media: The Role of Toy Design, Promotional TV and Mother‘s
Reinforcement in the Young Males (3-6) Acquisition of Pro-social Play Scripts for Rescue Hero
Action Toys,‖ paper presented at the ITRA Conference, Halmstadt, Sweden, June 18, 1999,
209, accessed at http://www.sfu.ca/media-lab/risk/docs/media-lab/toys_as_media_kline.pdf.
100
larger in stature, had massive shoes so they could stand on their own, and had a
twist—they were rescuers and thus had a pro-social focus to them, a novelty for
superhero toys. Since they were new, Fisher Price wanted to know how they
would be received by young kids (under 6). We, on the other hand, wanted to
examine:
(a) the actuality of the growing literature on boys‘ action hero play;
Because of the popularity of these seemingly militaristic superhero TV series, critics have repeatedly warned that many boys
were so fascinated with televised heroes that they were
assimilating the aggressive back stories and re-enacting them in a
highly ritualized form of ‗war play.‘141
(b) the influence of television scripts on imaginative play with toys.
Singer‘s study had documented the influence of TV programmes
on children‘s imaginative play—but he also has noted that such
effects varied with the family‘s mediation and support for their
children‘s imaginative play (Singer, 1981; 1994).142
Scripted play was one of several models to help explain the role of violent media
in the lives of viewers (in most cases young children). It was something that I
had been thinking about ever since my paper for the Linguistics prof; working
with Steve and the media lab finally gave me names and theories to go along
with my inklings.
Script theory is linked to L. R. Huesmann‘s work in the 1980s, which approached
media effects through an ―information-processing model.‖ Taking a cognitive
approach, Huesmann suggested that television shows provided viewers with
―rich packages of information that contain linkages between causes, goals, and
action plans.‖ Such scripts could become ready-made responses to various
situations:
141. Ibid., 210.
142. Jerome L. Singer and Dorothy G. Singer, Television, Imagination, and Aggression: A Study of
Preschools (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1981); Jerome Singer, ―Imaginative Play and
Adaptive Development,‖ in Toys, Play and Child Development, edited by J.Goldstein
(Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1994); both quoted in Kline, ―Toys as Media,‖ 210.
101
When an aggressive script is retrieved, it is reinforced and
generalized to a new set of circumstances. Thus, children who are
repeatedly exposed to media violence will develop a stable set of
scripts that are easy to retrieve and that emphasize aggression as
an appropriate response to social situations.143
Of course, there are other models and approaches in the literature, particularly
with regard to media violence, which seems to have the longest research history
amidst all the various implications of media use. One of the most influential
approaches is social learning theory, pioneered by Albert Bandura in the early
1960s. I always wanted a Bobo doll, and even today, when I watch the YouTube
clips of Bandura‘s classic Bobo doll experiment, I feel jealous.
This research demonstrated that preschoolers would imitate a
televised model that aggressed against a plastic inflatable doll,
particularly if the model was rewarded for such behaviour.
Subsequent experiments showed that young children would
imitate a cartoon character as readily as a human model.144
At times I would love to just smack that clown—must be why
taekwondo appeals to me so much. Maybe I need a cathartic outlet.
Bandura‘s work had a lasting impact on our thinking about the context of
learning. Cognition, behaviour and environment were all seen as influencing
each other. Unsurprisingly, the early experiments were critiqued for using
artificial situations. Nowadays, more natural experimental settings were being
examined—this is where we came in. We would open up the media lab for the
initial discussion, and then spend time in the child‘s home to observe their
undirected play.
That was my job. Actually my FIRST job was to shop for toys! Now, this is the
kinda research job I like. The media lab was outfitted with my new purchases,
along with older toys from Steve‘s kid closet: among them Tonka trucks,
143. Barbara J. Wilson, ―Media violence and aggression in youth,‖ in The Handbook of Children,
Media and Development, edited by Sandra L. Clavert and Barbara J. Wilson (Hoboken, NJ: John
Wiley and Sons, 2010), 246.
144. Ibid., 251.
102
Spiderman, Batman, and of course the Rescue Heroes which hadn‘t even hit the
market yet.
For the next few weeks, I was paid to play with the children and the room full of
toys while their mothers were being interviewed. Yes, I know this seems like a
very easy job, but the trick was to avoid interrupting their natural play—as well
as try to uncover their reasons for choices—a much trickier challenge than
expected.
Sometimes it was easy, like the time I spent 25 minutes on my knees racing up
and down the media lab with HotWheels cars because the little boy decided we
needed to race. Watching the footage in fast-forward for 25 minutes was even
funnier, since I was eight months pregnant and crawled around like a hippo.
Sometimes it was more difficult because the boys were shy and I had to coax
them to play without directing any of the games or choices.
It was interesting to see how the kids played. I could clearly see that Spiderman
and the other superheroes had scripts closely tied to the characters that these
young boys already knew about. This didn‘t surprise me—my Spice Girls
research had already shocked the hell out of me, showing that 2 and 3 year olds‘
play could already be ‗scripted‘ by the media. But the big question was, what
would happen with the new pro-social toys?
Once the initial play time was over, we let two of the three groups (one was, of
course a control group) watch the Rescue Hero TV show, then let them play
again. Astonishingly, even after watching a short 20-minute video, the boys‘ toy
choice and play was completely restructured. The big-footed, brightly coloured
characters suddenly became more interesting, and the TV show provided them
with the language, voices and styles of the characters. This pro-social play was
in sharp contrast to some of the actions earlier, which consisted of the boys
either ignoring the toys or using the ‗tools‘ (such as the fireman‘s axe or rock
climber‘s grappling hook) as weapons.
103
I had already known that play could be scripted by TV programs. I didn‘t realize
it could happen after just one viewing. Boy, if school could just figure this out
we‘d be set! (And if only my Linguistics prof could see me now!)
After a few weeks I entered the homes to see if the Rescue Heroes had become
central in the boys‘ play, or if they had found their space at the bottom of the
toy box. Interestingly enough, some of the boys really had begun to integrate
more pro-social play into their everyday behaviors.
What I really walked away with from the home visits, though, was a new
appreciation for toy marketers. Boy, they did a great job. They had effectively
integrated themselves into every aspect of the life of the child—PJs, shoes, video
games, books, backpacks, lunch boxes, food containers, bed sheets, posters, all
of their toys from games to action figures… their rooms were full, absolutely
full of toys, and the majority, if not all, had TV shows or games associated with
them. Media culture, and the toys associated with it, were their culture, through
and through. What they did with this culture was nuanced and complex, as the
research had been showing me; but I saw for the first time saturation at a level I
never thought possible.
104
Gotta catch 'em all!145
Seeing inside the bedrooms of the 3-6 year olds and hearing stories from the
mothers about their play got us more interested in the growing media
saturation of children‘s homes. So, we invited teens up to the media lab, got
them to fill out a survey and then let them freely surf the web (taking note of
where they went) to get a better understanding of their lives with media.
Our study was initiated by more than curiosity about how many TVs the kids
had or how much time they spent watching. Beginning with Himmelweit‘s work
in the 1950s, extensive research had been conducted suggesting that the impact
of media was not a simple cause-and-effect phenomenon; it involved people
who were not necessarily vulnerable, nor passive, but active participants and
conscious users of media. Yet we continued to see a growing body of literature
invoking a direct effects model, causing alarm which tended to quickly dissipate
once parents and educators took a closer look at their own children.
Steve, however, had been teaching me how to use data to initiate dialogue, and
this project was definitely heading in that direction. We were beginning to
articulate, in a more thorough fashion, a series of risks associated with heavy
media use. This might be a way of opening up a middle ground in which a
genuine discussion could take place.
[E]very media has both costs and benefits: even though the
internet allows children to do their homework on-line, it also
allows them to surf for pornography, be cyber-stalked or to be
subjected to email bullying. And the more kids use them the
greater the risks can be.146
We first wanted to check whether BC teens were engaged in the same mediarelated trends as children from Europe and US. Our survey sought to confirm
much of what Livingstone and ----- had found in their large-scale audits of media
use (music, TV, computer, internet, phone, books, video games consoles,
145. Pokémon catch phrase. Wikipedia, ―Pokémon,‖ accessed June 5, 2014,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokémon.
146. Simon Fraser University Media Analysis Lab, ―Media As Risk: Living in a Risky World,‖
accessed May 22, 2014, http://www.sfu.ca/media-lab/risk/new/about.html.
105
handheld games) and parental regulations, including looking at where the media
had navigated to: the bedroom.
To assess whether a ‗bedroom culture‘ existed in BC, we asked
teens what kinds of media they had in their rooms. Only 4.3%
reported having no media in their rooms. Over 80% reported
having two or more media in their rooms (14% had six or more).
Open the door of BC teens bedrooms and you will inevitably find
books and music (94% have books, 91% have music), whereas
Internet connections remain more rare (30%).147
As children, my brother and I used to dream of having TVs in our
bedrooms. Instead we were forced to fight tooth and nail for access
to the remote for the one family TV in the basement—the remote
meant power and control!
We wondered whether parents placed any limits on this cornucopia of media.
Some did, it seemed, but less than might be expected.
They reported that their parents were most concerned about
television and Internet use—least about comics and magazines.
More so than girls, boys report their parents were more concerned
about their television, Internet, and videogame use. … Across
media about 40% of the sample claim, they were subject to no
restrictions. Boys reported that they were especially likely to have
no restrictions placed on their Internet and videogame use.
Thinking back, I remember some monitoring, but very little… but
my media viewing environment in the 1980s was vastly different—
no swearing and very little sexuality and violence, as epitomized by
the Duke boys and their no-one-ever-dies car crashes.
Cable TV was now readily accessible and high-speed Internet was becoming
more popular. I kept on comparing my teen years with these students, struck
by the differences in content (violence and sexuality had increased
substantially), levels of access (cable, but also computers and video games) and
space (the bedroom, secluded from peering eyes of parents). Although many
147. Stephen Kline and Jackie Botterill, ―Media Use Audit for BC Teens: Key Findings‖ (Media
Analysis Laboratory, May 2001), accessed May 22, 2014, http://www.sfu.ca/medialab/research/mediasat/secondschool.pdf.
106
parents I had interviewed in previous projects claimed to understand the risks,
many teens, it seemed, were still left alone in their rooms with little to no
supervision.
Increasingly, we saw our research as presenting data that emphasized the
increasing risks associated with heavy media use. The three big ones were:
lower academic achievement, increasingly sedentary lifestyles with the
associated risk of obesity, and increased aggression and anti-social behaviours.
The third of these had entered the mainstream with horrendous incidents like
the Columbine and Taber shootings in 1999, which reinvigorated discussion
around computers, video games and violent media content. The other two were
less talked about, although obesity was making its way up the charts.148
[T]he influence of mass media on health is pervasive and strong
and must be addressed, for increased time spent with media
means that time spent in physical activity is reduced, the
consumption of high-fat foods is modeled and reinforced (45), and
unrealistic, unhealthy norms of physical appearance are cultivated
and reinforced. 149
It was pretty obvious that sitting for extensive periods (and being taunted, in the
advertising breaks, by high-fat and high-sugar snacks) did no good for the
health of young children or teens. 150 ―TV viewing is correlated with caloric
intake,‖ was one general research finding.151 Energy taken in needs to be used
up, otherwise children gain weight—but along with the extra calories came LESS
exercise. 152 The health consequences, studies were suggesting, went beyond
148. Peter T. Katzmarzyk, ―The Canadian Obesity Epidemic: An Historical Perspective,‖ Obesity
Research 10, no. 7 (2002), 166-174.
149. Lori M. Irving and D. Neumark-Sztainer, ―Integrating the Prevention of Eating Disorders and
Obesity: Feasbile or Futile?‖ Preventative Medicine, Volume 34 (2002), 299-309, 303.
150. W.H. Dietz and S.L. Gortmaker, ―Do we fatten our children at the television set? Obesity and
television viewing in children and adolescents,‖ Pediatrics 75 no. 5 (May 1985), 807-812.
151. H.L. Taras, J.F. Sallis, T.L. Patterson, P.R. Nader, and J.A. Nelson, ―Television‘s Influence on
Children‘s Diet and Physical Activity,‖ Developmental Behavioral Pediatrics 10 (1989): 176 –
180, quoted in Catherine S. Berkey, Helaine R. H. Rockett, Alison E. Field, Matthew W. Gillman
A. Lindsay Frazier, Carlos A. Camargo, Jr, MD and Graham A. Colditz, ―Activity, Dietary Intake,
and Weight Changes in a Longitudinal Study of Preadolescent and Adolescent Boys and Girl,‖
Pediatrics 105, no. 56, (2000): 7.
152. Berkey et al., ―Activity, Dietary Intake, and Weight Changes.‖ This longitudinal study of
10,000 US children suggested that time spent with TV, video and gaming impacted their BMI
more than changes in their caloric intake.
107
what most parents or teens were aware of, 153 and included changes in habits
such as the loss of imaginative and creative play.154
Dorman (1997) provided a comprehensive review of the research
looking at potential negative consequences in five areas:
cardiovascular implication, video game–induced seizures,
―Nintendinitis,‖ pathological preoccupation with video games, and
aggression and prosocial behavior.155
Video games were adding a new layer to such concerns. First-person shooters
were hitting a new level of popularity, and the games were becoming more lifelike. Lt. Col Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano even wrote a book called Stop
Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie & Video Game
Violence156 which talked in detail about the role videos games were having on
desensitizing soldiers to shoot before they were sent to war. The increased
media saturation of kids‘ lives—children‘s all day programming on new
channels like YTV (1988) and is sister station for toddlers Tree House (1997),
increased fears of letting children play outside, ever-busier parents, more
children staying in unregulated daycare, and an ever-growing range of digital
technologies—made desensitization an ever more real possibility.
Desensitization to violence is a subtle, almost incidental process
which may occur as a result of repeated exposure to real-life
violence, as well as from exposure to media violence. Emotional
desensitization is evident when there is numbing or blunting of
emotional reactions to events which would typically elicit a strong
response. Cognitive desensitization is evident when the belief that
violence is uncommon and unlikely becomes the belief that
violence is mundane and inevitable. Emotional and cognitive
153. Ibid., 7.
154. Jerome Singer, The Child‘s World of Make-Believe: Experimental Studies in Imaginative Play
(New York: Academic Press, 1973); Dorothy Singer and Jerome Singer, Imagination and Play in
the Electronic Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome
L. Singer, Handbook of Children and the Media (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2012).
155. Steve M. Dorman, ―Video and Computer Games: Effect on Children and Implications for
Health Education,‖ Journal of School Health 67 no. 4 (1997): 133-138, quoted in Susan Villani,
―Impact of Media on Children and Adolescents: A 10-Year Review of the Research,‖ Journal of
the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 10, no. 4 (2001): 398-399.
156. Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action
Against TV, Movie & Video Game Violence (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001).
108
desensitization to violence decrease the likelihood that violent
behavior will be either censored or censured.157
These new video games were not completely unregulated. ESRB ratings, created
by an American ratings board (much like the film rating board), ensured that
each game was well labeled. Steve made me study these, even asking me to
code various games the students knew about from the ESRB site. I was
astonished to find that even E (Everyone) rated games had violent content. It
seemed inescapable in many ways—it had become normalized in the
entertainment industry.
It seemed that once again society was tracing a well-worn route across familiar
ground. There had been support in the 1970s in Canada and the US for
protectionist policies with respect to television and children. In 1978, for
example, the CBC sought to ban advertising before and after programming
aimed at children:
The code suggested that no more than four minutes of commercial
messages be broadcast during one half-hour of children‘s
programming. The code also prohibited selling by children‘s
television program hosts. Mandates were introduced for
advertisements to indicate clearly when toys are sold separately.
The code forbade advertisers to encourage or portray a range of
values that were inconsistent with the moral, ethical or legal
standards of contemporary Canadian society.158
Out of the debate around the CBC code emerged the Broadcast Code of
Advertising for Children, an alternative backed by the industry lobby, the
Canadian Association of Broadcasters; it was subsequently endorsed by the
CRTC to become a condition of conferring a commercial broadcast license. 159 Yet
other measures to try and enforce content restrictions or mandate ―educational‖
157. Jeanne Funk, Heidi Bechtoldt Baldacci, Tracie Pasold and Jennifer Baumgardner, ―Violence
Exposure in Real-Life, Video Games, Television, Movies, and the Internet: Is There
Desensitization?‖ Journal of Adolescence 27 (2004): 25.
158. Joanne M. Lisosky, ―For All Kids' Sakes: Comparing Children's Television Policy-Making in
Australia, Canada and the United States,‖ Media Culture Society 23 (2001), 830.
159. Fred B. Rainsberry, A History of Children‘s Television in English Canada, 1952-1986
(Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988).
109
programming (such as the Children‘s Television Act, 1990) were less effective
because of difficulties of definition and monitoring compliance.160
Now video games were presenting a similar challenge. Steve argued that
Canadian parents wanted more information than the ESRB required, and a
ratings system that was geared towards Canadian values. There was also a push
towards regulating the sales of Mature or Adult rated games. In the spring of
2001 the BC Attorney General Graeme Bowbrick announced that new legislation
would prevent these games from being sold to children.161 This was the first
legislation in North American of its kind; the new ratings would also increase
the age restrictions to 14 for Teen-rated games and 18 for Mature-rated games.
The law would have provided Canadian parents with extensive information on
video games (over and above the current ESRB American ratings), and strict
fines or jail term for retailers who were selling to minors.
Following pressure from the industry, however, the legislation was promptly
abandoned by the new Liberal government following its election in May 2001.162
160. For more on the history of educational TV, see Lisosky, 2001, and Robert A. Levin and Laurie
Moses Hines, ―Educational Television, Fred Rogers, and the History of Education,‖ History of
Education Quarterly 43 no. 2 (Summer 2003), 262-275.
161. Tony Smith, ―British Columbia to limit sale of violent video games,‖ The Register (20 March
2001), accessed May 22, 2014,
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/03/20/british_columbia_to_limit_sale/.
162. Nick Dyer-Witherford and Zena Sharman, ―The Political Economy of Canada‘s Video and
Computer Game Industry,‖ Canadian Journal of Communication 30 (2005): 200.
110
Care Bear stare163
We are getting ahead of ourselves, however. Back in the summer of 2000, I was
planning my second visit to Korea, to revisit and research the kid culture I left
four years before. Mission: Master‘s thesis!
After a year of working with Steve and living/breathing/eating/sleeping media
lab research, my viewpoint on media and my research lens were taking shape.
Much of this shaping took place in such a fast-paced, working-tillyou-are-about-to-drop way that only now, sitting down to write this
chapter… 17 years after my first conversation with Steve… have I
seriously reflected on the role he played.
Some impacts are obvious—more grey hair, more wrinkles! (well,
can‘t blame ONLY him for this)—but he is also responsible for me
becoming an EndNote aficionado, article reader and organizer
whiz, SPSS operator… and then there are the underlying nuances of
the way I look at the field, the way I talk and interpret research,
that take much more unpacking and time to see.
Thinking back, I am in awe that Steve even wanted to work with me. When I
arrived on the mountain, I was deeply embedded in moral panic over pretty
much any electronic or digital medium that existed. As Steve would teach me,
this phenomenon had been described by the sociologist Stanley Cohen.164
Panic is the quasi- social psychological term which Cohen uses to
characterize the ‗sudden and overwhelming fear or anxiety‘ which
seizes public discourses. The word panic itself derives from the
god Pan who the Greeks imagined unleashed the powers of
irrational fear. So too, argued Cohen, public anxiety fed by news
reportage which was governed more by false accusations and
hysteria, than a reasoned concern with impartiality, prompted a
social control discourse mobilizing an strong reaction within the
163. ―The Care Bears' ultimate weapon is the ‗Care Bear Stare‘.‖ Wikipedia, ―Care Bears,‖ accessed
June 5, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Care_Bears.
164. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers
(Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge 2011). (First ed. 1972.)
111
justice community and those sensitive to threats to the moral
order. As experts were called in to explain the threat, youth
cultures were interpreted as deviant, and a threat to the whole
social order. …
The term media panic became widely used to describe the various
public over-reactions to counter-culture tastes and youth pleasures
– whether it be swastikas, reggae rhythms, rap lyrics, gay lifestyles,
raves or playing Carmaggedon. 165
My panic regarding kids was very much intertwined with my love of kid
culture—natural and unaltered kid culture. Whenever I saw kids at school, or in
the streets, I felt like they were my own and I needed to protect them. Even my
decision not to become a teacher was based on this need to protect.
If I was a classroom teacher I‘d only be able to protect/educate 30
kids a year. BUT if I taught, say, 100 teachers a year and they all
went out and taught 30 kids… well, you get the point.
Postman was the first writer who really spoke to my protectionist instincts. His
influence led me to the Direct Effects media research (1944-1963) first of all.
These theories resulted in beautifully concise and very persuasive boxes and
graphs of data, making the powerful effects of media quite apparent. Such
studies quenched my thirst for evidence to use in my early fights about media
and children. But with each research project, from Spice Girls on, I seemed to
be uncovering new and different media effects models. The simple linear
relationships of the direct effects approach were getting increasingly muddled
up, and I had to expand my thinking into new and unfamiliar areas.
There were of course the Active Audience theories (1944-1986) such as ―Uses
and gratification,‖ which took into account the emotional engagement of the
programs, the feeling and connections associated with television and media use.
Suddenly the audience became much more of an active agent.
165. Stephen Kline, ―Is It Time to Rethink Media Effects?‖ (Media Analysis Laboratory, n.d.),
accessed May 22, 2014, http://www.sfu.ca/media-lab/risk/docs/media-lab/panicfin.doc.
112
Then there were the Social Context theories (1955-1983) which began to make
space for the influence of peer culture. In ―Two-Step Flow,‖ an opinion leader
would influence others about topics and content; the media didn‘t necessarily
have a direct line to the whole audience who ‗felt‘ the impact. Another favourite
which really focused on the role of peer pressure, the ―Spiral of Silence‖
research, featured various experiments which made one person feel ‗out of the
loop‘ and showed how peers could influence such a person even to select a
wrong or illogical answer.
And finally, my research seemed to hit on the Society & Media theories (19331978) including the ―Cultivation‖ theory made famous by George Gerbner‘s
work on violence in the media and perception of violence in real life.166 This was
the ―mean world syndrome‖ I felt dissipate in Korea when I didn‘t watch the
news, couldn‘t read the news, and thus wasn‘t influenced… and felt safe.
As I slowly worked through my own understanding of the field, I began to
unwind what Steve meant when he was criticizing Postman. Although I will
always be indebted to Postman‘s rants, I do recognize the danger in being onesided. It was intriguing to me that Steve himself, as someone so well-known and
well-published, couldn‘t be pinned down to taking one side or another.
Steve‘s argument was that media studies theorists who were embedded in a
‗side‘ often misheard or even couldn‘t converse with the other side because they
were just too different. On the one side, he suggested, were the moralizers—
those who fear for children‘s safety, both physical and intellectual, and are
deeply concerned about the depletion of children‘s culturally-derived morals
and ethics. This was the side I had been on for some time. On the other side,
according to Steve, exist the liberators: those who support a laissez-faire
166. See e.g. George Gerbner and Larry Gross, ―Living with Television: The Violence Profile,‖
Journal of Communication 26 no. 2 (Spring 1976), 172-194; George Gerbner, Larry Gross,
Michael Morgan and Nancy Signorelli, ―Growing Up with Television: The Cultivation
Perspective,‖ in Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, edited by Jennings Bryant
and Dolf Zillmann (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994), 17-41.
113
attitude, promoting the freedom of the children‘s marketplace and encouraging
children‘s participation in consumer culture as savvy citizens.167
Bit by bit, I learned to move from my pretty solid position on the moralizers‘
side. The ah-hah moments from the research on Spice Girls, toddlers and
computers, and now Rescue heroes brought me round to Steve‘s point of view,
that being so one-sided was more detrimental than helpful. It made more sense
to be open, to look at the social world and see all of its nuances, rather than try
to find one piece of data that backed up my assumptions.
Although I have to admit that having an assumption backed up by
data is pretty rewarding.
Interestingly, this issue of taking sides comes up in others‘ work, including the
British cultural studies theorist Raymond Williams. In his groundbreaking book
Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) he noted a similar divide in
debates over technology and society, between the technological determinists
(technology as directing the process of social change) and those who argued
that technological development played a more subsidiary role, ―as it were a byproduct of social process.‖ He suggests that these two sides contribute to a ―real
debate, and each side makes important points. But it is in the end sterile,
because each position, through in different ways, has abstracted technology
from society‖ and ―(t)o change these emphases would require prolonged and
cooperative intellectual effort‖ to move beyond their strict boundaries and begin
to see the historical, cultural and economic influences on television.168
Another (critical) theorist who has urged researchers to take a new position,
maybe even a more central or in-between position rather than one on the
margins, is Douglas Kellner, the first ‗real‘ star in the field of media studies I
saw live… well, I didn‘t actually see him, since the room was packed and the
167. Stephen Kline, ―Moral Panics and Video Games,‖ in Childhood, A Collection of Papers from the
Sociology, Culture and History Conference, Department of Child and Youth Culture, Odense
University, Denmark (2000), accessed June 5, 2014, http://www.sfu.ca/medialab/research/mediaed/Moral%20Panics%20Video%20Games.pdf.
168. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Collins, 1974), 7-8.
114
only place to sit was against the wall at the very back of the auditorium. I did
buy his book the next day and have lugged it around ever since.
I cited Kellner earlier on the relationship between the Frankfurt school and
British Cultural Studies. In the same essay, he suggests we need to move beyond
these ‗homes‘ and find a multidimensional approach, looking at the media field
as ―a contested terrain traversed by conflicting mass medium in which
competing economic, political, social and cultural forces intersect.‖169 This
complex focus, he claims, can help to theorize ―contemporary culture and
society in the context of the current constellation of global capitalism.‖
170
[A] cultural studies that is critical and multicultural provides
comprehensive approaches to culture that can be applied to a wide
variety of artifacts from pornography to Michael Jackson and
Madonna, from the Gulf War to Beavis and Butt-Head, from
modernist painting to postmodern architecture. Its comprehensive
perspectives encompass political economy, textual analysis, and
audience research and provide critical and political perspectives
that enable individuals to dissect the meanings, messages, and
effects of dominant cultural forms. Cultural studies is thus part of
a critical media pedagogy that enables individuals to resist media
manipulation and to increase their freedom and individuality. It
can empower people to gain sovereignty over their culture and to
be able to struggle for alternative cultures and political change. 171
Is this what Himmelweit and Steve have been trying to teach me?
Steve never really positioned himself, as far as I could see, in one camp. He
endorsed a great breadth of understanding, from psychology to sociology to
anthropology; he wanted to explore various means of collecting data, teaching
me in the Rescue Heroes project to carefully and unobtrusively tape the children
playing, code their time spent with each toy, record and transcribe the narrative
and document my own experiences. The mothers were interviewed before and
169. Douglas Kellner, ―Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture, accessed April 27,
2014, http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/SAGEcs.htm; see also Kellner, ―The
Frankfurt School and British Cultural Studies,‖ op. cit.
170. Douglas Kellner, ―The Frankfurt School and British Cultural Studies: The Missed
Articulation,‖ Illuminations: The Critical Theory Website, accessed May 21, 2014,
http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell16.htm.
171. Ibid.
115
after, and their personal impressions of how their children‘s play was shaped or
not shaped by the toys and the TV show were taken as serious research data.
The teen media audit was more quantitative (we had the children fill out
surveys), but also qualitative in that their free play was monitored and recorded.
We, as researchers, were taught to listen carefully.
Hmm… so what are the main points to pull out of my own research
and the research with Steve? What were the ah-hah moments?
1. Definitions and understandings could change—it was OK. It didn‘t mean
that I was indecisive; it just meant that I was open to revisiting the role of
language in research and the lens it provided me. Take my original definition or
perception of childhood as an example. If I was to describe childhood/children
when I first came to SFU, it might have sounded like an early Dove soap ad—you
know, plump, rosy-cheeked angelic child full of innocence, full of perfection and
in need of protection. They could do no wrong, but the evils of the mediated
world could dramatically do wrong to them, as portrayed in the following
tongue-in-cheek depiction:
Every day, millions of Americans leave their children in the care of
total strangers. Many do so reluctantly. Child care is hard to come
by and they take what they can get. Fortunately, many of the
strangers are good company. They know something about the
needs of children, and are caring, even loving, in trying to meet
them. But because the financial rewards for child care are few,
these people rarely stay. Those who do pay attention, they hustle
the children for money, bribing them with toys and candy. They
bring guns to the house, and drugs, and they invite their friends
over; sometimes they use the house for sexual liaisons. Often
things get out of hand. Fights break out, and frequently someone
gets hurt or killed.172
My original stance resonated not only with the direct effects literature, but also
with the early Frankfurt scholars, who saw mass audiences as unknowing,
fragile, vulnerable to being manipulated and duped. Yet as I got to know and
engage with more children, I realized this was not the case. They were not
172. Newton Minnow and Craig LaMay, Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television, and the
First Amendment (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 17-18.
116
vulnerable and passive—rather, as Steve had helped me see, they were very
much active members of the audience. And the marketers knew this!—this is
why the Tween market existed. So, now I needed to learn to see it more clearly
and fully.
Steve, along with other researchers such as Juliet Schor, was very clear about the
need for media researchers to examine kids‘ culture on its own terms:
The merchants and marketers of children‘s goods have always
paid more diligent attention than educationists to children‘s active
imaginations and incidental cultural interests…. The marketers
didn‘t have to assume that children‘s daydreams, hero worship,
absurdist humour and keen sense of group identity were
meaningless distractions or artefacts of immaturity. Rather, they
recognized these attributes were the deep roots of children‘s
culture, which could be employed as effective tools for
communication with them‘ This willingness to accept children on
their own terms, without judgement, is surely one of the secrets of
marketers‘ success.173
They were not blank slates. Why had I forgotten this from my time
with Mrs. B?
2. If I wanted to take into consideration the agency of the child, I would need
to let go of some of my urge to protect. Steve argued that all of us, as
educators, parents and researchers, needed to regain our trust in kids‘ capacity
for insight and imagination.
Marketers… ignore most of the assumptions of the modern period,
such as the need to protect children from the adult world and
respect for adult authority. (Recall the slogan of children‘s
marketer par excellence, Nickelodeon: Kids rule!) Marketers use the
developmental paradigm with their talk of timeless needs and
motivations, but they reject its depiction of the child as
incomplete and defective and employ a child-centric point of view.
Advertisers avoid saccharine portrayals of children and rarely
regret the loss of childhood innocence. They‘ve put themselves
squarely on the side of hedonism and gratification of desire rather
than the modern socialization processes of discipline over bodily
urges and suppression of physical energies. Marketers stand for
fun and over work, license over restriction, expression over
173. Schor, Born to Buy, 203.
117
repression. They dwell on fantasy and imagination. They profess
belief in the autonomy and power of youth. Indeed, they hardly
ever use the term children or childhood. They believe in kids.174
I too needed to believe once again in kids. Where did this belief go?
I had it at one point. Mrs. B taught it to me—maybe it wasn‘t as
embodied as I thought since it quickly went out the window when it
came to media.
3. Finally, Steve taught me that I didn’t have to be one thing or the other. I
could still retain some of my protectionist stance, even as I learned to respond
with greater trust to the agency of the child. Be open to multiple ways, multiple
perspectives; find the in-between, the balance between quantitative and
qualitative and between the various theories.
‗Serious‘ academicians in the past too often felt that anything
dealing with children should be relegated to education
departments and should thus be ignored by all of the rest of us
with our ‗higher‘ intellectual pursuits of Truth and Beauty. But
what is truth anyways? And why can‘t it be found in the rites of
passage of American children from elementary school to junior
high school just as easily as it can be found in the manhood rites
of the Sioux Indian youths who sought solitary visions on
mountaintops? Both are doing what they have to do to attain
maturity in their cultures. The answer is, I say, that there are
many truths our children have to teach us, and one of these truths
is the reminder that we should look at the normal as well as the
neurotic, and the prosaic as well as the exotic. 175
This in-between-ness is a little disconcerting. I often assumed it was
a stance I would be allowed to take once I had PhD behind my
name. But it‘s a stance that has found me anyways, over time.
Now, at last, I could come to terms with Steve‘s media production side. I had
learned that there is a time and place for everything, and that he wasn‘t insane
to want to produce videos; nor to show us, students, how to produce videos.
Let‘s just say… he was proud of me at my MA defense.
174. Ibid., 202-203.
175. Sylvia Ann Grider, ―The Study of Children‘s Folklore,‖ Western Folklore, 39 no 3, ―Children‘s
Folklore‖ (Jul. 1980), 167.
118
ReBoot176
With notebook in one hand and iced coffee in the other, I wander down the
dark cement staircase, ready for the blast of ‗air-con‘ awaiting me behind
the glass doors. The cold air fills my lungs as my eyes slowly adjust—just
in time to be met with the piercing orange-eyed stare of Kerrigan. 177 ―So—
you are here too, eh?‖ Her eyes seem to follow me as I make my way
through the black-light-lit darkness to the counter.
I approach the desk, much to the surprise of Ajashi. 178 ―Anonyahsah,‖ I
say as I bow and pass a note to him with a supported right hand. 179 His
surprise mirrors my anxiety. He‘s seen me countless times before, walking
through this place: a voiceless presence in the PC maze. He cautiously
takes the note, and as his eyes scan the paper he seemed a bit relieved—I
assume that dozens of question about my odd behaviour these past couple
of months have now been answered.
My note, now in the hands of the PC-bang owner, explains that I am a computergame researcher from Canada who is studying PC-Bangs and the gaming
community, and asks whether he‘d be willing to share his database information
with me. A few weeks earlier, in a conversation with a friend who ran a
computer store, I found out that many PC-Bang owners subscribe to a database
which keeps track of individuals‘ usage patterns. My researcher palate started
to water when I heard this.
Could I actually gain access?
Could I actually see how often people attended a certain PC-Bang—
for how long and how often—without relying on self-reported data?
176. ReBoot, a Canadian animated adventure series that aired from 1994 to 2001, was the first
half-hour, completely computer-animated TV series. ―ReBoot,‖ accessed May 22, 2014,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReBoot.
177. One of the female characters on StarCraft; a five-foot image of her was painted on the wall.
178. Name given to a married man—like Sir.
179. To show respect we were taught to give objects with a right hand supported by our left.
119
This was a researcher‘s goldmine. I was in my usual Kym-the-researcher mode,
which meant gathering more data than I knew what to do with. I had become
really good at collecting, organizing, and even conducting statistical analysis.
With so many different projects behind me I felt confident in a variety of
methods. Nonetheless, I often defaulted to quantitative methods. There was
safety in numbers. They seemed to have a stronger tone of justification, plus
they matched the data in the many sources I used in my literature reviews.
These days I always had my notebook, so any time of the day I could do a quick
walk through, even entering various PC-Bangs on my way home from partying
with friends (what?! this is still valid participatory observation research, right?)
just to check off who was there—often dozens of players furiously clicking
away, surrounded by piles of cigarette butts and ramen bowls—yup, they had
been there for a while. Others had fallen asleep, often in the most crooked,
hurtful looking positions. Gaming all night was not a new thing; I had seen it in
Canada with Dana‘s roommate. Gaming out of the home all night, however, was
a new sight.
I was quite familiar with Korean entertainment culture. As one of the first to
study in this field, I had even named it Bang-culture (room culture). (Looks like
Steve‘s knack for coming up with new terms wore off on me.) Even though
much had changed since 1996, other things had not, such as the size of the
homes. Many were quite small; since getting together with co-workers, friends
or families was a popular component of everyday life, various businesses
outside of the home had sprung up to accommodate this trend: the
manwhabang (comic book reading room), norebang (singing room), video bang,
DVD bang and more recently the PC bang. This is what had drawn me back to
Korea—a chance to investigate how the quaint internet cafes that Dana and I
often used in 1996 had turned into dark, smoky, noisy, black-lit PC-Bangs.180
180. Korea had surprisingly jumped ahead of North America in these four years, in terms of
computer access and high speed internet; the most shocking statistic I found claimed that in
there were now 25,000 PC-Bangs in Korea. I really wanted to know where young children and
teens spent their time, with whom, and what was being displaced. These questions were
similar to those in our BC Teen audit, but now I was adding a new ‗place‘ into the mix,
extending the research beyond the home.
120
The Ajashi agrees to my request for access—much to my surprise—and I
am offered a seat behind the desk. This proves to be a blessing and a
curse… to me as well as the patrons.
For the next 40 minutes I cause a great deal of confusion as young Korean
men come shooting down the stairs, whip past the five foot mural of
Kerrigan and head straight to the desk—only to be met with a smile from
ME…a foreign WOMAN-—making for some very awkwardly shocking
moments. Between these amusing interludes, however, I am scrambling to
record monthly time patterns for this particular PC-Bang‘s patrons. No
judgments, but wow…some of the users seem to live here. Why? What is
happening? Curse my poor language skills! I am muted at a time when I
am desperate to know more… I have numbers, but seem to be missing part
of the story.
Still, I was happy with the numbers; calculated from user IDs, they would be
valid and reliable. Great sheets of numbers brought joy to my researcher heart;
over the year I had collected numerous pictures, videos, interviews with gamers,
academics and representatives from the gaming industry, but now I had
NUMBERS to back up all of my claims—that Korea was indeed the gaming
capital of the world.
My understanding of the field was growing way beyond my initial knowledge. I
had learned that the Korean government was endorsing this industry and
promoting it from both ends—game development but also game playing.
Government and industry were well aware of the existence of a thriving kid
culture—one particularly suited to the massive-multiple-online role playing
games like Diablo and StarCraft that had hit the market. The PC-Bang industry
was another consequence of the cultural mindset that gaming was not
necessarily a solo activity, but one to be pursued with friends. Steve would be
proud— like shrewd marketers, Korean industry and government had decided
to use kid culture to further their goal of computerizing the nation.
121
All is going well. I am frantically writing and smiling while motioning
patrons to the Korean speaking PC-bang owner. Thirty minutes in and my
back is hurting from the awkward position of the chair. In an attempt to
get a bit more comfortable, I slide my chair back just an inch. Harmless,
right? Not quite! As my chair ‗innocently‘ moves back, there is an
electronic ‗pop‘, followed by complete darkness, immediately followed by
gasps and a deafening outburst of swearing (now, THESE Korean words I
know). Heads instantly turn to the stranger foreign woman behind the
desk, as the owner flies across the room to hit the fuse box (without an allimportant DOOR on it) which is perfectly positioned behind my newly
adjusted chair.
My simple action has cut the electricity and brought serious disruption to
the psyche and game profiles of these young players. I know the damage I
have caused, because I have been breathing, sleeping, eating game culture
for the past six months—just as they have.
‗Mianhamidi! tadanhee mianhamini!‘ (oddly enough I know how to swear
and say ‗I am sorry‘). The owner glares and the patrons twitch.
Needless to say, I jot down the last set of numbers at high speed and get
the hell out of there. My heart is pumping, but I‘m not sure if it‘s because
I‘m escaping stares of death, or because I‘ve gained a great deal of data—
MY PRECIOUS.
As I sifted through my bounty at home, I was pleased but also torn. The
freedom of kids I saw in 1996 was completely gone. When we planned to come
back to Korea, I never imagined stepping into a dark, smoky room with rows on
rows of computers; I was even more shocked to find out that few parents
actually knew what was happening in these venues. The ides of computers as
educational also reigned in Korea, and many assumed kids were doing
homework or working online.
Yes… working at gaining a better score on StarCraft.
122
I had data that backed up my claims and even data to back up my surprises.
Now I just had to put them in the only form I knew would be heard—stats.
A quick scan of the prominent journals in mass communication
shows that the majority of the research results in effect sizes that
explain less than 10% of the variance in human behavior. For
example, Paik and Comstock‘s (1994) meta-analysis is often cited
as convincing evidence of a causal link between violent television
and aggression, despite a mean effects size of only r=.30 (leaving
91% of variance unexplained). A more recent study of Bushman
and Anderson (2001) paints an even bleaker picture with a mean
effect size of r=.20 or 4% of variance explained. In the absence of
convincing data, it is easy to conclude that the effects of media are
too complex and dynamic to understanding with currently
available scientific methods.181
OK, so I realized that my stats didn‘t necessarily show the whole picture. And it
wasn‘t that I disagreed with critiques of quantitative data; I knew that stats can
be problematic. And I also knew that there was a long history of academics
standing in line to criticize causal research projects like the one I was
completing.
But here‘s the tension. I felt like I could only be heard, only be seen as a valid
researcher if those boxes were filled. This was the first time this research had
been done by anyone—not just a foreign woman. So, how better to present data
cross-culturally than to present stats? It was the only way my voice could be
heard. Plus it mirrored beautifully the dozens and dozens of projects I used to
justify why this research needed to be done. Steve had trained me well to
develop a statically valid project. Dr. Park, my Korean mentor, was also a
psychologist versed in verification. I needed to be heard by them, especially.
What else could I have done? I have qualitative data, lots of it; I‘ve spent a
year living my PC-Bang research. Yet my lack of voice as a woman, as a
foreigner and as a very low-level Korean speaker leave me no choice. My
voicelessness means the numbers will need to speak for me; even if some of
181. John. L Sherry, ―Media Effects and the Nature/Nurture Debate: A Historical Overview and
Directions for Future Research,‖ Media Psychology 6, no. 1 (2009), 84.
123
the story gets left out. Some data is better than none. At least it will get
people talking in the field.
The culture I had treasured in 1996 was lost; there was nothing I could do about
it besides make nice, neat boxes. In four short years it was stripped away and
replaced by a mediated play environment that I had now carefully documented
in reliable and verifiable numbers.182
I left Korea, again with a heavy heart—wondering what would happen next, but
hoping, at least, that this time my research would live on.
182. Stewart, Informatization of a Nation, op. cit.
124
Chapter 4. Do… or Do Not. There Is No Try183
Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope
Filing cabinet #1. Media effects research documents, beginning with A for
addiction and ending with V for violence.
Filing cabinet #2. Media education program documents, beginning with A for
addiction reduction and ending with V for Violence reduction.
Filing cabinet #3. New media articles from Korean journals and bundles of filled
out surveys in Hangul.
Filing cabinet #4. Snacks, bottled water, t-shirt, contact lens solution, toothbrush
and toothpaste.
What? When you were a Research Assistant you never slept on the couch/floor,
or brushed your kid‘s hair with a fork because the family stayed over to help
feed you and keep you calm before you handed in a paper?
So. Maybe you didn‘t work for Steve.
Being so steeped in my work at the time seemed not only natural but necessary.
It had become part, well… the whole, of who I was. It was not just my media lab
experiences (and media experiences in general) that were shaping and guiding
me. This little round, mousey-eyed face that I woke up to daily reminded me
that this was not only a job, it was my life‘s work to understand the role of
media in kids‘ lives. By the time I got home from Korea, Tayme was a little girl
who had just started preschool. I was going to have to figure out what to do
about the schools, and soon!
183. Spoken by Yoda to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (20th
Century Fox, 1980). IMDb (The Internet Movie Database), ―Quotes for Yoda (Character),‖
accessed June 8, 2014 at http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0000015/quotes. All headings in
this chapter are from the original Star Wars trilogy; all but the first are quotes from Yoda, the
teacher of the Jedi knights.
125
Opportunity came knocking. Within a week of returning home from Korea, I
was at Steve‘s living room table, hearing for the first time about the most
amazing project—Media Risk Reduction for elementary students in North
Vancouver. Finally, all those years after Joe‘s class had shaken me awake, I could
head into classrooms again!
It is still dark outside. Dana and Tayme are still fast asleep, and I am
sitting amongst towering boxes from another recent move, in the only
space I can find on the floor—prepping. This is the day that will make or
break our North Vancouver project—the meeting with the District VicePrincipal and colleagues.
I am freaking out; in a way I have been planning for this moment since
taking Joe‘s class! I am scared. I am not ready for this!
A few days before the meeting Steve and I met to organize our plan of attack.
He would distill the long history of media effects research into our three focal
media risk themes: decreasing academic achievements, increasing bullying and
aggression, and increasing obesity rates. He would tie these in with the
district‘s current agenda—increasing physical activity and healthy lifestyles, and
reducing bullying and aggression.
For my part, I was to lay out what the curriculum would look like and how we
would be working with the teachers. This suited me fine. I wanted to teach
teachers how to get their students to see and feel what I had felt; I wanted the
children to understand how media impacted their play, their storytelling and
peer relationships, all the taken-for-granted parts of childhood. I wanted to
empower them to resist!
Except… we hadn‘t created the curriculum, all we had was a vague framework of
themes. At this point, I had to just go with my gut feeling about what type of
program would work and be helpful. It wasn‘t like this was the first time I had
actually thought about it, after all!
126
Steve starts us off. There is a round of introductions to the group of very
official looking people at the long table. Then he launches into a quick
review of the extensive literature on risks associated with media use,
focusing on the two that seem to fit best with the district‘s priorities:
obesity and sedentary lifestyles, and aggression and anti-social behaviors.
There was nothing ground-breaking about identifying these risks—what was
new was the way we‘d be talking about them. In the public debate about media
effects, it was common practice to distill… well, bastardize… a large-scale study
to fit the size and scale of a newspaper article or 3 minute section on the
evening news, either condemning or condoning media use. We were trying
something new, summed up in a line Steve and I used probably a hundred times
over the course of the project:
‚Not everyone who smokes gets cancer,
but the more you smoke,
the more likely you are to get cancer.‛
We all knew smoking was ‗bad‘ for us, and it had negative implications. But
hearing ―you‘re all going to die from smoking‖ didn‘t work because there were
many very alive smokers. Similarly, saying that TV and heavy media use was
going to cause obesity, aggression and so on wasn‘t going to work. Anyone in
the audience could discredit such a bold statement. Instead, we started by
having the audience agree these three risks were actually real risks. Then our
argument was that the less media children use, the less they are at risk of both
aggression and obesity.
It was a much softer approach than a Postman-inspired rant, which didn‘t
negate agency on the part of the media user (basically our entire audience). This
was important—the user had to feel respected and in control, not vulnerable or
manipulated.
127
It was also not our own idea. The use of risk communication184 for a project
aimed at reducing media use by elementary-school children had been the focus
of a major study in the United States, whose success inspired Steve to create a
Canadian version of it.
Introducing: US medical researcher Dr. Thomas Robinson—dunn-dunn-dunn!
Thomas N. Robinson, MD, MPH is the Irving Schulman, MD Endowed Professor in
Child Health, Professor of Pediatrics and of Medicine, in the Division of General
Pediatrics and the Stanford Prevention Research Center at Stanford University
School of Medicine, and Director of the Center for Healthy Weight at Stanford
University and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford. Dr. Robinson
focuses on "solution-oriented" research, developing and evaluating health
promotion and disease prevention interventions for children, adolescents and their
families to directly inform medical and public health practice and policy.
His research is largely experimental in design, conducting school-, family- and
community-based randomized controlled trials to test the efficacy and/or
effectiveness of theory-driven behavioral, social and environmental interventions
to prevent and reduce obesity, improve nutrition, increase physical activity and
decrease inactivity, reduce smoking, reduce children's television and media use,
and demonstrate causal relationships between hypothesized risk factors and
health outcomes. Robinson's research is grounded in social cognitive models of
human behavior, uses rigorous methods, and is performed in generalizable
settings with diverse populations, making the results of his research more relevant
for clinical and public health practice and policy. 185
OK, so Steve probably didn‘t have music playing in his head when he talked
about Robinson.
―Along with his colleagues at Stanford University, Dr. Robinson created an
18-lesson, 6-month classroom curriculum based on the idea of reducing
students‘ TV, movie and video game use. What we‘d like to do is adapt his
approach to try something similar with your students.‖
184. The National Research Council (NRC) defines risk communication as: "an interactive process
of exchange of information and opinion among individuals, groups, and institutions" that, via
two-way communication ―can highlight more clearly the nature and size of the conflict,
leading the way to a more informed dialogue.‖ Prevention Report (U.S. Public Health Service,
February/March 1995), accessed June 9, 2014,
http://odphp.osophs.dhhs.gov/pubs/prevrpt/archives/95fm1.htm.
185. Centre for Health Policy/Centre for Primary Care and Outcomes Research, ―People: Thomas
N. Robinson, MD, MPH,‖ accessed June 9, 2014,
http://healthpolicy.stanford.edu/people/thomas_n_robinson
128
We didn‘t actually propose to replicate Robinson‘s randomized trial approach, 186
in which students were divided into a nonselective group, where students
limited screen time overall, and a selective group, which limited TV viewing to
certain times of day or certain programs. But we saw three features of his study,
in particular, as pointing in the direction we wanted to go.
First, Robinson‘s emphasis on ‗solution-oriented‘ research pointed to research
that not only helped to explore the risks, as others had done, but would actually
do something to reduce them. This would help us move from the common
‗problem-oriented‘ or ‗disease-oriented‘ paradigm of media studies, where
researchers were constantly pointing out the problems, to actively seeking out
solutions.
Second, Robinson wanted to focus on the community involved in schools, and
not just treat schools as vehicles for delivering information. This made
complete sense: we didn‘t want to be the know-it-alls; we wanted both to
support changes in the home (which really is the place these changes in media
habits needed to happen) and also be open to adjusting and changing our
lessons based on what we learned.
Third, Robinson wanted to develop curriculum for elementary students. You‘d
think this would be common. After all, it was fairly easy to find other outside
programs being brought into the schools—drug ed, sex ed, bullying, gardening,
Roots of Empathy, reading, etc… all understood and valued early interventions.
But most of the media education programs we were aware of focused on
teenagers—neglecting the fact that media immersion was starting at the earliest
ages.
186. Thomas N. Robinson and Dina L.G. Borzekowski, ―Effects of the SMART Classroom
Curriculum to Reduce Child and Family Screen Time,‖ Journal of Communication, 56, no. 1
(2006): 1-26; see also Thomas N. Robinson, ―Reducing Children's Television Viewing to Prevent
Obesity; A Randomized Controlled Trial,‖ Journal of American Medical Association, 282, no. 16
(1999), 1561-1567.
129
At age one, she‘s watching Teletubbies and eating the food of its
‗promo partners‘ Burger King and McDonald‘s. Kids can recognize
logos by eighteen months, and before reaching their second
birthday, they‘re asking for products by brand name. By three or
three and a half, experts say, children start to believe that brands
communicate their personal qualities, for example, that they‘re
cool, or strong, or smart. Even before starting school, the
likelihood of having a television in their bedrooms is 25 percent,
and their viewing time is just over two hours a day. Upon arriving
at the schoolhouse steps, the typical first grader can evoke 200
brands. And he or she has already accumulated an unprecedented
number of possessions, beginning with an average of seventy new
toys a year.187
Steve has launched into an explanation of why elementary students are
the key demographic for our project.
―Media habits start early and are more difficult to change later on. We
need to be educating young children who are still formulating their media
taste habits and culture. This group is often ignored because people feel
they are too young to examine their own patterns of media use and too
young to be critical about content or the media industry. Robinson‘s work
shows this is not necessarily the case.‖
Young children had been described in much of the older media effects literature
as vulnerable, susceptible and in need of protection. Based on my previous
research, I had this strong suspicion that they were not as susceptible as we all
thought; they (like us) had only fallen into habits, and since media had become
so intertwined with growing up, many of their habits were associated with
media use. They didn‘t necessarily chose to spend 3 hours watching TV a
night—they often didn‘t know what else to do, and let‘s face it, watching TV is
much easier than many other activities.
187. Schor, Born to Buy, 19.
130
If we could interject a bit of inquiry into these habits a young age, maybe the
taken-for-grantedness of media could be disrupted a bit. And it was really
disrupting these habits that was a main goal of mine.
If we were working with elementary students, we would have to try and work
with the parents as well. Evidence suggested that parents played a key role, or
one of the key roles, in how media was used in the home. We had seen this with
the Rescue Heroes study, but many other researchers were starting to look more
closely at the mediation of mass media in the home. Under the influence of
many recommendations from leading medical bodies in the US, 188 there was
growing evidence that parents were indeed trying to limit children‘s exposure to
media in the home, and that the attitudes they had about media directed their
mediation styles.189
In this climate, it made more and more sense for the schools to implement
programs to support parents‘ efforts. Rather than individual families trying to
shift the tides of the media and childhood relationship, groups of children could
partake in a shared experience that could open up new possibilities at home. Yet
as far as programming goes, there was very little out there for elementary
kids—and what there was did not necessarily emphasize watching less TV, a
finding that Robinson remarked on as well.
Surprisingly, few scientific studies directly focus on reducing
children‘s television viewing. Rather, most research interventions
try to teach children media education and critical viewing skills
(Cordes-Bolz, 1982; Dorr, Graves, & Phelps, 1980; Huesmann, Eron,
188. ―The American Academy of Pediatrics advises that children aged 2 years and younger watch
no television and that children older only educational, nonviolent programming (American
Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Public Education, 2001). Other recommendations to
limit children‘s screen time come from the American Psychological Association (1995), the
American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (2001), the American Medical
Association (1996), the National Parents Association (2001), the National Education
Association (1999), and the U.S. Surgeon General (2000), among many others.‖ Thomas N.
Robinson and Dina L.G. Borzekowski, ―Effects of the SMART Classroom Curriculum to Reduce
Child and Family Screen Time,‖ Journal of Communication, 56, no. 1 (2006): 2.
189. Annenberg Public Policy Center, Television in the Home: The 1997 Survey of Parents and
Children (Washington, DC: Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania,
1997); A.I. Nathanson, ―The Unintended Effects of Parental Mediation of Television on
Adolescents,‖ Media Psychology, 4 (2002): 207–230.
131
Klein, Brice, & Fischer, 1983; Roberts, Christenson, Gibson, Mooser
& Goldberg, 1980; Singer, Zuckerman, & Singer, 1980).190
Steve is winding up to deliver the conclusive argument.
―The most important thing to note is that Robinson‘s study was a success.
The researchers compared children‘s body mass index and levels of
aggression before and after they went through the media education
program. The results indicated that the experimental schools had reduced
school bullying and slowed weight gain as a result of a 25% reduction in
media use.‖
Robinson‘s success was a huge boost for media education, because of the fact
that it had been conducted within the standard scientific paradigm and met the
tests of validity and reliability (see chapter 1). Publication in leading scientific
journals meant it had been validated by the wider scientific community as good
work.
Prior to these intervention studies and our own television
reduction study, the only studies to examine media reduction
interventions were small and did not employ randomized
controlled design.191
The project was also theoretically sound, basing its approach on Bandura‘s
work.
190. C.R. Corder-Bolz, "Television Literacy and Critical Television Viewing Skills," in Television and
Behavior: Ten Years of Scientific Progress and Implications for the Eighties, Volume II, Technical
Reviews (DHHS Publication No. ADM 82-1196), edited by D. Pearl, L. Bouthilet, and J. Lazar
(Rockville, MD: National Institute of Mental Health, 1982), 91-101; A. Dorr, S.B. Graves and E.
Phelps, "Television Literacy for Young Children," Journal of Communication, 30 no. 3 (1980):
71-83; L.R. Huesmann, L.D. Eron, R. Klein, P. Brice and P. Fischer, "Mitigating the Imitation of
Aggressive Behaviors by Changing Children‘s Attitudes about Media Violence," Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 44 (1983): 899-910; D.F. Roberts, P. Christenson, W.A.
Gibson, L. Mooser, and M.E. Goldberg, "Developing Discriminating Consumers," Journal of
Communication, 30 no. 3 (1980): 94-105; D.G. Singer, D.M. Zuckerman, and J.L. Singer,
"Helping Elementary School Children Learn about TV," Journal of Communication, 30 no.
3 (1980): 84–93; all quoted in Robinson, "Effects of the SMART Classroom Curriculum," 2-3.
191. Thomas N. Robinson and Dina L.G. Borzekowski, ―Effects of the SMART Classroom
Curriculum to Reduce Child and Family Screen Time,‖ Journal of Communication, 56, no. 1
(2006): 3.
132
Bandura‘s (1986) social cognitive model provided the conceptual
foundation for our intervention because the model is well
grounded in experimental research, provides directives for the
production of behavior-change interventions, and has
demonstrated efficacy in previous school-based behavior-change
interventions, and has demonstrated efficacy in previously schoolbased behavior-change research (Bandura, 1986, 1997; Killen et al.,
1988). In social cognitive theory, behavior develops and is
maintained through the reciprocal interplay of personal,
behavioral, and environmental factor (Bandura, 1986). Within this
context, the social cognitive model offers four processes that
influence learning and adopting new behaviours, and are
particularly helpful for designing behavior-change interventions:
attention, retention, production, and motivation (Bandura, 1986).192
Yet for all its success, this was an American study, conducted with American
kids. We wanted to see what the Canadian experience was. This was typical of
Steve‘s work, where the study of Canadian kids and families could serve both as
a comparison to what was happening elsewhere, and to suggest that the
Canadian situation might be a bit different from that in the U.S. and thus in
need of separate attention.
A Jedi’s strength flows from the Force
―…and now,‖ Steve finishes, ―I‘ll turn it over to Kym, who will talk about
what the Canadian version would look like to implement.‖
I smile and adjust my papers—opting to place them on the table, rather
than hold them, once I feel my heart race and I start to shake.
―Well, firstly this is a great experience for everyone. As Steve mentioned
this is a new and unique approach that addresses major issues of current
concern to the school district—bullying and children‘s health.
192. Albert Bandura, Social Foundations of Thought and Action (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall., 1986); Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (New York: Freeman, 1997);
J.D. Killen, M.J. Telch, T.N. Robinson, N. Maccoby, C.B. Taylor and J.W. Farquhar,
―Cardiovascular disease risk reduction for tenth graders,‖ Journal of the American Medical
Association, 260 (1988) : 1728–1733; all quoted in Thomas N. Robinson and Dina L.G.
Borzekowski, ―Effects of the SMART Classroom Curriculum to Reduce Child and Family Screen
Time,‖ Journal of Communication, 56, no. 1 (2006): 3-4.
133
―We know that often teachers are asked to teach media education, yet
given little to no training or support. We want to change this. By letting us
come into the classroom and run the programs, the teachers will be able to
learn directly from us, and also be provided with Canadian-based lessons
and research.
―We intend to develop the curriculum in consultation with the teachers.
The main focus will be on risk reduction—helping provide the students
with an opportunity to make their own decisions about media use. This
will involve them doing their own research and digging into the role that
media plays in their lives. We want them to see their own habits and
decide for themselves to make changes.‖
In general, we wanted to follow Robinson‘s strategy of developing awareness of
media use, followed by a ―turnoff week‖ when children were encouraged to find
alternatives to their usual media habits. We saw this as including the following
elements:
Reflection—allowing students, parents and teachers to examine their
own media use patterns, preferences, habits and understandings of the
role that media plays in their lives;
Deconstruction—providing students and parents with opportunities to
deconstruct images, values, concepts and notions that they hold about
media and its impact on their lives, through critical examination of their
thoughts and feelings;193
Finally, reconstruction—providing students and parents with means to
take charge of their media environments and make changes to the habits,
preferences or definitions that they had developed previously.
193. The influence of Len Masterman (see below) is apparent here. In his media education
program he discussed the notion of ‗demythologizing‘, a process which would focus on
making ideologies visible ―and hence to reveal that ‗suppressed ideological function‘ of media
texts.‖
134
The intervention… consisted of eighteen 30- to 50-minute classroom lessons taught
by the regular third- and fourth-grade classroom teachers (trained by the research
staff) as part of the standard curriculum in the intervention school. The majority of
lessons were taught during the first 2 months. Early lessons included selfmonitoring and reporting of television, videotape, and video game use to motivate
children to want to reduce the time they spent in these activities. These lessons
were followed by a TV Turnoff during which children were challenged to watch no
television or videotapes and play no video games for 10 days. After the turnoff,
children were encouraged to follow a 7-hour per week television, videotape, and
video game budget. To help with budgeting, each household also received an
electronic television time manager (TV Allowance, Miami, Fla). Additional lessons
taught children to become "intelligent viewers" by using their viewing and video
game time more selectively. Several final lessons enlisted children as advocates for
reducing media use. Parent newsletters were designed to motivate parents to help
their children stay within their budgets, and suggested strategies for limiting
television, videotape, and video game use for the entire family. We allowed parents
to decide whether to include computer use in their child‘s budget 194
This is where Steve jumped in and said: ―Cultural Judo!‖
Steve, being the sage professor, always came up with a catchy phrase to describe
his research. In this case he was asking us to ‗use the force‘ that existed in
children‘s culture already. You may see Judo as the building of skills use to
throw people around, which seems like a very odd way to teach! Yet, the name
itself means ―gentle way,‖ and it is all about working with, rather than against,
the power of an opponent.
In short, resisting a more powerful opponent will result in your
defeat, whilst adjusting to and evading your opponent‘s attack will
cause him to lose his balance, his power will be reduced, and you
will defeat him. This can apply whatever the relative values of
power, thus making it possible for weaker opponents to beat
significantly stronger ones. This is the theory of ju yoku o seisu
(gentleness controls hardness).195
194. Thomas N. Robinson, M. L. Wilde, L.C. Navracruz, K. F. Haydel and A. Varady, ―Effects of
Reducing Children's Television and Video Game Use on Aggressive Behavior: A Randomized
Controlled Trial,‖ Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 155, no. 1 (2001): 18.
195. Jigoro Kano, Mind Over Muscle: Writings from the Founder of Judo, edited by Naoki Murata
(Tokyo: Kodansha, 2005), 39-40; quoted in Wikipedia, ―Judo,‖ accessed June 9, 2014,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judo.
135
Our own work, and mounting criticism of media education programs in general,
led us to believe that simply resisting or combatting the forces of kid culture
and/or the marketing forces of the entertainment industries was not an
effective approach. The premise of cultural judo was that we could provide
students with the knowledge to see through the entertainment industries and to
help them lose their balance (media habits) a bit for them to see the taken-forgranted in a new way.
So there are two levels to our use of this term:
1. We needed to work with the kids. We needed to trust in their abilities to be
thoughtful reflective participants in media culture.
2. We needed to provide them with the skills to adjust and evade marketer‘s
ploys—not necessarily to fight against them, but to use their ‗powers‘ to turn
them aside.
The oh-so-official looking school board reps around the table love the
project!
They see it as a way of addressing two of their key priorities: bullying and
health.
We are in!
And now… I have to create a curriculum…196
As well as Robinson‘s rather sketchy description of the SMART curriculum,197 I
had a number of themes created by Steve to work with: personal media use (a
very important part of our search for before-and-after evidence); heroes and
196. Developing the curriculum was my job. Shane, the other RA, had the job of organizing the
massive amounts of literature on the three risks, distilling them into dossiers for easy
digestion.
197. Steve contacted Dr. Robinson to say we were doing a Canadian version of his study and we‘d
love to have the lesson to use and then compare the results. He responded—―They are not
YET ready for SALE…. Email back in a year.‖ So we were truly on our own. (The SMART
curriculum can now be accessed at http://notv.stanford.edu/.)
136
villains (connected to Steve‘s interest in commercial play and also our recent
Rescue Heroes project); fair play (also connected to Steve‘s work and our
previous projects); and, of course, the main reason for it all: Tune out the Screen
Week.
Hmm… I wonder if I can find any media education curriculum
literature to guide me. In large-scale studies, Canada is often hyped
as one of the leading nations in media education. OK, I do find this
hard to believe from where I‘m standing. Sure, BC has identified
media education as a cross-curricular focus from K to 12)—so yah,
we/re ‗on it‘… But teachers have no training and few to no
resources. Is that all there is? 198
The curriculum development was based on three goals:
1) to collect data so we could prove that an intervention could reduce media
use—and thereby reduce the risks associated with it;
2) to help the students become researchers—and make sure they had their own
data to manipulate, correlate and compare;
3) to create lessons with a dual purpose—learning for the kids and data
collection for us—thus I needed to find ways to connect with math, reading,
writing for all the grades; pleasing the teacher and the parents was essential if
we wanted to get the data we needed.
The tune out week activity was really the highlight of the whole program. It
would provide the turning point of the research—the point after which we could
gather the ‗post‘ data.
198. Media-education programs of the time often lacked extensive teacher training or
administrative support, and were loosely defined, under-resourced, or focused on technical
training rather than critical understanding of how media was impacting children‘s lives. B.
Duncan, J. Pungente and R. Shepherd, ―Media education in Canada‖, in Weaving Connections:
Educating for Peace, Social and Environmental Justice, edited by T. Goldstein & D. Selby
(Toronto: Sumach, 2000); David Buckingham, Media Education: Literacy, Learning and
Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).
137
It wasn‘t all about getting them to stop watching or using, it was about getting
them to find alternatives to the embedded habits they had formed over the
years.199 This was something that really drew me into the program and impelled
me to go without sleep, or showers, or seeing my family—I wanted so
desperately to find a way for them to open up to the idea of alternatives, to let
them see beyond their media habits.
I want them to break free from the hold of consumer culture. I
have great fun being in ‗control‘ of my media habits now. It‘s
freeing to not feel addicted to TV—to decide when and why I watch
something. I want them to have the same feeling—of freedom of
choice, not habit.
When you can‘t think of anything else to do you‘ll fall into habits. We‘d heard
them say this. So breaking habits, disrupting the regularity of constant TV
viewing was a major goal for me as I tried to track down worksheets and
curriculum ideas.200
Many of the truths we cling to depend on our point of
view
A bit of digging around, and I found Len Masterman‘s book Teaching the
Media201—as well as a bunch of school-based projects, including drug and
alcohol awareness programs, just to see what had been done. But it was
Masterman‘s book that captured and held my attention. At the time he wrote
199. This was exactly the approach taken in the Robinson study—not stopping but intervening.
―Targeting all screen time but incorporating selective viewing intervention approaches allows
parents to exert their own belief and preferences about individual media and/or content.
Targeting all screen time, therefore, was expected to produce the greatest parent and teacher
‗buy in‘ for the intervention, and providing this element of parental choice and control was
designed to increase self-motivation for their participation in screen-time-reducing
behaviours.‖ Robinson and Borzekowski, ―Effects of the SMART Classroom Curriculum,‖ 6.
200. Buckingham notes the prevalence in media education of prescriptive lessons incorporating
textbooks, worksheets and teachers‘ booklets that are geared at guiding students towards the
‗right‘ deconstruction or interpretation of various media. This is most often seen in the field
of Language Arts, to which media education is often relegated. David Buckingham, Media
Education, op. cit.
201. Len Masterman, Teaching the Media (London: Comedia, 1985).
138
this book, he was a Lecturer in Education at Nottingham University, and was
cited as an influential figure in media education programs in Britain, Australia
and Europe. Oddly enough, such appraisals didn‘t include Canada, but as I got
to know his work, it became quite clear that he had been a major influence in
shaping the goals and rationales of the media education organizations in BC and
Ontario as well.
Not only did Masterman lay out the reasons for media education in his first
chapter called ‗Why?‘, but in chapter 2 he tackled the question of ‗How?‘, which
was very helpful for newbies in the field. Even more importantly, he discussed
‗How not to‘—and somehow this seemed like the right place to start.
Looking through the table of contents for the WHY chapter, even though
Masterman was writing in 1985 and the media risk project started in 2001, there
was a lot of overlap between his ideas and ours.
Media saturation—not only did we agree, but had plenty of our own hard-earned
data from BC teens, children and families and Korea youth to back this claim up.
Media influence—again, not only did our own projects help to solidify our
perceptions of this, but there was a mountain of literature with longitudinal and
cross-cultural studies to corroborate our own research.
Manufacturing and management of information—basically the political economy
focus that Joe had started for me and Steve continued, asking us to always keep in
mind who owned what and how it influences what information is seen or not seen.
Media and democracy—absolutely connected to Steve‘s PhD work on voter
influence: a look at how media has ―now penetrated to the heart of our
democratic process.‖
Importance of visual communication—another ah-hah moment connected to Steve
and the what-the-hell-is-he-doing-making-videos question. Yes, outside of school
the visual world encompasses us—so why not teach how to read and decode visual
communication as well? It finally made complete sense to me,
Educate for the future—Masterman saw a tendency towards polarization, that
students would leave school with either ―unwarranted faith in the integrity of the
media‖ or a ―undifferentiated skepticism which sees the media as sources of all
evil‖—once again this tied in with our search for balance.
Growing privatization of information—Masterman was concerned with deregulation and its long-term impact, tying in with Steve‘s work on toy marketing
and kid culture as well as others‘ concerns about the broader
commercial/corporate landscape.
139
Launching myself into ―How not to…‖ I discovered that Masterman critiqued
four common perceptions of media: the media as agents of cultural decline; the
media as popular art forms; the media as aids to learning, and disseminators of
knowledge and experience; and the media as agents of communication. His
survey of the field resonated for me, and helped me pinpoint where Steve and
I—and also Robinson (since we wanted to duplicate his project)—might locate
ourselves in the universe of media education.
The media as agents of cultural decline
Masterman claims we can trace media panics back to 1933, when F.R. Leavis and
Denys Thompson published Culture and the Environment: The Training of
Critical Awareness.202 The book was a call to teachers to ―resist corruption of
culture,‖ and to preserve
the literary heritage, and the language, the values and the health of
the nation in the face of the corrupting influence of the media
which offer(s) superficial pleasures in place of the authentic values
of great art and literature.203
They felt that the school not only had the moral obligation, but also the means
to prevent the corruption of society through the education of taste. If they
could only inoculate the children against popular culture, low culture, then the
values of high culture might be preserved.
Although Masterman wonders about the implications of the overtly moral and
even religious overtones of the Leavis and Thompson text, he does concede that
the book presented media education as an ―acceptable and intellectually
respectable activity‖ in the schools, opening the door for other educators to do
the same. On the other hand, as he points out, dismissing the pleasures of
children‘s current media use as uncivilized, uncultured and meaningless can
erode relationships among teachers and students, making media education
202. F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and the Environment: The Training of Critical
Awareness (London: Chatto & Windus, 1933).
203. Masterman, Teaching the Media, 7.
140
more difficult and problematic. Furthermore, the idea that children can
somehow be inoculated against the negative impact of media may encourage
teachers to see their students as passive recipients, both of negative cultural
values delivered via the media and of the good or appropriate values delivered
by the teacher.
Despite these weaknesses, Masterman suggests that there still is a lot to be
learned from this early book of Leavis and Thompson, including
its anti-utilitarian spirit; its emphasis upon critical reading; its
anti-capitalism and rejection of market values; its challenging of
cultural and social orthodoxies, and its pugnacious education
politics and rejection of a notion of education designed to
reproduce the prevailing order.204
And this is where Masterman endeared himself to me—his ability to see the
value in a piece of work that had long been dismissed as elitist and
protectionist. I had for a long time only read critiques of Leavis and Thompson;
yet much media research until the early 1980s provided ‗evidence‘ for a
continued sense of panic, and arguments to maintain the protectionist
approach.205 Indeed, there is much evidence in the field of teachers and parents
seeking to inoculate children from lowbrow influences through censorship,
restrictions, and a ‗good‘, ‗healthy‘ dose of ‗authentic values‘ or ‗classic
knowledge‘—Shakespeare, poetry and classic books.206 Arguably, all of these
influential positions in the field had their roots in L and T‘s early work.
This is where I first planted my feet—feeling overwhelmingly
responsible for children‘s wellbeing, reducing any exposure to
violence or other harmful images, providing a plethora of
204. Masterman, Teaching the Media, 46.
205. See e.g. Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: William
Morrow, 1977); Marie Winn, The Plug-In Drug, op. cit.; Neil Postman, The Disappearance of
Childhood and Amusing Ourselves to Death, op. cit.; and longitudinal qualitative research such
as George Comstock, Eli A. Rubinstein and John P. Murray, Television and Social Behavior:
Reports and Papers (Washington, DC: Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on
Television and Social Behavior, National Institute of Mental Health, 1972) and George Gerbner
and Larry Gross, ―The Scary World of TV‘s Heavy Viewer,‖ Psychology Today 9 no. 11 (1976):
41-45, 190.
206. Duncan, Pungente, and Shepherd, ―Media education in Canada‖; Buckingham, Media
Education.
141
alternatives so that the one perspective, image or language used in
the media is not the only one the kids see. So, yah, I guess this
sounds like inoculating them.
Many would claim when we raised Tayme we fell into this
protectionist, elitist stance—not providing her with all the
normalities of childhood, such as Disney, Sesame Street, Teletubbies,
etc. Well, yes, I was protecting her from images I found offensive
and shallow, but when she was exposed to these images at other
people‘s homes we didn‘t make a big deal about it—we didn‘t
launch across the living room and swoop her up. We just didn‘t
endorse one particular perspective; Disney, for instance, was just
one of the versions of Cinderella or a princess story she got, not the
ONLY one.
Our odd ways (according to family and friends), didn‘t seem so odd
as she grew and they realized that Tayme wasn‘t some outcast
freak because she didn‘t know who Minnie Mouse was. She was a
social, sweet, creative, chatty, playful child… we proved to those
worrywarts that media culture is NOT kid culture and a child CAN
live without it.
Interestingly enough, many of the early works in media studies that fed the
protectionist stance were based in the same view of the audience as vulnerable
and passive that one finds in Leavis and Thompson. As more recent authors
have pointed out, this was in keeping with assumptions across the social
sciences.
The field of communication has strong ties to modernism. Early
communication theory was based on modernist assumptions.
During the 1940s, quantitative communication research developed
to describe, explain, and improve modern social institutions. This
administrative research proved especially useful in planning and
implementing promotional communication campaigns that could
defend democracy while boosting sales for consumer goods and
142
services. Highly profitable media industries were developed,
guided by ratings data and formative research.207
These authors relied on behaviorist methodologies to examine and measure
viewers‘ brainwave patterns while watching TV, the psychopathology of TV
viewing, the impact of violent and anti-social programming on viewer‘s
behaviours, and the physical activity levels and reading behaviors of children in
a media-saturated environment. It was the studies and publications emerging
from this general approach that provided a plethora of ‗evidence‘ to justify the
moral panics associated with media‘s impact on children, and to persuade
parents and educators to create counter-measures and means of protection for
children faced with these everyday dangers.
I am still grateful to Masterman for digging deep enough into the ‗old‘ literature
to help us see it in a more multidimensional way; in a more optimistic way. At
one point, he even quotes Thompson as saying the purpose of education
―should be to turn out ‗misfits‘, not spare parts.‖208 Masterman‘s willingness to
dig deeper into the nuances of the media field literature, and to resist falling
into a quick critique, reminds me of the ways I‘ve had to defend Steve‘s
research, because depending on how you read it you may get something
completely different.
207. D.K. Davis & J. Jasinski, ―Beyond the Culture Wars: An Agenda for Research on
Communication and Culture,‖ Journal of Communication 3 (1993): 141.
208. Denys Thompson, ―Advertising God,‖ Scrutiny 1 no. 3 (December, 1932); quoted in Len
Masterman, Teaching the Media, 46.
143
The media as popular art forms
According to Masterman, the influence of Culture and Environment began to
wane when a new generation of teachers had integrated media into their own
lives. These teachers not only felt more comfortable bringing mass media into
the classroom (magazines, newspapers, comics; radio, film, TV) but were also
less likely to see their work as a crusade to rescue children from the evils of
media.209
This significantly shifted the tone of media education. The ‗life and death‘ fears
had waned, though some measure of protectionism remained, and education
shifted from teaching against the media to teaching through the media. As
discussed briefly in chapter 3, the rise of British Cultural Studies likewise
represented a significant shift in the media studies field. We see this in the
voices of educators such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, who are inclined
to see media as part of a broader cultural system rather than an autonomous
entity.
Hall: Where education is concerned, it seems to me we are
confronted with a number of problems, and the main one is that
we are not yet quite sure what it is we would be trying to do if we
tried to help children discriminate as regards mass media.210
Williams (more to the point): I will have no more blaming the
young… and no more blaming the parents and no more nagging,
until we are prepared as a society to do something radical about
211
the institutions.
Media education began to concentrate on ways of helping students develop
critical judgment, not just in the context of classical ―high‖ culture, but in other
209. Research with teachers in Ontario indicated that the three paradigms discussed by
Masterman ―roughly correspond to three different ‗generations‘ of teachers, and we can see
something of the difference that the paradigms make to their classroom practices‖ Andrew
Hart, Teaching the Media; International Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1998): 182.
210. Stuart Hall, heard at the Popular Culture and Personal Responsibility conference (NUT, 1960),
quoted in Masterman, Teaching the Media, 51.
211. Raymond Williams (NUT, verbatim Report, op. cit., p.18), quoted in Masterman, Teaching the
Media, 52. Institutions in this context meant the BBC and other media institutions, but also
the education system.
144
forms of media as well.212 Institutions and educators began treating popular
cultural (e.g. Hollywood) movies as art created by serious artists; the emphasis
on aesthetics moved from the high- versus lowbrow distinction to a deeper
structural analysis of the text—an important shift which foreshadowed a
growing focus on textual analysis in other forms of media.213 The fast-growing
field of media education and film studies in university, however, did not
translate to practical applications in the schools. Even as theoretical debates
about media blossomed within academia, practitioners were often excluded
from these conversations.
Buckingham suggests that these developments of the 1970s were premised on
the notion that changes in media education would flow from the university to
public schools through the education of parents and teachers. In this light, it
was possible to believe that the establishment of a film studies course for
university students would help students in elementary and secondary schools—
―a view which even at the time was probably anachronistic.‖214 As Masterman
notes, such programs were vulnerable to charges of elitism, particularly when
they treated foreign films, documentaries and avant-garde films as aesthetically
superior to other films. 215 The focus was frequently still on distinguishing good
from bad values/aesthetics/ideals, based on the notion that students‘ media
tastes were in need of training and refinement.
Oh, this idea is too tempting, particularly after witnessing some of
the crap that kids watch—yah, I am talking about you, Nickelodeon
and Disney.
212. The School of Communication at SFU reaped the benefits of this shift in the early 1970s.
213. In the UK, the new era in media education was marked by the launch of two journals, Screen
and Screen Education, by the Society for Education in Film and Television (SEFT). Contributors
drew on a mix of Althusserian Marxism, structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalytic theory,
effectively displacing Leavisite literary criticism. David Buckingham, Watching Media Learning:
Making Sense of Media Education (London: Angleterre, 1990).
214. Ibid., 12.
215. Len Masterman, Media Education in 1990‘s Europe: A Teacher‘s Guide (Strasbourg: Council of
Europe, 1994).
145
If you ever want to do a Clockwork Orange move on someone, just
tie them to a chair in front of the screechy, vacuous, stereotypical
garbage designed for tweens/teens…
… but Seinfeld, now that‘s high-class!
The fact is, even though I try to be open and accepting that the
distinction between high and low culture is superficial and in need
of shattering, I still have a very strict sense of what‘s worth
watching. Now that Tayme is 15, we see, thankfully, that the
training we did when she was young has paid off. She has a keen
sense of when the product placements have gone too far, leaving a
distaste for movies which go too far; she makes sure to read books
before she watches the film; and she has a sophisticated sense of
humour—ahh… see… I am still entrenched in the high/low
dichotomy, however much I try to deny it.
Masterman, on the whole, sees the education of judgment as a worthy tradition
in media education. I hear echoes of Kline‘s two-camp argument in his critique
of approaches that reject qualitative distinctions:
Are we to be denied our right and duty to help our students
distinguish the creative from the meretricious, the worthwhile
from the third-rate in the media?… Are we sacrificing too much in
a dangerous slide into relativism?216
Rather than abandoning the question of what content or knowledge is to be
valued, he would like it to be
moved from centre-stage in order to facilitate our chief objective:
increasing our students‘ understanding of the media—of how and
in whose interest they work, how they are organized, how they
produce meaning, how they go about the business of representing
‗reality‘, and of how those representations are understood by those
who receive them.217
216. Masterman, Teaching the Media, 61.
217. Ibid.
146
The media as aids to learning, disseminators of knowledge and
experience
While Masterman has reservations about these earlier approaches to media
education, he is especially skeptical about the claims made for media as neutral
educational tools. His observation that such a view is not only ‗common-sensed‘
but powerfully institutionalized and resourced within education ties directly
into my early research with toddlers and computers, when I observed how
parents had come to feel that this new technology, with its interactive
capabilities, was a magical tool for learning and a key to their children‘s future.
To be effective, it is argued, teachers need to possess enough
technological mastery to ‗match‘ teaching and learning methods to
the appropriate technology. Educational technologists are available
in many large educational institutions to give material support
both to teaching staff, and to this view of the media and they, in
turn, are backed up in many countries in the world by wellestablished professional networks, publications and organisations,
all promulgating, with greater efficiency and at far greater expense
than the media education movement can muster, principles which
are the very antithesis of our own.218
Masterman doesn‘t deny that connection to media can be helpful in the
classroom, but he does warn that the integration needs to go beyond wheeling
technology into the classroom and knowing how to press play. If technology is
integrated and woven into the curriculum to provide ―a livelier and more
interesting classroom environment for the student,‖ then it, like other forms of
information, must face the same critical scrutiny.
I am reminded of my visit to the North Edmonton elementary
school. No critical scrutiny there!
In the Media Lab, we often try to ―demystify‖ the media by showing
children how the magic is done. This seems to be part of what
Masterman is calling for. But I wonder how far we can go in
teaching students about all the cunning ways certain viewpoints are
218. Ibid., 62.
147
conveyed. Unlike Steve, I am more interested in keeping media out
of the classroom than bringing it in. To me those screens and
images will always have a Trojan Horse kind of feel about them.
If educational media are not opened up for critique, Masterman tells us, ―then
an entirely mystificatory view of the media, and of knowledge, will have been
smuggled in under the guise of educational progressivism and relevance‖ .219
The media as agents of communication
The fourth approach to media education has its roots in the development of
schools and programs of communication—a development which Masterman
regards with ambivalence. On the one hand, the influx of programs focused on
technical skills worked well to develop a tech-literate population; however, it did
little to develop equivalent critical abilities. What is more, as the
communications field grew, it came to encompass a tremendous range of
phenomena and ideas.
As someone now happily employed in a School of Communication,
this resonates with me. I remember the first course I taught. I was
sent the shell of the syllabus: Explorations of Mass Media. My task
was to fill it out. My first reaction was to fill my house with books….
sitting literally surrounded by books for days on end, combing
through them, much to the dismay of Tayme and Dana, who had to
jump over piles of books to get from the kitchen to the living room.
Even after THREE days, I seemed no closer to narrowing down the
reading list to 26.
Masterman was right; too much freedom causes much confusion
and a whole lot of stress. The field is just too damn big!
Masterman not only reminds us of the complexity of our field, but also of its
methodological issues. Communications is a composite of many other fields—
219. Ibid., 65.
148
anthropology, psychology, political science… meaning divisions exist even
within the field itself. This disconnect is clearly seen in the ―attempts to
separate communications from social, historical, legal and economic contexts in
which they are produced, circulated, transmitted and consumed.‖220 Such
―technicist‖ orientations have a lot to do with the strength of the media
industry. The advertising industry, in particular, has endlessly deep pockets to
coordinate massive research projects on the role of colour, rhythm, sound,
movement, etc. on young consumers, whereas critical educators are growing
grayer by the minute wondering where their next research grant money will
come from.
Masterman was writing in the 1980s, at the beginning of New Media Research
and the push towards more holistic endeavours—see Kellner‘s ideas in Chapter
3. However, this doesn‘t mean that even now, in 2014, we see an effortless
blurring of genres and methods in the exploration of the various facets of
communications. The focus of particular disciplines such as psychology or
political economy, within the broad field of communications, tends to weigh
heavily on what is written and how.
Interestingly enough, many of Masterman‘s critiques are also
tendencies of my young students (and myself as a young student):
lack of diversity of thought (missing social, political, history
complexity); relying on empirical research methods based on simple
effect models (neglecting to take into account how the audience
decodes the media); and looking at mass media forms as if they
existed in a vacuum.
My job currently is to ask my undergraduate students to expand
their silo perceptions of media, to broaden and complexify their
thinking. This is why I throw McLuhan at them! This routinely
causes great distress, but isn‘t that what Masterman is endorsing—
messiness, complexity and struggle?
220. Ibid., 68.
149
Named must your fear be before banish it you can
The district vice principal, Tom Tupper, did a fantastic job at rounding up four
diverse schools to take part in the project. Soon there were eight teachers and
178 students (91 male, 87 female) waiting for us to take them on a media
adventure. The schools varied from high SES (socio-economic status) to an ‗inner
city‘ school. This diversity suited the research component of the project quite
well—it was all about creating a program that was easily transferable. If it
worked with kids from vastly different socio-economic backgrounds, then we
were well on our way.
I was excited to meet with the teachers. I was getting pretty tired and
overwhelmed trying to develop curriculum for classes ranging from grade 2 to
6. Not only was I aware that the lessons might be weak and in need of tweaking,
I was also keenly aware of my own lack of training as a BC teacher. I wasn‘t
even finished my M.A.—so I was basically a nobody coming into the schools and
telling the teachers what they should and shouldn‘t be doing. I was anxious for
feedback and support.
Shane and I enter the library and I hand out the packages. They include a
week-by-week summary of the main themes.
Week 1) Media Audit. This will produce baseline data on what the students do on a
daily basis, which will then be used to compare to their media use during tune out
the screen week at the end of the project.
Week 2) Heroes and Heroines. We will ask children to identify the characteristics
that they admire most and talk about how the media influences those choices.
Week 3) Scripting and Re-scripting. Focuses on the idea of the villain or ‗bad guy‘.
We will discuss the characters of villains by comparing conflict in portrayed in
media with examples of bullying in real life.
Week 4) Fair Play. We will ask children to examine the games they like to play, the
difference between conflict and cooperation in games, and the way limits and
rules help make games both fair and fun.
Week 5) Tune Out Week. The final unit is preparation for the Tune Out the Screen
Challenge. They will also be asked to plan alternative activities so they can enjoy
the free time they gain during Tune Out week.
150
The teachers do not react the way I expect. Rather than jumping in
discussion, feedback, changing or adding of ideas to the lessons, they seem
to focus on my poor grammar, punctuation and line spacing. They leave
the main curriculum plan exactly the way it is. The only major change is
the creation of additional worksheets for those students who finish early—
extra little games, drawing space, or questions to keep them busy while
others are finishing.
I am not sure what is happening. We are beginning our work at the same
time as a BC-wide teacher‘s job action, and at this point the teachers are
working to rule. Does this have something to do with their lack of
reaction? Maybe the teachers don‘t want to invest much more energy and
time than they have already invested by meeting after school? Or maybe
they trust us since we are the experts coming to the school to deliver the
program?
I guess since I handed out the papers, I became the expert? I don‘t
feel like an expert! I meant the lessons as more of a brainstorming
start so they could be further developed. This was not the plan!
I was becoming increasingly aware of how much classroom teachers appreciated
having another teachers teach topics related to the social development and
practices of children—drug education, sex education, media education. It would
soon become apparent, in our quick chats before or after class, that our
teachers were happy to have a media expert field questions from the parents
and students and coordinate the project, since they themselves had not taken
media education courses in their own education, nor during their teacher-intraining courses. I still felt dissatisfied, but at least I could see where they were
coming from.
Having met with the teachers, our next step was to connect with the home
environment—the parents. There were two purposes to this. First, if we created
a strong supportive environment around the children that endorsed alternatives
to media, the students would be more likely to find those alternatives and shake
151
up their media habits. Second, we wanted to have the ‗blessing‘ of the parents
so that they would be on board when documentation came home such as
parental surveys, or when we asked the students to go without media for a
week.
As I prep for the first parents meeting I think about the story I am going to
tell. I realize that what I really want to tell is the story of my path of
discovery starting with Joe‘s class.
I want the parents to become acquainted with the early 1950s TV studies,
which I feel echo our present fears of computers and video games. I want
them to see the shocking statistics from research studies—―an average of
6,000 violent interactions in a single week of programming across the 23
channels that were examined, including both broadcast and cable
networks. More than half of the violent shows (53%) contained lethal acts,
and one in four of the programs with violence (25%) depicted the use of a
gun.‖
221
Part of our agenda was to shift laissez-faire parents from their open ways to a
more restrictive approach to media exposure. But we had to tread carefully…
Things might not go well if I critiqued their parenting styles directly, or if I
suggested that they were putting their children in harm‘s way.
[P]arents and teachers who must bear the consequences of this
shift in children's cultural environment are put on the defensive by
this framing of the issue. What the issue of proven harm obscures
is the fact that we have granted to marketers enormous power to
meddle in the key realms of children's culture—the peer group,
fantasy, stories and play. The key question we must pose is why
the marketplace must be given so much influence within the
matrix of socialization. Parents who are concerned or who resist
the cultural thrust of the market are told they have the choice to
control their children's television-viewing, to read, talk and play
221 Dale Kunkel, ―Effects of Television Violence on Children,‖ statement to the US Senate
Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation (June 26, 2007), accessed June 16,
2014, https://www.apa.org/about/gr/pi/advocacy/2008/kunkel-tv.aspx.
152
with their kids and, if they are really radical, to support media
literacy programmes in the schools.222
But this is where I want similarities between the parents listening to my
lecture and my own experiences as student ended. I don‘t want them to
feel the hopelessness I have felt, or the enormity of the forces reaching out
to influence their children. Rather, I want them to be inspired by our
project and hopeful that something could actually be done in our media
saturated world.
Using the theory of risk communication helped to maintain a level of respect
and understanding between the parents and ourselves. We talked about how
unreasonable it would be to see it as a simple causal relationship—many of us
watched Bugs Bunny and Road Runner, but we aren‘t violent adults. The
parents responded well to the analogy of the risks of smoking—it seemed that
they were on board. 223
There was only one major issue. I had two parents who were concerned about
the project displacing material that was already being taught in schools.
Fair enough. But on the other hand, REALLY? How can they not see this
as one of the most important parts of their child‘s learning this year? I am
still asking the kids to write, read, do worksheets, math calculations,
drawing, think critically. What am I missing?
I was doing all that I could to make sure the lessons weren‘t add-ons. I wanted
them to be integrated as much as possible into the existing curriculum. I never,
ever envisioned the lessons being a ―fun Friday afternoon activity‖—they needed
to be seen as valuable topics to be learned.
222. Kline, Out of the Garden, 350.
223. Some parents were desperately searching for answers. At one school almost all the parents
of the children showed up—the teacher and principals were amazed. One mother came up to
me after the presentation and shared her personal story. When their family first came to
Canada her son would not eat, so she began to feed him in front of the TV, because when he
was watching TV he would eat without a fuss. Now he always ate in front of the TV and had
become obese. She said to me, ―I don‘t know what to do now, what can I do?‖
153
Was this why I had found a school for Tayme that actually had an
Electronic Media and Television section in the Parent Handbook?
Not particularly common, even today—but this warning was
steeped in the early 20th century philosophy of the school‘s founder
Rudolph Steiner.
Current brain research now tends to confirm what Waldorf education has been
suggesting for decades: that the capacity for imagination is severely impaired by
repeated exposure to media images and television, and that the potential for
negative impact on the nervous system of developing children could be a
contributing factor in the substantial increase of learning disabilities…
We prefer for young children to be protected from exposure to television, videos,
audiocassettes or computers. We have observed that they are not able to cope with
the sense impressions generated by these media, as well as a correlation between
viewing and nervousness, inability to concentrate, anti-social behavior, a dimming
of the imagination and a general passivity. The younger the children, the more
vulnerable they are to these effects.
Preschool through Grade Three: no television or video games.
Grade Four and up: no television during the school week, avoid cartoons and
programs that are over-stimulating and those that feature violence.224
I definitely still had a strong protectionist streak… one that was
actually growing stronger as Tayme got older. She was 4 years old
at the time of the Media Risk Reduction Project. She had just
started pre-school and for the past four years I had to curb my
media use so she wouldn‘t be as addicted as I felt. We even put the
TV in the closet for a time when she was young—hauling it out and
slapping the sides (it was a crappy, old TV) to get it to work when
we wanted indulge in ―The X-Files‖ --after she was in bed, of course.
Even so, whenever I did fall off the wagon and found myself drifting
towards the TV late at night to be zombified, I always felt guilty. It
was like a dirty secret that I watched TV.
224. North Vancouver Waldorf School Parent‘s Handbook, accessed June 17, 2012,
http://www.vws.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Parent-Handbook.pdf.
154
So, back to my preparations for re-entering the classroom. This time at least the
kids and I spoke the same language and I actually had somewhat of a lesson
plan—whew, already two steps ahead of my Korean teaching experience. This
plan, of course, had a very different twist than any plan I had ever had before.
It was beyond just teaching; I was preparing to face these little kids, some only
seven, and asking them to begin to undo much of what their parents and the
media had done to them.
This is where I was feeling a tension between what I instinctively saw as the
teaching practice required in the class and the various waves/periods of media
education described by Masterman. I needed the students to take a radically
open stance (implying vulnerability) in looking at their media use, past-time
activities and habits—which meant media needed to ‗come into‘ the classrooms.
But it needed to be present in a different way from the approach most common
in schools, when content was carefully selected and crafted for the classroom.
Often the idea was to borrow what the children were using outside of the school
in hopes these topics or content would engage them with as much gusto as they
displayed in their leisure time.
For a long time, parents and educators worked hard to buffer the
schools‘ educational mandate from the encroachments of popular
entertainments with a ―check your Ninja Turtles at the door‖
stand-offishness. 225
Ninja Turtles in the 1990s, Cabbage Patch Dolls in the 1980s… the banned items
change over time. And so too do the permitted items—it‘s not like all mediarelated toys, all commercially-driven crazes are banned. Many nursery schools
have been Disneyfied, I suspect in hopes of making it feel friendly, cozy and
fun. Yet could we trick the students into thinking that school is fun because
there is a SpongeBob SquarePants poster on the wall next to the times-table
chart?
225. Stephen Kline and Kym Stewart, ―The Culture of Violence and the Politics of Hope:
Community Mobilization around Media Risks,‖ Journal of the Institute for the Humanities III
(Spring, 2004): 5.
155
So, I was walking a very thin line. Not wanting to condemn media use—I fully
recognized that media use WAS happening—yet not wanting to condone it by
bringing it into the classroom as a hook for some completely unrelated topic of
discussion. My aim was to talk to students directly about their media use,
keeping the discussions as free as possible of adult opinions or opposition, and
recording it all to see if our intervention could indeed reduce media use (and
then reduce the risks).
I have a small glimmer of hope that the children could be the
conduit to the parents; that these young ones could alter the
habitual use of screen time in the family home as a whole.
Without a Television we would not be a Family.226
But the odds aren‘t good. Even my cute little five-year-old face with
big brown eyes couldn‘t convince my mom to give up smoking. Not
even when I set out to be a good example by giving up my own most
prized possession—my blankie—by climbing, most dangerously, up
the linen closet shelves to place it at the top, out of reach. (Five-year
old logic isn‘t great.) If even that didn‘t work, do I really expect
some worksheets, diaries and activities in the classroom to make an
impact on something as deeply rooted and apparently innocuous as
TV watching?
One of my main concerns, as I prepared to meet the kids, was the need to
document change at every step. In order to integrate the data collection as
seamlessly as possible, we had decided to involve the students as researchers
who would be conducting their own research, analyzing their data they collected
(usually in charts or math form), and spending a great deal of time reflecting on
their own practice. And so we would start with one of the most widely-used
media education activities in the literature… the all-mighty media diary/audit.
This beginning audit, of what the children watched/played both time and
226. Martin Large, Who‘s Bringing Them Up? Television and Child Development (Gloucester:
Author, for the TV Action Group, 1980), 94-95.
156
content-wise, was the baseline we needed to measure success, so it had to be
constructed carefully and introduced to the students with even more care—we
were after all asking them to disclose their deepest, darkest media-using
secrets, in a place where those very topics were either forbidden or shunned as
anti-educational.
Deep breath—here we go…
Week 1: Patience you must have my young padawan
So many tensions brought me to this day, standing in front of a crowd of grade
twos who were sitting cross-legged on the carpet in front of me.
―Hello, my name is Kym and I am a researcher at SFU. We are here to run the
first Media Risk Reduction project. There was one done in the U.S. and we
decided that your school, along with three others, will be the FIRST ONES in
Canada to do this project!
―You will get a chance to complete media diaries, look at heroes and villains,
create your own games, and after a month we are going to get you to complete a
really amazing challenge—to go without media for ONE WHOLE WEEK!‖
Before anything is thrown at me or the children decide to revolt against, I launch
the next question like a standup comedian searching for a connection with the
crowd:
―So, who likes to watch TV?‖
This seems to divert their attention away from tune out week. Hands shoot up.
I begin asking what shows they watch and why.
Before long, the S word comes up… The Simpsons!
I still struggle with Steve‘s views on media and kids. We both agree
that getting them to experience life media-free may be a good way
157
to reboot a more active lifestyle. But I also want something more. I
want them to find a way to step outside of the media culture they‘ve
been living in. I guess I think that if they can get rid of the media
habits they‘ve formed, they‘ll be able to protect themselves against
mass commercialization (as well as poor health habits) over the long
haul.
Steve takes a more liberal approach, as usual. He can see the value
of some TV, even The Simpsons, and wants the kids (and parents) to
value its cleverness rather than condemning it outright. He knows
that sheltering kids from media is impossible, it is too hard to
control (particularly when TVs have found their ways into malls,
dentists‘ offices, restaurants, cars…). Since the kids can‘t avoid
being part of media culture, he wants them to be more media
literate. But I want them to be freer to explore life outside of the
mediated kid culture bubble they find themselves in.
The kids are starting to get into it.
―I‘m not allowed to watch the Simpsons because they swear and say bad words.‖
―No they don‘t,‖ said another boy. ―They don‘t say bad words, EVER!‖
―So,‖ I intervene, ―how many of you are NOT allowed to watch the Simpsons?‖
11 of the 21 students‘ arms shoot up.
Some coordinate their flying hands with side comments: ―I do anyways!‖—wink,
wink, nudge, nudge.
Ok, I will play along and see what happens. ―How many are not allowed to
watch, but watch anyways?‖
Six of those 11 raise their hands.
158
Hmm… feels like I‘m playing with fire. When Tayme is 10, will she
sneak off and watch The Simpsons at a friend‘s if I don‘t let her
watch at home? Would it just be better to let her watch at home
with me jabbering about its ‗goodness‘ and ‗badness‘ in the
background?
Once again arms flying coincide with side comments to neighbours. ―I just
watch it at Billy‘s house.‖…―I just watch it in my bedroom.‖
THEY ARE TELLING ME THEIR SECRETS—THIS IS GREAT!!!
Now, how do I write this down while they talk? I need someone here recording
everything they say, how they move, and their facial expressions. I know the
lessons to come will have written worksheets and we‘ll be able to record a lot of
this info, but at this moment I am itching to know how to collect it ALL.
These conversations remind me of the ones I‘ve had with parents
who admit they use TV as a babysitter. Juicy little tidbits about
things I know go on but often aren‘t reported or heard in such an
authentic way.
Before I know it, my first day is over. I have an ear full of sound bites, and a
group of kids who actually gave me the impression they would be happy to
complete some surveys.
Here is a sample of what we gave them. They were to colour or shade in the
number of spaces corresponding to their media use and then give us some more
info on the details.
4) How long did you watch TV?
0
½
1
1½
2
2½
3
i) What kinds of TV shows did you watch?
159
3½
4
4½
5
a) __________________
b) __________________
c) __________________
One week later, I return to a motley collection of responses. Some have been
uber enthusiastic and, for some reason, filled out the whole sheet—which would
mean 6 hours of every possible media form. This seems to be a few of the young
kids who possibly thought it was a colouring exercise?!
Other students have not been quite as enthusiastic. Some have forgotten to fill
in the survey at all, which means we have to rely on recall—this worries me
since I have a hard time calculating my computer time from the day before,
never mind asking a grade two student to do the same.
―Why did we ask you to do this?‖ I finally ask as I am walking around.
―You want to know what kids do nowadays,‖ was the main response that we
discuss in two of the three classes.
In the last class, one boy says:
―Cause it is easier to see what we do and we can say ‗Man, I used a lot of media
today!‘‖
He got it… awareness!!
As I walk around I am making notes:
– create better guidelines for media diary
– provide examples of how to fill out the survey
– get rid of sleeping time
– simplify the chart…
The chart took too long to fill out—there were 15 activities they had
to think about and three spaces for the various shows, or games
they played—and, look at the implications of having them do a
diary anyways.
160
I am guilt ridden…this was too much!
In-between the classes… I get some feedback I‘m not expecting.
A teacher who missed out on the introduction and planning sessions for the
project approaches me at the end of a class to voice her concern that I am
glamorizing media.
―If you come into the classroom and let them talk about their favourite shows
then aren‘t you endorsing media? Aren‘t you saying that only those who watch
are cool? What about those that don‘t watch?‖
This comment catches me off guard. I have been plotting away, working for
days (and some nights) creating worksheets and lessons for the project. I‘d
thought I‘d dealt with all the ‗issues‘— I‘m really not prepared to defend
everything we‘re doing NOW.
―Well, rather than pretending they don‘t, we assume they do. We don‘t want to
come in and preach to them about their bad habits. We know they‘ll shut down
and stop listening. So, if we make it fun to talk about media, make them feel
comfortable to talk about media—which isn‘t often talked about at school—then
we can help them to reshape their habits, sculpt their critical thinking skills
about media and help them to reshape healthier media habits. We actually want
to make not watching as cool as watching it.‖
Despite my annoyance, it‘s interesting to hear myself arguing for the same
middle course that Steve advocates. This teacher indeed wants the students to
‗check their Ninja Turtles at the door,‘ but I have moved on. Time to employ
Kinshi Waza227—you know, Cultural Judo!
Interestingly enough, the same teacher also shocks me when she refuses to
release one of the students‘ media diaries.
227. Techniques prohibited in competition. Judo Info Online Dojo, ―Japanese Judo Terms,‖
retrieved May 22nd, 2014, http://judoinfo.com/terms.htm.
161
―You don‘t need this one. It isn‘t good.‖
The teacher flips through the survey and shows me the shading and the hour
totals. There are more shaded boxes than actual time viewed, as documented in
the total slot at the end of the chart.
―This is too hard because he isn‘t good at math and this won‘t make sense to
him.‖
I am mortified that this is being said IN FRONT of the student, who sits
motionless at his desk.
Mrs. B yells—TRUST!
―It‘s fine. I‘ll take it. We want all the surveys.‖
And there‘s that ideas of trust again—some teachers have little trust for the
kids and their capacities. Perhaps the student was thinking each section of the
line to be shaded was a show, not an hour, and if I actually looked at the data I
could figure it out. I‘d much rather do that than dismiss it—IN FRONT OF HIM!
Initially I am just pissed off.
The teacher had no right to question what we were doing once we
got the OK from the school and teachers and parents and…
everyone else and the hoops we had to jump through!
And how can they be so inconsiderate to the kids?!?
But…. after looking through the piles of surveys, I begin to question the validity
of the data. Not that I want to give the teacher any credit for this ah-hah
moment, but maybe the surveys aren‘t as perfect as we‘d hoped. We are going to
have to cull those ‗odd‘ submissions and only calculate the ones we feel have
some thought put into them.
162
After some work, we create a clean sample of mean time per day spent with
various media forms.228
Mean time spent w ith Media
140
120
100
80
Boys
60
Gi rl s
40
20
0
Reading
Phone/Chat
Screen
Enter tainment
Educational
Computer
Game Pl aying
Media
With this cleaned up date we seemingly proved our point that kids are media
saturated: they spend a great deal of time with media, particularly screen media.
I am happy with the nice, clean charts that seem so professional—I feel like
these are ‗shareable‘ pieces of the research.
I also feel my obsession of wanting to record everything the students do grow
with each interaction. My mind is constantly focused on how to collect more,
what question to ask on the next worksheet to fill in the ah-hah moments of the
previous one.
228. Stephen Kline, Media Consumption as a Health and Safety Risk Factor: North Vancouver Media
Risk Reduction Intervention (Burnaby: Simon Fraser University, Media Analysis Lab, 2003), 1112; accessed May 22, 2014, http://www.sfu.ca/medialab/risk/docs/kline_media_risk_reduction5.doc.
163
One happy surprise from the first week involves a question that I
felt the kids could get something out of—―what do you like to do (list
favourite activities)?‖ And then, ―what do you do (fill out media
survey)?‖
Oddly, and promisingly, these are NOT the same activities. They like
to play with friends or go outside or do sports—even though they
end up spending most of their time in front of some media form.
In the weeks to come, I need to find ways to ask ―Why?‖
The project is alive—growing, shifting, changing… often right up to the last
moment. At times, especially in the media lab, I am only a researcher.
Everything I am doing is connected to collecting, saving, archiving data.
Then I step in front of the little kids and the hard-core researcher status I have
adopted cracks, just a little bit.
Do I fear boring them to death? Do I fear not saying or doing the
right thing to help facilitate critical thinking about media? Is media
education and all we are doing just a fun, add-on, activity that is
not taken very seriously?
I try to make all of the activities fit the school‘s agenda. Students collect data. I
teach them to think critically about media use. I even make the surveys ‗mathy‘
by having them add up the time, per day, per week, up to a year.
It all seems age- and school-appropriate. But what does a grade two or three kid
feel about 50 hours month with TV? Is that something they should be
frightened about? Feel guilt for? Feel the need to change?
164
Week 2: When you look at the dark side, careful you
must be
Week 2 has a planned outline that seems more teacherly than week 1. For this I
am thankful, but then I start to worry we won‘t have the data we need.
Oddly enough, the TV character that exemplifies my tension is Telly,
the fuchsia-coloured Muppet on Sesame Street. It wasn‘t until I took
a quick look at Wikipedia that I realized he was addicted to TV when
he was introduced in Season 11 (hence the name Television
Monster—shorted to Telly). After that, ―producers worried that he
would be a negative influence on their easily influenced viewers,
and changed him into the worry-wart character that he has been
ever since.‖
Well, the description fits me to a T right now: ―fidgeting, nervous
wreck, prone easily to manic behaviour and paranoia.‖ 229
Well, I have to keep moving, even if my worries are causing me to second guess
what I am doing every time I step into the classroom. Hmmm… might be the
lack of teacher training too!
The theme for Week 2 really helps focus my attention on what to create for the
lesson and what to talk to the kids about: the differences between real and
fictional heroes and heroines. The aim is to get the kids to look carefully at
who they believe to be heroes and villains in the media and then see if they can
pick out stereotypical characteristics.
229. Wikipedia, ―Telly Monster,‖ accessed May 22, 2014,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telly_Monster.
165
Nowadays I do this with my undergrads—well, something similar—
by getting them to read Giroux‘s scathing critique of Disney and
stereotypes.230 I have gotten used to their reactions—anger with him
and then me…. but I have learned an important trick over the
years. FIRST let the students watch Disney clips, talk and reminisce;
only THEN proceed to slaughter those loving memories—oh, so very
carefully…
Our Rescue Heroes experiences are still fresh in our minds, along with the ideas
of heroes and villains and the culture of violent play surrounding these toys. So
it makes sense to dig a bit deeper into this play culture to see what older kids
say. I am wondering, of course, if I can make connections between the children
with behavioural issues and the violent shows they watch. Really it all comes
down to showing people, from various angles, the ramifications and risks of
media use.
We can be Heroes
We can be Heroes
We can be Heroes
Just for one day
We can be Heroes231
―When I say the word hero, who do you think of?‖
―Batman!‖
―Spiderman!‖
―Wonder Woman!‖
230. Henry Giroux and Grace Pollock, The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence
(Lantham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).
231. David Bowie and Brian Eno, ―Heroes,‖ Heroes (London: RCA, 1977); song lyrics accessed May
22, 2014, http://www.metrolyrics.com/heroes-lyrics-david-bowie.html.
166
Imagine that! All related to the media. In anticipation of this moment, I have
created photocopies (and then coloured them) of pictures of alternative heroes
like doctors, parents, and friends.
Creative eh? Not a worksheet—bit proud of myself for that.
But an issue arises I have NOT anticipated: some say they don‘t have a hero,
even when we‘ve just gone over examples.
Students in a grade 2/3 class were asked 'who their real life heroes
were?' 3 of the 10 boys replied that a doctor and parents were
their heroes, while the other 7 claimed they did not have a hero in
real life. All of the 7 girls claimed they too did not have a hero in
their life. The students, however, have little difficulty in describing
their favourite media related characters and why these were their
preferred choice. This once again indicates that media plays a
major role in the lives of children today.232
After a bit of discussion, it doesn‘t take long before we have to transition back
into the worksheet world. Still a bit creative, though—students are asked to
draw their favourite hero and then write a story about him/her.
We kept some of the students‘ drawings. I remember one little
Korean boy drew King Sejong, the king who created the Korean
alphabet—now that‘s a hero!
This exercise really fell into the reflective and then deconstructive
parts of Cultural Judo—asking what do you like, starting to unpack
why, and THEN providing them with some tools to help facilitate the
discussion of why… so the conversation moves beyond ‗because I
like them‘.
There are few surprises when it comes to documenting what the students like.
However, we are able to link it with previous research on ratings with gaming
and teens at the Media Lab—also a passion of Steve‘s—so the big picture is
slowly becoming clearer.
232. Stephen Kline, Media Consumption as a Health and Safety Risk Factor, 32.
167
15.2 Rating System for Favourite TV Shows
When surveying the students about their favourite shows the students responded with a
great variety of programmes. The most popular show genres were Teen for boys and
Family for girls. The Simpsons was rated as teen because the majority of parents we
spoke to indicated that they found this show to be highly inappropriate for elementary
students. Shows like Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, Bugs Bunny and X-Men were considered
children's programming, variety shows such as Amanda Show and family style sitcoms
like The Cosby Show and Full House were coded as family, and finally shows such as CSI
and Friends were considered adult shows. 233
Table 15.2 Percent of students' selection of favourite TV shows and their
corresponding ratings
Boys
N
total
Girls
N
total
Children
50%
33
66
16%
9
58
Family
12%
8
66
40%
23
58
Teen
35%
23
66
30%
17
58
Adult
3
2
66
16%
9
58
The boys tended to enjoy more children- and teen-oriented shows while the girls
selected more family programming.
15.3 Favourite television characters
It was of no surprise since The Simpsons and Yu-Gi-Oh were two of the top-rated shows
that 11% of the boys selected Homer or a Yu-Gi-Oh character as their # 1 favourite
characters. Bart Simpson was the next favourite with 10%.
Of the 87 girl respondents 7% selected Lizzie McGuire and 6% chose Lisa Simpson. Bart
Simpson was also seen as a favourite with 5% of the girls selecting him.
The data are good for us, in that they basically confirm our beliefs and guesses
about the influence of media on children‘s tastes and interests and help us to
shape the next section of the unit—the reconstruction phase.
233. Ibid.
168
Week 3: You must feel the Force around you
This week is geared towards reshaping what we have just broken down the
previous week—ideas about heroes. We will be transplanting common
conversations between heroes and villains into the real world—to help illustrate
the absurdity of these types of storylines but also to see if we can muck around
with them and attempt to change in them in some way.
I begin by asking them to tell me how heroes and villains talk to one another.
The younger kids are much quieter than the older ones… makes it
difficult since I don‘t have any props this time—just my voice. It is
tough going, to say the least. What would YOU do, Mrs. B?
But the older kids really get into it. The talking quickly turns into action, as the
kids are wanting desperately to SHOW rather than tell me about the
conversations between the heroes and their nemeses.
Harry Potter and Malfoy quickly became a hot topic.
―Oh, sorry, Weasley, didn't see you there.‖234
I ask: ―How do they settle their differences?‖
A few boys start to throw air punches and air spells. Within a few moments, the
children have jumped up and started pretend sword fighting.
Feels like I‘m playing with fire again. Are these the kinds of
discussions that are usually allowed into the classroom?
―Do you think this is ever the ‗right‘ way to behave?‖ I ask.
The discussion heats up. Many of the students express their disbelief that other
kids can‘t see the difference between TV and reality. Soon the kids are telling
234. An episode in J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher‘s Stone (London: Bloomsbury,
1997), when Malfoy ―accidentally‖ pokes Ron in the head.
169
stories about those other kids mimicking actions they‘ve seen on TV, movies or
video games.
―My cousin…‖ or ―my little brother… did ACTION A after watching
SHOW/MOVIE/GAME B… I don‘t know why!‖
These sentences have become familiar to me. In my experience,
children, parents, educators and university students all tend to
believe that media has not impacted them in any way; it has only
impacted others. Still, I‘m amazed that I am hearing these
conversations; it‘s even more unbelievable that I didn‘t have to
really do much to get them started.
The discussion has a life of its own; the kids are willing and quite able to see the
absurdity of Harry and Malfoy‘s fights or any other heroes-villain combo.
I can just sit and ask questions like:
―Is it all fake?‖
―Can we never trust the media?‖
―What strategies can we used to try to figure out if they are lying to us or not?‖
I introduce the idea of critical thinking, the goal of being aware of what you‘re
watching and asking questions about it. They seem to understand.
The really important and difficult task of the media teacher is to
develop in pupils enough self-confidence and critical maturity to
be able to apply critical judgments to media texts which they will
encounter in the future. The acid test of any media education
programme is the extent to which pupils are critical in their own
use and understanding of the media when the teacher is not there.
170
The primary objective is not simply critical awareness and
understanding, it is critical autonomy.235
Yes it is all about being critical, but I keep wondering: What does
critical look like in a grade 2 student compared with a grade 6
student? How do I know it is critical and will continue on ‗when I am
not there‘? How do I know they aren‘t playing the game of ‗please
the teacher‘?
Carefully, I begin to turn the conversation back to the everyday.
―Alright… that is how THEY would solve it, but let‘s take the same issue of
cheating in a game at school and talk about how WE would solve it.‖
And suddenly I find I‘ve triggered a scripted response. It looks a bit like this…
One child turns to another.
―You are bullying me and I don‘t like it!‖
The rest of the class responds in chorus.
―Turn away and tell a teacher or adult!‖
Well that‘s all folks. That is all it takes to stop a bully!
I‘m not sure what to say to the kids about their little skit. Because that is what
they‘ve brought into our discussion—a memorized skit from a previous lesson,
via another out-of-school program—the ‗what-to-do-when-I-am-being-bullied‘
scenario.
I don‘t want to demean the program that has taught them this. I can see it
might be useful. On the other hand, wow—it doesn‘t seem to be addressing the
235. Masterman, cited in Buckingham, Media Education, 24-25. I‘ve seen this quote from
Masterman deployed in many different media education discussions. Buckingham suggests,
however, that it ―is open to an infinite range of interpretations: for who would possibly argue
that education is not concerned with developing 'critical faculties'?‖
171
issue of where bullying comes from, or how to stop it before it happens. And it
reminds me in an uncanny way of the scripted play that was going on in our
Rescue Heroes study.
The more I‘m in the classroom, the more issues I seem to have with
the way kids are educated.
And how about me? I seem to be able to tie any issue kids are
having into media. Is that bad? Short-sighted? Am I projecting my
own issues onto them?
What is the right way to teach?
Week 4: Truly wonderful the mind of a child is
Halfway. Time to start preparing more deliberately for the ‗dreaded‘ tune out
the screen week.
One crucial component is getting the students ready to find and engage in those
activities they say they really like to do, rather than the media-related activities
they often end up doing.
In choosing a focus for the week on fair and fun play, we have two main
objectives:
1. We want the students to discuss alternatives to their media use. This will
mean introducing them to new games or re-acquainting them with older
games.
2. We want them to see play as something they can control and shape to
their needs. This means creating room for discussion of play, including
fairness and rules of play.
This is definitely one of Steve‘s inspirations. The lesson we‘ve come up with
asks student to invent games using some random objects (things I had lying
172
around the house)—a piece of string, a ruler, a couple of bouncy balls and some
plastic cups. No room for worksheets here!
Try not to have a good time...
this is supposed to be educational.236
But first I have a chance to pull out a lesson I‘ve been itching to try—
intergenerational interviews. Ever since Joe‘s discussion of oral culture being
replaced by mass media and the loss of intergenerational learning, I‘ve liked the
idea of having students talk to parents, grandparents, and other relatives. For
their homework last week, I gave them the task of asking one of these older
adults to teach or tell the child of a game they played as a child.
I can see some personal influences here… all the time I spent with
the Babas when I was growing up. Might also have something to do
with being a mom and wishing Tayme could have the same kinds of
relationship in her life.
I start the class by asking about their homework. Some haven‘t done it—the
teacher has told me to ‗scold‘ those students, but instead I praise the ones who
did talk to their parents, telling them that it is important to help with the
discussion.
The assignment turns out to be a real hit. Students come up with some
surprising games, most of which would not be allowed in schools today—too
many sharp objects and far too many waivers needed!
Once we‘ve shared various games, I hand out the odd sampling of objects and
ask them to create their very own game. Soon the students (and I) are laughing
to the point of tears as we immerse ourselves in inventing, sharing and playing
the games.
236. Attributed to Charles M. Schulz (the Peanuts cartoonist), accessed June 17, 2014,
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/29125-try-not-to-have-a-good-time-this-is-supposed-to.
173
It is interesting to see that the ‗good‘ students have a more difficult time making
things happen than, say, the more rowdy kids. The latter take the objects with
alacrity, move tables around, and proceed to develop a very complex game with
multiple levels of rules and action all around.
The ‗good‘ students, for the most part, remain seated. They look at one another
and at the game. When I come over to ask a few questions, I get a lot of
shoulder shrugging and ―I don‘t know what to do.‖
I can see myself doing this as a kid! Even though I wanted to run
around and have fun, I was very aware of the rules of the school—
i.e. NO running around, NO bouncing balls in class, etc.
Maybe the kind of teaching I want to do implies changing the rules
of the school as well?
The games are developed and presented to the class. Very little ‗wrap‘ up is
needed. The kids have experienced the fun to be had, even from such an odd
collection of household objects, and the creativity involved in coming up with
rules that are both enjoyable and fair.
―OK,‖ I tell them, ―it‘s up to you to keep this going!‖
Week 5: A Jedi must have the deepest commitment
The day has come. After spending the last few weeks getting the students ready,
we have to remind them of the last part of the project—tune out the screen
week.
Suddenly heart-felt pleas fill the room.
―It would be impossible for me not to watch ‗Art Attack‘ on weekdays at 5:00. I
need to watch it, I am addicted to it!‖
―It is impossible for me to stop playing Game Cube.‖
174
―No way, media is my friend.‖
―No way, I can‘t live without my TV.‖
―My DAD can‘t live without his BCTV, his hockey, his root beer and his coffee!‖
Will they be angry with the challenge we are giving them? Will they
even try to take part?
The students seem much more vocal this time, compared to the first time I
mentioned it in Week 1. Maybe the shock has finally worn off and they can
speak up.
I discuss the options of doing ‗other‘ activities and maybe talking with friends
about various projects they could do instead of using media. I also remind them
of how successful they were last week; this seems to help, as they start to
reminisce about how ‗brilliant‘ their games were.
Amidst the barrage of groans and growls, I hear words of hope. Some students
are even suggesting that this type of challenge could actually be ‗fun‘.
Ah, gotta love those optimists! Well, in this case, anyways. When it
comes to media and kids, I‘m more often on the pessimists‘ side.
One boy pipes up and says he doesn‘t want to do the tune out week. I remind
him he has a choice and can decide to just reduce time or even not participate.
―Cool,‖ he says flatly. ―There is no way I wanna do this.‖
―It‘s up to you,‖ I shrug. I can see other students rolling their eyes at his
reluctance. Interesting… has the tide of coolness begun to shift?
―Remember,‖ I tell them, ―you‘ll be the FIRST in Canada to do this!‖
So, so, so you wanna be cool
You gotta turn off, turn off, turn off our Tttt-Vvvv
175
Next I get them started on creating publicity for tune out week—posters and
commercials—and I go round to get them to sign their contract:
I will go cold turkey
I will decrease my time with media
I will not take part
Finally, we have a guest come from the Media Lab to show us a bit of movie
magic.
The idea is straight from Masterman, who endorsed using media
production as a means of demythologizing what we normally saw
on the screen.237 The Media Lab has a very, very special set of tools
for this, plus technicians willing to take days out of the term to
prepare and run the ‗show‘. We‘ve done this demonstration in many
different places—in school libraries, gyms, classrooms on campus,
and the magnificent Blue Room in the new School of
Communication building. Using chroma key technology, Dave and
Chris will deconstruct the blue screen magic that the kids see on a
daily basis on TV and movies.
A discussion of the weather people on the news, standing in front of the map
and telling us if it will rain or not, fails to hold their attention.
So we move on to nursery rhymes… The Three Little Pigs!
Dave and Chris put an image of the straw house up on the screen. One by one,
the children are positioned in the right stop on camera and asked to blow as
hard as they can.
237. Nonetheless, Masterman discusses various traps. First, ―merely producing a replica of a mass
media form does not necessary induce critical thought.‖ Second, any practical media activity
can be reduced to ―a series of purely technical operations‖—the technicist trap. Third,
practice can easily slip into uncritical cultural reproduction, which ―enslaves rather than
liberates; it freezes the impulses towards action and change; it produces deference and
conformity.‖ Masterman, Teaching the Media, 26.
176
Whooosh! They blow the house down! Ahhh! Now they are starting to get it.
And they REALLY get it when kids who are wearing blue suddenly have their
clothing disappear into the background.
We get them to play around pretending to be Lisa sitting next to Bart on the
school bus, but with a totally different script. They think this is hilarious!
Our aim is to get them enjoying subverting media norms. We‘ve
sought out obscure and odd scenarios to help them play with the
idea of real and fake. Now for the grand finale—it has to do with a
cloak… any guesses??
Suddenly one of the dreams of the kids has come true… they have their very
own invisibility cloak! The magic of Hollywood films has come to North
Vancouver elementary schools.238
As we are winding down, I ask why they thought we brought Chris and Dave and
all the fancy equipment to the school.
―To make us famous.‖
―To make us have lots of money.‖
―To show other kids what we can do.‖
Well, I guess I did pump them up at the beginning with stories of this being the
FIRST EVER Canadian media risk reduction program. I have to quell some of
these youthful ambitions and re-focus the students on the idea of ‗fakes‘ on TV.
I remind them of the past few weeks of discussion. But I can see that I am
steering the boat here.
Yikes... Masterman‘s acid test failed and I was right there!
238. The idea of video production made its way into the older classes thanks to Shane, who
brought a camera to the tune out prep day. He asked the older kids to create mini-skits to
help illustrate ‗coolness‘ in tuning out. They turned into commercials, with grade 5 and 6
kids singing, dancing and acting ‗cool‘. It was a very tuned-in move on his part.
177
Practical activity does not, in itself, constitute media education. In
particular, the commonly-expressed belief that, through practical
work, students will automatically acquire critical abilities and
begin to de-mystify the media needs to be challenged. Rather, the
link between practical work and analytical activities needs to be
consciously forged by the teacher.239
Boy, I sure thought that is what I was doing… my questions were
very conscious… but more was needed. What?? The students had
fun—this was most definitely the highlight of the program. I do,
however, feel like something was missing. I wish I could hone in on
that excitement and extend it, use it to focus on some of the deeper
issues. But I don‘t really know how.
After Tune Out Week: Honour life by living
The week after tune out week, I walk tentatively into the classroom, not knowing
what the emotional state of the class will be. To my surprise, the students are
not only happy, but extremely proud of their accomplishments.
One boy who rarely speaks up in class makes a beeline for me and says, ―I didn‘t
watch TV at all this week!‖
Coming from a boy who claimed to be very addicted to TV at the beginning of
the year, this is most definitely a check on the success side. It sparks similar
storytelling of the week‘s adventures without media. Some say they cut down,
and they even tried to get their brothers or sisters to do the same, but it was too
hard for them.
―My little brother cried if I turned off the TV.‖
―After one day, my sister was bored.‖
239. Masterman, Teaching the Media, 26. Buckingham, in Media Education, suggests that
production is important to the development of critical thought, but that the production
process needs to be followed by a reflective process, helping the student understand the
decisions they made to get to the final product.
178
Clearly their siblings didn‘t have the same agenda as the kids in the
class. It looks like bringing about changes beyond the kids‘ own
choices is a bit harder than I had hoped.
It seems that the tune out prep helped the students who went cold turkey. One
girl says she found a puzzle she never knew she had and played with it. Another
boy says he and his dad went for a bike ride every night. The weather has been
amazing, which really helped.
As I sit there listening to the kids‘ success stories I feel extremely proud of
them. And it is so interesting to hear of their initial struggles. Students tell of
being steps away from defeat because of complete boredom, only to conquer
those feelings in the end and succeed.
I remember reading Marie Winn‘s discussion of a ―withdrawal‖
period for tune outers. Now I can see this and hear this in the
stories my students are telling. They have actually gone through
withdrawal and have had to struggle to move past it. It makes their
accomplishment even more impressive.
And we researchers have succeeded too! As the next page explains…
179
The ‗tune out‘ challenge was accepted enthusiastically. Of the 121 students who kept a
record of Tune Out Week activities, we found that sixty percent of the students reported
getting through tune out week without using screen entertainment (TV and VCR,
computer games, video games) at all. Girls were slightly more enthusiastic (62% vs. 54%
for boys) thought older boys (grades 4-6) were far more successful than younger ones
(63%) compared with 41% of younger ones. The opposite was true for girls as 65%
younger in grades 2-3 were ‗media free‘ compared with 59% of older girls.
Boys
Tune Out
Did
Not
Participate
Girls
2/3
N
Tot.
4/6
N
Tot.
2/3
N
Tot.
4/6
N
Tot.
40.9%
9
22
62.9%
22
35
64.5%
20
31
59.4%
19
32
59.1%
13
22
37.1%
13
35
35.5%
11
31
52.4%
13
32
…most students considerably reduced their media consumption during tune out week.
In these classes the time devoted to screen entertainment dropped to only17 minutes a
day. This amounts to an 80% reduction in media consumption during tune out week for
those students in the programme.
Although gender differences were not significant, it was noted that boys averaged 21
minutes screen time during tune out, while girls watched 14 minutes. Children in the
lower grades watched slightly more than older children (19 minutes vs. 15 minutes)
although closer analysis of the gender differences by grade level revealed that it was the
grade 2-3 boys who engaged in screen entertainment most during tune out week (29
minutes) while the youngest girls did so least (12 minutes). Grades 4-6 boys averaged 17
minutes compared with the 15 minutes for the older girls. Even the 40% of students that
continued to watch and play during the week reduced their screen time to 42 minutes
which is still considerably less than the 117 minutes average daily use observed during
the audit week. …
The ‗displacement effect‘ was estimated by subtracting the amount of time spent using
media in tune out week from that during audit week. The net effect was that students
gained 100 minutes a day of leisure time from reducing their dependency on screen
entertainment. Those that tuned out gained 35 minutes more than those that didn‘t, but
all children seemed to benefit from the challenge. 240
The weeks of preparation—analyzing our own media consumption patterns,
looking at the role of bullies and victims and heroes and heroines in media,
game playing and poster making—all built up to this point. It is clear the
240. Kline, Media Consumption as a Health and Safety Risk Factor, 32.
180
students have successfully reduced their media intake, and more importantly
they have had the experience of controlling their media use patterns.
Following tune out week we interview parents and teachers. Everyone tells us it
was a fantastic success. Teachers report few incidents in the playground, while
the kids tell us they weren‘t tired at school because they had played hard
outside and went to bed at a decent time. What‘s more, they had fun with their
families playing outside.
One student enthusiastically asks, ―Can I do this all summer?‖
―Sure, why not!‖ I reply.
Will the new strategy stay? Unfortunately, we have no way of
knowing. As with many projects, the funding determines the length
of time we are permitted to be part of students‘ and their families‘
lives.
But for us at the media analysis lab, this pilot provides a much
needed source of energy and enthusiasm. It feels like we have
finally found a solution to the problems we have been studying for
so long. A short media education program is capable of
meaningfully addressing issues of media, control and healthy living.
Yet questions linger…
181
You must unlearn what you have learned
Everyone loved the project. We got major publicity from the Vancouver Sun and
calls from all over the Lower Mainland to repeat the project in other schools.
Like Robinson we hoped to create a curriculum package to sell. We envisioned
making a few tweaks and possibly trying it out again before we put it on the
market. As the initial glow faded, however, I was left with some nagging
feelings of discomfort. Some lessons were so data-driven that I didn‘t even feel
like a teacher. Others were so fun that I was unsure where to find the data. The
overarching theme was reducing media risk, but the ties that bound the lessons
together seemed to be dangling somewhere, and even at the end I couldn‘t find
them.
It wasn‘t only the curriculum that seemed to need more integration. I longed
for a closer relationship between the teacher and myself in the classroom.
Sometimes I was left alone in the class, frozen with fear that the kids would bolt
out the windows like in Korea. I wished we could have side chats about what
they were doing in other topics, so we could find a way to weave in the ideas we
were discussing a bit more. I felt like when I was there, school stopped, and
when I left, real school started again. Nothing that I did seemed to bleed into
any other subjects, and no other subjects (besides the ones I forced in, like the
math and the time diary) seemed to find their way into the project lessons.
This fragmentation seemed to be a trend. Media Sense, the only
available elementary-based-media education textbook for Canadian
teachers, had the same problem. The book‘s curriculum, like its
assessment tools, just consisted of a list of categories and
fragmented pieces of information for the students to acquire.241 Even
though there were themes, they seemed to miss important
connections—advertising, for instance, was not connected with the
journalism unit, yet in reality one could not exist without the other.
241. Kymberley Stewart, ―Does Media Sense Make Sense in Today‘s Media Saturated World?‖, paper
for Education 911, Simon Fraser University, Fall 2006. See D. Booth, K. Lewis, S. Powrie and D.
Reeves, Media Sense (Toronto: MeadowBrook Press, 1998).
182
We ended up published papers on the findings,242 but again I felt like some of
the story was missing. It seemed so nicely wrapped up, but I hadn‘t really been
left with such a neat and tidy feeling. The data we collected was real, authentic,
but the stories behind the data seemed somewhat lost when the boxes only
portrayed numbers. The final report on the website housed more stories, but
they didn‘t make their way into the journal-friendly versions.
We had indeed succeeded in doing what Robinson had done—create
a report which medicalized kid culture.
Before I entered the classroom, quantifying kids‘ media use made perfect sense.
But now I had doubts… and questions. I needed to know if the curriculum
really worked and if there were long-term effects. I worried that we had had
success in providing students with some fun activities that would be
memorable… but wondered how and whether that had changed them. I wanted
an acid test of our effectiveness.
What we really needed was continued funding to explore these issues further.
However, the powers that be—funders—didn‘t help us out, even though Steve
tried to create a sequel. And so I was left with my questions.
Why was this project, which seemed flawed in many ways,
apparently such a nice fit with the school system?
Why were
principals calling Steve and begging to have us repeat it in their
schools? It seemed as if the educators were attracted to the data‘,
‗evidence‘ and ‗research methods‘—but they weren‘t asking the
hard, educational questions that seemed to me increasingly
important.
242. Stephen Kline & Kym Stewart, ―Family Life and Media Violence: A Qualitative Study of
Canadian Mothers Raising Young Boys (3-6),‖ in Children and Media: Multidisciplinary
Perspectives, edited by Bea van den Bergh and Jan van den Bulck (Leuven: Garant, 2000);
Stephen Kline, ―Countering Children‘s Sedentary Lifestyles: An Evaluative Study of a MediaRisk Education Approach,‖ Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research 12 no. 2 (2005): 239258; Stephen Kline, Kym Stewart and David Murphy, ―Media Literacy in the Risk Society:
Toward a Risk Reduction Strategy,‖ Canadian Journal of Education 29 no. 1 (2006): 131-153.
183
So much of the project was unique and fantastic to be a part of—but it had just
whetted my ambition to find a way to track, collect and prove that a media
education program could indeed shift unhealthy lifestyle habits.
That seemed like a clear, manageable goal for a PhD thesis, right?
Time to move on….
184
Chapter 5. The Reverse Peephole243
The Deal244
I head into the library. The staff is sitting at tables placed in a large rectangle
shape around the room—waiting for me.
It feels like a firing squad. My heart beats anxiously as I apologize for the
multiple surveys their students had to complete this past term, for the pages of
jargon stuffed into the Media Education box in the office, and for the lack of
helpful materials.245
I hope my heartfelt apology will be enough, because I didn‘t only come to the
meeting to share the final research findings and apologize—I have another item
on the agenda.
―Before I go, I‘d like to ask if there are any volunteers to take part in a new type
of media education program I will be developing next spring. Please know that
it will have a few of the same activities as the MRR, BUT the one major
difference will be the support. Ideally, I would like to work with one teacher for
a year and aim to co-develop and co-teach the whole unit.‖
243. Seinfeld episode where Kramer and Newman reverse their peepholes ―so you can see in.‖
Headings in this chapter refer to various episodes of the show. Details at Wikipedia, ―List of
Seinfeld Episodes,‖ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Seinfeld_episodes, and The Seinfeld
Scripts, http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/.
244. Seinfeld episode in which Jerry and Elaine try to work out the rules of their relationship.
245. After all the positive publicity for the MRR project Steve was inundated with proposals for us
to continue the project in various schools. We opted to take this challenge on—with varying
results. One of the last was this school. Since there was neither time nor funding to have me
teach classes, we created teaching packages; each week I would drive to the school and drop
off a package of readings to justify the week‘s lesson, surveys, worksheets and ideas for
activities. I felt badly about teachers taking time away from their class material to have
students fill out random delivered media surveys.
185
Silence! I scan the room, breath held, hoping someone will volunteer their
classroom. My eyes fall on Jude as she raises her hand.
Hey Jude… you didn’t let me down!! 246
The room starts to stir and teachers begin to move out. I rush to Jude‘s table
and shower her with promises.
I promise to work closely with you.
I promise to support you in the classroom.
I promise it will be different this time around.
It has to be different. I am on my own now—my PhD research.
I can‘t repeat the MRR project—that would not constitute unique research and
would not meet the PhD expectations. But more than that—MRR is too
communications. Now I‘m in the education faculty, I need to think like an
educator.
First things first—find a supervisor.
Hey Dr. Egan, don’t let me down…
I arrange a meeting with Dr. Egan. Considering he turned me away eight years
ago, you may be wondering why I‘m coming back; well, this time I have a new
plan of action and it seems to fit better with his work.
In the scramble to develop curriculum for MRR, I had gone back to the
ideas I had read, over a decade ago, in Egan‘s Educational Development.
In a moment of complete panic in the media lab, I called Tannis, a friend
working with Egan‘s Imaginative Education Research Group, and
246. Jude was the one teacher who had taken in the game creation part of the project, so I had
already been with her in her classroom, albeit very briefly, and really liked her energy and the
passion she had for teaching and her students. The reference is to The Beatles‘ ―Hey Jude.‖
186
explained the project. She said there were these planning frameworks that
the IE educators were using.
Holy hell, yah!! If I could slot in my content into a lesson planning
framework then my fears of fitting into the school would vanish.
Tannis talked about finding a ‗binary opposite‘ for the lesson, or a ‗heroic
quality‘ and a ‗narrative‘. OK, this seemed possible; after all, media was
ALL about binaries and heroes and storytelling. Was that good enough? It
sure didn‘t feel like it was enough, because I was still not really clear about
how to begin the lessons, what to teach and in what order.
Was it because I hadn‘t finished teaching training? Or was I just
missing something?
Tannis emailed the frameworks. I opened the attachment, stared, stared…
stared some more…then closed them.
Shit!… I still haven‘t found what I‘m looking for!
To be honest, I really didn‘t give them much of a chance. I had unrealistic
expectations of being able to slot in my content and the framework would
magically create a lesson. I was desperate for help at that point; I didn‘t have
time to figure out the language of Imaginative Education, nor how the
frameworks were intended to be used.
Standing before Jude, though, and promising things would be different, I knew I
had to find the time to learn… no excuses.
My meeting with Dr. Egan doesn‘t get off to a good start. I walk into his office,
take a seat, smile and launch into a diatribe about my proposed PhD research.
Coming fresh off the MRR project, my language has a heavy social psychology
tone to it—to be specific, a Bandura-infused discourse on impacts/effects, with
an emphasis, of course, on the measurable shifts of the media literacy of the
children BEFORE and AFTER my media ed program.
187
If I could turn back time
If I could find a way
I'd take back those words that hurt you
and you'd stay
Alas—as those familiar with Egan‘s work will know—he had, in 1988, and AGAIN
in 1999 in a collection of essays, echoed Jan Smedslund‘s verdict on social
psychology as ―pseudo-empirical, and a product of conceptual confusions.‖
247
Critiquing the sway of psychological thinking in education, and wanting to ―save
us from a lot of bad research,‖ he had especially (albeit by chance) singled out
Smedslund‘s criticism of Bandura—and HERE I come in, all (desperate) smiles,
babbling on and on about social learning theory and my ‗new‘ way of measuring!
Doh!
I don't know why I did the things I did
I don't know why I said the things I said
He smiles. Nods. Says very little.
Being that I know Kieran quite well now, and giggle at the selection
of a Cher song to play in the background as I remember our first
visit, I do know I probably made him weep a little bit inside.
Doesn‘t know what she is talking about—one tear.
Hasn‘t read my work—another tear.
I didn't really mean to hurt you
I didn't wanna see you go
I know I made you cry
Of course, he really should launch into a lecture correcting all that is wrong,
confusing and naïvely understood. But this is not his way.
247. Kieran Egan, ―The Analytic and Arbitrary in Educational Research,‖ Children‘s Minds, Talking
Rabbits & Clockwork Oranges (New York: The Althouse Press, 1999), 169.
188
His words are kind, supportive and clear. He wishes me well and says the
psychology doctoral program will suit my needs better.
So, Educational Psychology will be my new home. The data-loving
side of me (that Steve helped nurture) likes this placement.
However…
There are two ‗must‘s in the classroom—conduct research and teach
without boring the children to pieces. My previous media education
experience has taught me this is more difficult than I initially
thought.
Another side of me (sparked by Joe) knows that education, in its
current form, needs to change. And Egan‘s theory seems to be a
key…
Joe versus Steve. Can there be an in-between?
The Barber248
I was soon going to be evicted from my Media Lab Analysis home and needed to
find a new job/second home. And this is when serendipity struck.
The SFU university newspaper ran a short story on the MRR project. The next
day, Steve and I got an email from a new member of the Education faculty, Dr.
Mark Fettes, inviting us to speak to a group of teachers and researchers who
would be leading a new CURA (Community-University Research Alliance)
initiative.
It is always good to do a bit of reconnaissance when meeting new people. I had
read Egan‘s and Kline‘s books before I chatted with them (although you may
have noticed I needed to improve my spy skills in the case of Egan), but Dr.
248. Seinfeld episode where George goes for a job interview. It is interrupted before it ends and he
is uncertain whether he has the job. He sticks around pretending he does.
189
Fettes was a bit of a mystery at this point. Luckily for me, SFU News ran a story
on his project.
―It is difficult and psychologically risky for someone to adopt a
way of imagining the world in which they are invisible or
marginalized,‖ explains Fettes. ―Yet, this is what the mainstream
curriculum typically requires of students. Through imaginative
education, we hope to involve learners in re-imaging their
communities' futures and their place in the world.‖249
It seemed that he, too, was drawn to Egan‘s ideas about engaging students‘
imaginations! I was also drawn to the focus on the students and their
capabilities. Trust seemed to hold a major place in his pedagogical outlook.
We met at Harbour Centre and presented our MMR findings to an enthusiastic
and welcoming bunch of teachers and leaders from three school districts (Haida
Gwaii, Prince Rupert and Chilliwack) and their Aboriginal communities. This
project was looking at the implementation of IE to make schools more inclusive
and successful for all students, and Aboriginal students in particular. It didn't
have a name at that point, but eventually we all came to call it LUCID—Learning
for Understanding through Culturally Inclusive Imaginative Development.
Although none of us realized it at that meeting, it would be the last time I‘d
work with Steve and the first time I‘d work with my new supervisor. Within the
next month, Dr. Fettes—Mark—had offered me a job with the project, and I had
found a new home with the Imaginative Education Research Group (IERG).
This woman is bending my mind into a pretzel250
Tannis and I head down from our mountain home towards downtown
Vancouver. We are meeting up with Mark and the LUCID group in the Coast
Plaza Hotel for a two-day pre-conference workshop before the 2nd Imagination
and Education conference put on by IERG.
(Steve and I presented in the
249. Carol Forbes, ―Appealing to imagination,‖ SFU News, accessed June 3, 2014,
http://www.sfu.ca/archive-sfunews/sfu_news/archives_2003/sfunews01080409.htm.
250. Jerry in ―The Pie.‖
190
inaugural conference a year ago, but this year I am going solo, and I‘m also a
part of the IERG group now.)
The day is full—learning how to fill out expense claims, book conference calls,
organize flights and trips for Mark and the community leaders, listening to
instructions from the out-going RA, and in any spare moment putting my head
down to finish up the last edits to my MA thesis (which hasn‘t yet been
defended)—and then SHE takes the podium—and I stop.
SHE is Miranda Armstrong, a teacher at Melbourne Girls Grammar School.
Throughout her career, she has been on a mission to find ways of engaging
students in a more authentic education; this led her to Egan‘s work in the late
1980s.
Her current dedication to IE is contagious—she lives it, and if anyone
has any doubts about the role of IE in transformational education, she squashes
that in mere moments.
My initial research into this led me to Jerome Bruner, who talks of
authenticating children‘s learning by placing them in the role of
experts. Certainly, becoming characters… allowed my students to
‗become‘ museum curators, bankers, lawyers, public servants and
so on. But they had done it in school uniforms, as school children.
251
I hear in her journey the role of storytelling—the element of Egan‘s work that I
first connected with. But she has gone further with it, to develop a whole style
of teaching based on role-playing.
Putting students in role—having them develop a character as part
of a story, offered students an imaginative way of developing
emotional intelligence. To be genuinely in role, a student has to, to
one degree or another, experience all the stated elements of
emotional intelligence.252
251. Miranda Armstrong, ―BRAIN SOUP LACED with IMAGINATION: An Australian Perspective on
Imagination Curriculum Design Across the Disciplines,‖ paper given at 2nd International
Conference on Imagination and Education (Vancouver, B.C July 14-17, 2004), 3; accessed June
10, 2014, http://www.ierg.net/confs/2004/Proceedings/Armstrong_Miranda.pdf.
252. Ibid., 4.
191
And then she says:
But also, Kieran‘s research gave me a headache. To begin with, I
didn‘t really have a clue what he was talking about.253
And she has my heart in her hands. She is so honest! And says what I‘ve felt for
so long but have been too scared to say out loud. Miranda welcomes our
confusion and moves it along… gently… unwinding the uncertainties and
presenting a journey of perseverance; taming our fears and telling us
magnificent stories of transformation of young children. My hope is reignited.
Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason254
Miranda‘s talk was important for me because I was increasingly reluctant to
connect myself with the psychologically driven media education model that that
we implemented in MRR. Indeed, sometimes I felt guilty about the way the MRR
looked/felt… although I knew the kids loved many of the lessons, and without
that experience I never would have been driven to search out a new way—a new
faculty—a new place to work/study/live.
Yet I was still trying to distill what bugged me about the MRR project—what
changes I wanted to make. I was also still trying to understand the field of
‗media education‘ and differentiate myself from others who had a different
perspective and set of purposes than I did. Because media education didn‘t
belong to any particular educational theory, it had been co-opted by a whole
range of educators wanting to either involve or talk about the media.
Masterman had helped to lay out some of the main orientations in the field, but
I hadn‘t yet found the place that I belonged.
Like Postman, I believed that the schools could play a role.
253. Ibid., 5.
254. Jerry in ―The Baby Shower.‖
192
My book Teaching as a Subversive Activity is more or less an
answer to this question because, in addition to what seems
obvious to me—the responsibility of parents to help preserve their
own children‘s childhood and not just turn their whole socializing
process over to the media—I think the schools have
responsibilities too. The schools are very well situated to do this
sort of thing because the school is one of the few institutions we
have whose most important product is not progress. Schools
don‘t have to speak for modernity but are free to do what is best
for children.255
But it was hard to find a clear vision of what the role of schools should be, or
how to get there. Unlike many media educators, I was neither focused on
education through the media, nor (in my current incarnation) on inoculating
children against media influence. I turned to Postman once again…
… when I talk about media education I don‘t mean just teaching
kids how to use a camera or even how to use a computer, that
might be part of it, but that is not the largest part. The larger is to
give our young some sense of the history of human
communications, its social effects, the biases different
technologies have had etc… 256
This I agreed with. I didn‘t just want them to use the technology— they could
figure that out on their own, like I had with the computer—I wanted them to
understand it well enough to talk back to it.
…so that each youngster has really full-bodied understanding of
how media alter people‘s social life, their psychic habits, their
psychological and even political ideas. So that‘s really what we
have to do. I might add that I think the schools are beginning to
take television and other media seriously.257
Len Masterman, in the 1980s, was asking the same question I was asking
today—how can we as media educators couch our work in an educational
framework to help make it meaningful—possibly challenging some dominant
assumptions about teaching in the process?
255. Sandra Longfellow Robinson, ―Childhood; can it be preserved? An interview with Neil
Postman,‖ Childhood Education, 61 no. 5 (May 1985): 338.
256. Channel Zero, ―Prelude to Vegas: Neil Postman gets interviewed,‖ accessed 1996,
http://www.channel-zero.com.
257. Ibid.
193
you can teach about the media most effectively, not through a
content-centered approach, but through the application of a
conceptual framework which can help pupils to make sense of any
media text. And that applies every bit as much to the new digitized
technologies as it did to the old mass media…The acid test of
whether a media course has been successful resides in students‘
ability to respond critically to media texts they will encounter in
the future. Media education is nothing if it is not an education for
life…
Hell yah!! Hi-five Masterman, this is totally what I believe as well!
My own objectives were to liberate pupils from the expertise of the
teacher, and to challenge the dominant hierarchical transmission
of knowledge which takes place in most classrooms.
Ok, hi-ten then… this is ALSO what I believe… down with the
transmission model!
In media studies information is transmitted laterally, to both
students and teachers alike. The teacher‘s role is not to advocate a
particular view but to promote reflection upon media texts, and
develop the kind of questioning and analytical skills, which will
help students to clarify their own views.258
OK, Masterman is my new guru !!
But to tell the truth, I didn‘t really believe that questioning and analysis were
enough. Miranda‘s talk confirmed my instinct that I needed ways of getting
students to be more playful, to put themselves in unfamiliar roles, to move their
bodies as well as their minds.
Was THIS what imaginative education was about?
258. Centre for Media Literacy, ―Voices of Media Literacy: International Pioneers Speak: Len
Masterman Interview Transcript‖ (interviewed by Dee Morgenthaler, Nov. 3, 2010), accessed
June 10, 2014, http://www.medialit.org/reading-room/voices-media-literacy-internationalpioneers-speak-len-masterman-interview-transcript.
194
I can't go to a bad movie by myself. What, am I gonna make sarcastic
remarks to strangers?259
With hopes revived, I headed into more meetings with Jude to prepare for our
project in the spring. Jude had a grade 3 class, so I knew I had to set my sights
on Mythic understanding—this was the IE framework that connected with preliterate children, and although I knew the grade 3 students could read a bit, I
wouldn‘t necessarily call them literate.
One of the unique features of Egan‘s theory was that he didn‘t claim that
illiteracy or pre-literacy were deficits that needed to be fixed. Rather, he
suggested that children‘s non-literate ‗kind of understanding‘ has depth,
importance and presence, along with very specific cognitive tools developed via
social and cultural contact with the world around the child.
The past went that-a-way.
When faced with a totally new situation,
we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects,
to the flavor of the most recent past.
…We march backwards into the future.260
From my first reading of Educational Development to my most recent reading of
The Educated Mind,261 the language and terms had changed significantly. For
example, the ‗stages‘ I read about early on were now called ‗kinds of
understanding‘…
…and not just called, but emphatically called KINDS of
understanding and if you said the S word you‘d get fierce stares.
That was fine, I could adopt a new language… whatever, just words
eh?
259. Jerry in ―The Chinese Restaurant.‖ Connects with the feeling that I needed to co-teach, to
have the support from an educator and to be the support as media studies researcher.
260. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage; An Inventory of Effects (San
Francisco: HardWired, 1996 original publication, 1967), 74-75.
261. Kieran Egan, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1997).
195
We won't get far
Flying in circles inside a jar
Because the air we breathe
Is thinning with the words that we speak262
It was only gradually that I came to understand why this shift was important.
The language of ‗stages‘ was ingrained in our culture and its ideas about
progress.263 We breathed in this notion of development as moving along a predefined, linear path. Egan was trying to get away from this, to a notion of
education as many-layered and involving both gains and losses. It was a way of
thinking at odds with how most schooling was done.
But not Waldorf. Tayme‘s school came into our lives via our
midwife, who on finding out that I was studying the impact of
media on kids said, ―There is this school where the kids aren‘t
allowed to watch TV and they aren‘t allowed to wear
commercialized clothing to school.‖ It wasn‘t until four years later
we finally arrived at this mysterious school, and it wasn‘t until
Tayme was in grade 2 and got a new teacher that I began to make
the connections between Egan‘s ideas and the philosopher behind
Waldorf—Rudolf Steiner.
Little by little, I started to integrate IE into my everyday thinking. The point of
education was not to quickly bypass certain kinds of understandings to get to a
better one. The Mythic kind of understanding wasn‘t just an insignificant
bothersome place you had to get through in order to move onto something
grander. It wasn‘t immature or childish, but an essential place/space/existence
to be in to live fully and imaginatively. Moreover, as Egan pointed out, when
one did become literate, something was lost.
262. Death Cab for Cutie, ―Codes and Keys,‖ Codes and Keys (Nashville: EMI, 2011); song lyrics
accessed June 10, 2014, http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/deathcabforcutie/codesandkeys.html
263. During pregnancy I was inundated with books telling me what is happening at each stage.
Then when Tayme was born there were these odd checklists that needed to be completed in
order for her to be judged adequate or not—moving from stage to stage. This WAS
development as far as I knew.
196
We drive the same way home from school every day. One day,
Tayme says to me, ‗I remember when Hannah could read the signs
and I was in awe of her, and then the following year I was doing
what seemed impossible just one year before. I remember how it
felt to look at the signs and not decipher the symbols. They were a
mystery, but now the mystery is gone. They are just there.‘
I don‘t have the same visceral memory from my own childhood, but
I do have my Korean experience. When we first arrived in Korea we
did a lot of charades—our bodies were the way we navigated the
world. But then we learned to read Hangul and the world changed.
We didn‘t have to interact so abruptly with the world; we didn‘t
have to sniff, peer or listen as carefully; we READ and spoke the
words. We gained literacy skills, but lost the heightened awareness
we initially used to make sense of this unfamiliar world.
This was how Egan claimed education works in general. In gaining new kinds of
understanding, we risked losing some of the vividness and power of the older
ones. We gained literacy; we lost magic. But we didn‘t have to totally lose what
we had before. Imaginative education was a way of trying to keep all kinds of
understanding alive. At times, the mystery of the world would reveal itself to
Tayme in a new way, even though she couldn‘t go back, couldn‘t become wholly
oral again. And of course, neither could I—I really wasn‘t an oral being in Korea;
but the experience reawakened capacities I‘d ceased to use.
Literacy creates very much simpler kinds of people than those that
develop in the complex web of ordinary tribal and oral societies.
For the fragmented man creates the homogenized Western world,
while oral societies are made up of people differentiated, not by
their specialist skills or visible marks, but by their unique
emotional mixes. The oral man's inner world is a tangle of
complex emotions and feelings that the Western practical man has
long ago eroded or suppressed within himself in the interest of
efficiency and practicality.264
264. Marshall McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, Essential McLuhan (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1995),
175-176.
197
Egan didn‘t seem to be endorsing some strict mental/physical or intellectual
breaks that happened; rather there were gradual shifts that eventually coalesced
into qualitative changes in perspective. The boundaries between kinds of
understanding were more blurred than implied by the term ‗stages‘. Also, very
importantly, they weren‘t part of some Bigger, Better, Faster model of
development.
The place where I came to see this most clearly was looking at what
Tayme was doing in her Waldorf class… using my IE lenses, which
had been much better developed than my Steiner ones. Initially I
thought the development of orality was only a stalling tactic until
the children were ready to learn to read—another typical
consequence of the idea of stages as biologically necessary and
inevitable.
Whence did the wond’rous mystic art arise,
Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes?
That we by tracing magic lines are taught,
How to embody, and to colour THOUGHTS?265
But then I began to see what Tayme was doing in Kindergarten and
grades 1 and 2 (in Waldorf official ‗reading‘ learning doesn‘t
happen until grade 3). It was a far cry from the little K‘s I see in
regular school classrooms, sitting on the rug reciting letters…
C-A-T spells cat
D-O-G spells dog
B-O-R-I-N-G-M-E-T-O-T-E-A-R-S spells what is happening to me right now.
This never happened in Tayme‘s class. They worked as I believe
little ones should work. Making, creating, digging, undoing,
recreating, struggling, balancing, chitter-chattering, tasting…. Their
day was spent inside listening to stories, puttering around building
fascinating structures out of silk sheets and wooden frames (putting
265. McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium is the Massage, 48.
198
them on tables, removing chairs, flipping everything on its head),
grinding their millet for snack or cutting veggies for soup, heading
outside while the soup/millet boiled to dig, run, make, and then
inside for warm food. Nap time…. and then one day a week breadmaking, and we‘d come home with uniquely shaped animals each
Tuesday.
The children moved to the stories they were told, making trees,
clouds, and birds with their bodies… Rarely if ever did they just sit
and stare up at the storyteller perched on the tall chair. They spent
time painting with watery colours that took on a life of their own as
they washed over the paper, blending, mixing and blurring; dancing
on the page.
Of course, Tayme‘s class included the biting kids, the hitting kids, the kids who
didn‘t share—I am not in fantasyland here. Still, it was substantially different
from any of the primary classes I‘d seen elsewhere. The focus was on language,
storytelling, rhyming, rhythm, and body movement—it fit perfectly with Egan‘s
Somatic and Mythic kinds of understandings and the cognitive tools and
descriptions associated with each.
So things were becoming clearer, but also more complicated. Now I had to be
thinking not just about Mythic understanding for my media unit, but also about
the body and senses (Somatic understanding)—a layer that had been introduced
since my reading of Educational Development.
Our body is the most fundamental mediating tool
that shapes our understanding.266
This had been a part of my own media education rant for some
time—that is, the lack of trust we now have for our bodies because
we have been too accustomed to relying on the media. How often do
you look outside, open up the balcony doors and see how cold or
warm it is? Or, do you turn to the weather channel or go online?
266. Egan, The Educated Mind, 5.
199
Why? What have we lost the connection to the seasons? I wanted to
bring students‘ attention back to their bodies and help them see how
wonderful our senses are and how they provide more excitement
and creativity in our lives.
Both Mythic and Somatic understanding made perfect sense in the context of
what I wanted to accomplish with the kids—reconnecting them with kid culture
that hadn‘t been infiltrated and commodified by the marketers. According to
Egan, these kinds of understanding were also important for acquiring the
literacy skills so valued by the school. Our orality, our ability to play with
spoken language, to use it extensively, had become malnourished in mainstream
Western culture, so when we launched into reading we had very little to build
our understanding on. His theory implied a critical stance towards both school
and the popular media—both had failed to engage children‘s imaginations for
educational ends.
Media, by altering the environment, evokes in us unique ratios of
sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way
we think and act—the way we perceive the world.
When
these
ratios
change,
men change.267
According to Egan, in order to develop Mythic and Somatic understandings I
needed to introduce the kids to the right cognitive tools. There were interesting
echoes here of anthropological/sociological approaches to the study of media.
267. McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium is the Massage, 41.
200
Swidler (1986) invites us to think of culture ―as a ‗tool kit‘ of
symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views, which people may use in
varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems‘. If the
problem is marking sense of the world of public affairs, media
imagery provides many of the essential tools. Of course, those
tools that are developed, spotlighted, and made readily accessible
have a higher probability of being used.268
For Somatic understanding, these tools involved our senses and our physical
interaction with the world. For Mythic, they included binary opposites, imagery,
puzzles/mystery,
metaphor,
jokes/humour,
rhyme/rhythm/pattern
and
games/drama/play.269 I understood the importance of these various elements,
but I hadn‘t really seen how they could seamlessly come together in a day, week
and year until Tayme‘s school proved it to me—particularly in the early grades,
that in mainstream classrooms tended to be completely inundated with literacy
and reading.
Uh-oh… we have a problem.
If IE asks us to re-engage the body and oral language but the system
emphasizes early literacy—how are they going to connect?
When I first brought ideas to Jude about orality and the mythic cognitive tools, I
was struck by her insistence on having written output.
―We need to have deliverables. Parents want to see the students‘ written work.
The more we have to show the better.‖
On one level, this totally made sense; it was what the school had been focusing
on and what the parents and students, never mind the teachers, were used to. If
we wanted media education to be taken seriously as part of the academic
curriculum, we needed to meet those expectations.
268. William A. Gamson, David Croteau, William Hoynes and Theordore Sasson, ―Media images
and the social construction of reality‖, Annual Review of Sociology 18 (1992): 389,
http://cgs.illinois.edu/sites/default/files/media/GamsonEtAl_MediaImagesandtheSocConstru
ctionofReality.pdf.
269. It is interesting to note that all of these are commonly found in children‘s media
programming, and in advertising aimed both at children and grownups.
201
On another level, I could see it derailing our efforts to focus on the cognitive
tools that most needed attention.
Ohhh… I am being haunted by worksheets!
I had to find a way to compromise between these two opposing worlds—the
‗normal‘ world of the school and its addiction to deliverables, and my world,
where the children would spend a great deal of time talking about their ideas,
discussing, debating, making up stories and role playing, as much for the
delight of it as for the purpose of producing anything at the end.
Portable television, take us away
From this burden of reflection we've carried today
Oh, the generator's running but there's nothing on the air
And the static is a comfort, so we huddle around and stare270
270. Death Cab for Cutie, ―Portable Television,‖ Codes and Keys (Nashville: EMI, 2011); song lyrics
accessed June 10, 2014,
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/deathcabforcutie/portabletelevision.html.
202
The Strike271
In planning lessons for use in schools, I still felt at a disadvantage—I was not
trained, I didn‘t have any PDP272 courses under my belt.
You're on the floor
Fearful of what's outside your door
But the codes and keys
They can protect you
From the pangs of jealousy273
I was hopeful, however, that the IE framework and theory could become my
guide. Much of what Egan was asking educators to do was counter to what they
had been taught—but I hadn‘t been taught that way. For instance, when he (and
IE theory) insisted that we start by locating importance and the wonder of the
topic instead of objectives, I was on board.
Locating importance:
What is emotionally engaging about the subject?
How can it evoke wonder?
Why should it matter to us?
274
These were unfamiliar questions for most teachers. Rather than finding the
wonder in a topic, when teachers were thinking about how to engage their
students, I often heard: ―I wonder what they would find interesting‖—―they‖
being the children who were living media-saturated lives. Characters from TV
271. Seinfeld episode where Frank Costanza reveals the holiday he created (Festivus) because he
despises the commercialization of Christmas. Here‘s it‘s meant as a metaphor for the process
of consciously developing alternatives to what we have taken for granted as natural. Quotes
are from The Seinfeld Scripts, ―The Strike,‖ accessed June 21, 2014,
http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheStrike.htm.
272. Professional Development Program—the SFU one-year teacher training program.
273. Death Cab for Cutie, ―Codes and Keys.‖
274. Egan includes ―planning frameworks‖ in many of his books that are intended to help teachers
come up with imaginatively engaging ways of teaching familiar topics. The boxes in this
chapter are taken from Part II of The Educated Mind.
203
shows, video games and movies littered children‘s possessions from their
running shoes to their school supplies, even their food. (I even came across
hunks of so-called fruit gloop shaped like the Disney Princesses.) Students were
using these artefacts to signify who they were: who was ‗cool‘ and who wasn‘t;
who was ‗in‘ and who was ‗out‘; who will be friend or foe—it was a powerful
force. Not surprisingly, then, when teachers were faced with the challenge to
find materials that children like would often turn to Disney, cartoons, comic
books, movies, and other products of media culture.
I had a hard time agreeing with this strategy. Schools had taken on a new role
for me—they felt like a place of refuge from the constant commercialization of
everyday life. I had gained great Spidey-senses when it came to
commercialization of kid culture, and my body would tingle (well, shake with
disbelief) when walking into classrooms dripping with consumer culture
materials…
A recent math book, Mathematics: Applications and Connections
(McGraw-Hill), currently in use by sixth, seventh, and eighth-grade
students in at least 16 US states, inserts products as Barbie dolls,
Big Macs, and Oreo cookies right into math problems. For example,
―Will is saving his allowance to buy a pair of Nike shoes that cost
$68.25. If Will earns $3.25 per week, how many weeks will Will
need to save?275
I didn‘t think I, or other teachers, needed to contribute to media saturation.
And after reading Egan‘s work, I most definitely felt that I didn‘t need to
appease the students with commercialized materials. After all, in ways
reminiscent of Postman, he was criticizing
…the insidious trivialization of childhood and of early childhood
education, in which a sanitized and prettified conception of the
world and human experience is considered all that children can
and should understand.276
275. L. Schrum, ―Education and commercialization: Raising awareness and making wise decisions,‖
Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education 2, no. 2, (2001): 172.
276. Egan, The Educated Mind, 245.
204
So what were teachers to do? Well… this is where Egan‘s work really fit in—he
offered insight into what engages students, gave us a framework to follow and a
theory of child development, without ever asking teachers to try to be
something they‘re not, or to adapt their teaching to the vagaries and trends of
kid culture. So I have to find the wonder in the topic of media. Let‘s see…
A Festivus for the rest of us
I had only a brief experience in the classroom with MRR, but was keenly aware
that children were often critical and sophisticated thinkers of media culture—
particularly when it came to those younger than them. I heard repeatedly:
―I am fine, I can watch anything and it doesn‘t hurt/affect me; but my younger
brother should never watch or do what I do.‖
It was as if children (the age didn‘t seem to matter) believed they could
miraculously create a force field around themselves, shielding themselves from
media influence. So, my new mission was to find a way to break down this field,
in a loving, caring and meaningful way.
Finding binary opposites:
What abstract and affective binary concepts best capture the wonder and
emotion of the topic?
What are the opposing forces in your “story”?
The trick here is to locate something dramatic inherent in the
topic. Not drama in the sense of blood and gore, but a sense of
tension, of contrasting perspectives perhaps, that can be opened
up and become immediately accessible to children.277
As I was pondering what to do, Don, a fellow PhDer who happened to be
married to a long-time grade two teacher, told me of one of his wife‘s favourite
classroom activities. It involved a small stuffed animal that would venture
277. Ibid., 246.
205
home with a new student each weekend. The stuffy was accompanied by a diary
so the student could write about their adventures with the stuffy during that
particular weekend.
This way of gaining insight into the students‘ home lives really sparked the
researcher side of me; it also sparked the teacher side of me, because I could see
how children could be inspired to write more (and more creatively) by creating
an intriguing writing situation.
The seed was planted that night. As I walked home across campus I pondered
how I could adapt this activity to fit into my media education lesson, and I was
suddenly struck by a memory of the pranksters who liberated garden gnomes
and returned them to the wild. Often this involved taking the decorative cement
figure on a trip and sending the owner photos of their beloved gnome at famous
landmarks. I found this prank and the resulting pictures to be fold-over bellylaughing hilarious.
Suddenly these two different ideas collided—gnomes on vacation and stuffed
animals in a grade three classroom. A variety of incongruent conversations (real
and imagined) I had over the last year with co-workers, peers, authors and pop
culture personalities began to merge with this notion and form a very strange
brew. A few years earlier, I would have freaked out by the disconnectedness of
these ideas, but over the past year, I had learned to relax and let my process run
its course.
―You‘ll never guess what happened to Tayme and me on the weekend.
Remember that rain storm on Saturday night—well, on the mountain it
was a bit crazier than down the mountain, and we kept on hearing this
knocking. Thinking it was just the wind and the branches on the window,
we ignored it, but it kept on happening in a very rhythmic way: knockknock… pause, knock-knock… pause.‖
206
I knew what had to be done. I dug around our house for a stuffed animal that:
1) could stand;
2) was cute;
3) did not have any pop culture references (which was easy since we never
bought Tayme anything that was connected to cartoons).
I found the perfect candidate—a mascot from the Korea/Japan 2001 World Cup.
Yes, I know, commercialized, but unusual enough that few of the students
would make the connection. ‗Zayah‘ was born.
―Finally I just had to see what was happening, so T and I approached the
window and carefully lifted up the blinds. And we saw an Alien! Oh my! At
first we were very scared, but then we heard a little voice saying hello,
anyone there? We crept back to the window and realized the alien wasn‘t
as scary as we thought. We helped her inside. She was lost and needed
help. She kept on talking about these signs and we didn‘t really know what
she was talking about so the next morning we went for a little walk.‖
One lunch break Dana and I walked with ‗Zayah‘ across campus, taking pictures
of her in seemingly natural positions—walking across the street (à la Abbey
Road), walking by the various stores on campus, standing in line at the coffee
shop, talking on the payphone, even getting stuck in the Coke machine (well…
almost natural!). Each photo op was carefully set up to show brand names or
207
symbols like Stop signs or Exit signs in the background. The more we played
with the idea, the funnier it got, and the more potential it had to intrigue the
students and get them to look at the taken-for-granted in a new way.
But the images couldn‘t be random; a journey of Zayah had to be crafted. And
the crafting needed to be grounded in a binary opposite… this would help hold
the whole lesson together and eliminate the fragmentation feeling that I had
with MRR.
First: What is so interesting about branding? Where is the wonder?
Really, it was the take-for-grantedness of much of it, the way branding had
woven itself into the fabric of everyday life; even identity. I wanted the students
to see it—not only see it, but grasp the magnitude of it.
Second: What are the contrasts or tensions involved here?
I could use binaries like visible/invisible, overt/hidden. But these didn‘t seem to
have much flair—they were OK, but not spectacular as I had hoped. We were
talking about such glitzy things (advertising) and I needed a binary opposite
that would be as catchy, or dare I say sexy, as what the advertising world
delivers to us on a daily basis.
Finally, after some afternoon complaining to Tannis, we came up with a new
pair that immediately sparked my trickster side: sly and obnoxious.278
Now I had a central tension for the story of Zayah‘s adventure. It took the little
alien from my home, down the street, across cross-walks, and through the
university campus, posing from time to time in front of, beside or near brands—
from an in-your-face, obnoxious one like a Coke truck, to small, inconspicuous,
sly ones like a Nike swoosh on a pant leg.
278. This was the first time that Tannis and I chatted about using really odd or non-obvious
binaries for lesson planning—a hint I continually pass on to anyone who wants to use IE.
208
It's a Festivus miracle
The next step was to find out if I could engage the student‘s protective natures
through Zayah‘s story, thereby mobilizing the energy they needed to become
experts in the field and to be willing to share their expertise with me.
Organizing the content into a story form.
The First Teaching Event
After telling the students the story about how T and I met Zayah, with Jude‘s
help I project her adventures onto the screen in the classroom.
The kids get the hang of it fast. They start to help Zayah make sense of her
campus tour by yelling out their names of the brands they see.
―I know that one for sure, my Dad buys those clothes ALL the TIME‖.
Standing on my tiptoes, with arms spread out wide, raising my voice to an
obnoxious level, I shout:
―Hey, look at me! Buy me, I need attention!‖—yes, I am the Coke truck.
209
The sly one makes me contract, crouch down and speak softly:
―Shhh... you can‘t see me, but I am still advertising, ha ha ha I‘ve tricked you, I
am sneaking and sly like a fox.‖
The kids really seem to enjoy skulking around as the sly logos; some love being
loud, stomping and taking up as much space as possible as they personify the
obnoxious logos. We become the logos! From that moment on, whenever we
need to remind ourselves of the binaries to help categorize a new find, the
children shift their whole bodies, shrinking down to depict sly and puffing up to
talk about obnoxious.
―I saw the most obnoxious ad at the bus stop yesterday!‖
―At my house I have a stool for my desk and it is red and has an arm going like
this and it says ‗big red‘ and it is just yelling at me!‖
Before long, the students begin to use the binaries to organize their discussions,
and even take one side or another in a debate. The messy, strange world of
advertising suddenly began to make sense to them, not only because of the
binaries, but because they had a mission—to help Zayah understand.
[T]he educational point is not to teach binary concepts, nor to
teach that the world is structured in binary terms, but always to
lead towards mediation, elaboration, and conscious recognition of
the initial structuring concepts.279
The binaries weren‘t just labels for categorizing the multitude of ads we see
each day; they provided a mediating lens for looking at the complexity of ads—
because not everyone is clearly either obnoxious or sly. Soon the students were
playing with that complexity, with the in-betweens, with the oddities that were
now revealed in the world—it was astonishing to see!
279. Egan, The Educated Mind, 43.
210
And now as Festivus rolls on
The binaries hadn‘t been too difficult to come up with. But according to Egan, I
still needed to shape the narrative of the unit.
Finding the story:
What’s “the story” on the topic?
How can you shape the content to reveal its emotional significance?
What is the emotional significance of media studies?
What is wonderful and intriguing about uncovering, dissecting,
deconstructing the everydayness of media?
Ah-hah! It‘s the power of being a media researcher!… or should I
say… media DETECTIVE?
WELCOME TO THE MEDIA DETECTIVES ACADEMY!
Now, if we‘re going to be detectives, how do I find a narrative?
Is Egan asking us to find a story related to the topic? If so, I‘ll have
to find something that would be appropriate for Grade 3.
I thought of my own childhood. Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and Choose Your Own
Adventure came to mind. But none seemed to be what I was looking for. I
remembered Dan‘s dance class and how perfectly the story matched with the
activities in the gym. I was hoping to come across something similar. But it
appeared it wasn‘t as easy as I‘d hoped.
Out of necessity, unable to find a book that fit my very specific criteria, I began
to think I would need to create my own narrative.
Wow, this is pretty far outside of my comfort zone. My ever-creative
friend, Tannis, had written a few stories when developing IE units;
she even turned some into books. Is this my only hope?
211
Then it hit me, it wasn‘t necessarily a story, it was a story FORM. When I read
Educational Development I had somehow missed the very explicit discussion of
structuring in story FORM, including the development of mini-stories to help
move the main story along. Presumably when I read the earlier parts about story
and its importance in our lives, I had the Opie and Bettelheim work on fairytales
in mind—a focus on content, not structure. Now I was suddenly relieved. I
didn‘t have to create my own story, I didn‘t have to adopt a story, I could just
think of the whole unit AS a story, one with a beginning, middle and end that
connected, built upon itself.
Oh, was this the problem with MRR? I kept on saying it lacked
integration or was fragmented, but maybe it just lacked a narrative
structure!
Now that I was to be the head detective of the Media Detective Agency, my
perspective on the story form needed to change. Each lesson now had to follow
a specific format: it had to be a CASE to be solved by the detectives-in-training.
Not only did it have to look official, with a logo and case number, I wanted to
make sure that the students developed a sense of expectation, a confidence in
their roles. We, as a class, would need to begin our time together in the same
way each day—ritual and rhythm became important to me.
The larger trick is attaching the rhythms inherent in languages to
the more general, peripatetic patterns of everyday life—hope and
despair, fear and relief, oppression, resentment, and revolt, youth
and age, the rising of emotions of comedy and the pity and fear of
tragedy, and on and on.280
Egan often talks about rhythm being associated with storytelling, with orality
and the role of the body in understanding. Now I could see how commercial
markets had tapped into this particular cognitive tool—so why couldn‘t
educators?281
280. ―The prevalence of rhyme and rhythm in TV ads, on shows like Sesame Street, in nursery
rhymes, and in children‘s stories testifies to their persisting appeal.‖ Egan, The Educated Mind,
59.
281. Ibid., 59.
212
The imaginative teaching method of ritual and routine… consists
of songs, prayers, poems and verses regularly performed by
children, such that over time they connect with certain words and,
more importantly, the essence of what they represent. It is a
method that relates directly to Steiner‘s notion of ‗unconscious
learning‘ and the importance he placed on stimulating the
‗rhythmic‘ life of the child.282
Essence- what a lovely term. What essence do I bring to the
classroom? What essence creates an imaginative classroom?
Increasingly, influenced by Egan but also by what I was learning about Waldorf
education, I felt rhythm to be a component of the way I needed to exist in the
classroom. Not in the usual sense of classroom management, shape of the day,
list of objectives to be covered, but as more of a breathing in and out during the
time we are together; a ritualized, patterned time.
So here was one of the first things I did to create a sense of rhythm to the Media
Detectives narrative. I gathered the children in the back of the room, sitting
knee-to-knee on the carpeted area—the place where I first met Zack. Sitting
there with them, I would introduce a mystery object to be felt, smelt, heard.
We‘d talk it through, as detectives; then, before they received their printed
version of the case, we‘d hold hands and I‘d send around a particular strength
that would help them with their case—study skills; good interview skills; keen
observation skills, etc. With a hand squeeze from me, we‘d sit in silence and
wait for the squeeze to reach each child, energizing them with the skill, before it
came right back to me.
This ritual provided a pattern for our time together. It initiated the movement
from student to media detective and prepared them for the work ahead.
282. Thomas W. Nielsen, ―Towards a Pedagogy of Imagination: A Phenomenological Case Study of
Holistic Education,‖ Ethnography and Education, 1 no. 2 (2006): 256.
213
The Parking Garage283
I was getting the hang of Egan‘s framework now, or at least thought I was
getting the hang of it. I had a pretty solid binary opposite to work with, loved
the detectives idea (so did the kids), we were all having a great time playing with
the idea of needing to explain the world of ads to Zayah—but I still struggled at
times with the structure of the lessons I wanted to create.
Then Tannis, who was constantly fiddling with things and had been working
with LUCID teachers in Chilliwack and Prince Rupert, created a whole new way
of looking at lesson planning. In place of Egan‘s original linear step-by-step
scheme, she put the binary opposites in the centre of a circle and listed the
other Mythic cognitive tools around the outside.
283. Seinfeld episode which takes place entirely within a parking garage, where the characters are
unable to find Kramer‘s car. Sometimes the classroom can be like this—wandering around
together in an enclosed space, trying to figure out where we‘re going and deal with everyone‘s
different questions and needs. Quotes are from The Seinfeld Scripts, ―The Parking Garage,‖
accessed June 21, 2014, http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheParkingGarage.htm.
214
215
This circular framework284 was intended as a brainstorming tool; it became a
staple in my toolbox, as it did for many other IE teachers. It was easier to look
at the cognitive tools and check them off, making sure I found an activity that
would work for each one.
Without going into minute detail of the time I spent in Jude‘s class—tempting
though it is—I will, however, go over a few of the cognitive tools and lessons
that illustrate both my successes and my failures.
No, no that's a Toyota
―So we have seen how there are signs all over the place that may have confused
Zayah. Do you have any in the classrooms?‖
Eyes wander all around in search of logos. One boy is wearing a Gap sweatshirt
and I carefully guide their gaze towards him—not wanting to put him on the
spot, but needing an example of logos on clothing. This directs their attention
to their own clothing; every child in the room begins to shuffle in their seat and
inspect themselves closely. I walk around with sticky notes and persuade them
to paste them on the logos they find.
―See if you can find the obnoxious logos—like this Gap one which seems to be
yelling ‗look at me!‘‖
―You‘ll have to look more carefully for the sly ones, like those on the bottoms of
your sneaker soles. Have you ever noticed how they can magically appear and
follow you after walking through snow or water, leaving a series of ads behind
you?‖
284
Permission to use circular chart granted by Tannis Calder.
216
We show off our sticky-noted bodies, categorizing the sly and obnoxious ones.
This sparks a competition to find the smallest logo.... some students, I suspect,
were hoping to spot a microscopic one that would allow them to win!
We transition to a worksheet with a picture of a cow on it. A former student of
Steve‘s, Sherry Graydon, wrote a book called Made You Look where she talked
about the idea of being branded like cows and this image really stuck with me. I
hope it will encourage the students to talk about the absurdity of it and
question the value of being branded with a certain logo when we are not cows.
Being a child whose mom would sew everything, and with no brand
names available at the bargain stores, I may have had a bone to
pick since I was deprived of the $100 jeans that were all the rage.
Did it really matter? I never thought so—even when the logo craze
hit a high point in junior high, when Levis were the only cool jeans
for rockers, the preppy students enjoyed the sweatshirt fad
sponsored by B.U.M. equipment, and coolest of all were the shirts by
ZULU that changed colour with heat.
Wanting the students to try to deconstruct these fads before they hit junior high
and drove their parents crazy asking for absurd clothing, I ask them to brand
their cows with the logos they most often saw.
The day is ending. We have just finished discussing how fair it is that movie
stars get paid to wear logos, and we have to pay to wear them. Finally—
surprise!—we are introduced to the real Zayah, who by the way is in the room
and has been listening to our whole conversation! Eyes and bodies start to spin
around in a frantic attempt to catch a glimpse of her. Once they spot her, they
become quiet, hoping not to frighten her.
Jude had a tricky sense of humour as well and agreed to hide her in
the classroom before my lesson. She even took it a step further and
had Zayah leave sticky notes or notes on the white board
throughout the term for the students—I loved her for that!
217
I tell the students that Zayah will be staying in the classroom. She will often
move from day to day, to get a better sense of what is happening. They should
keep their eyes open for her!
You should always carry a pad and pen
My researcher-side had not been run over by my teacher-side; I still yearned for
a way of knowing what was happening with kids‘ media use in the home
environment. Since Zayah was a prized possession of our family‘s, I wasn‘t
really open to having it spend the weekends with students—so Jude found a
little Bear that could go home with a different child each weekend so they could
write about their weekend adventures. The bear was not just a generic teddy
bear; it was, oddly enough, a Care Bear.
Ahhh... 80s commercialism is haunting me! This simple stuffed
animal sparks my inner grumpiness about consumerized kid
culture. However, I know I will have to stop being so picky. This
lovely little bear is going to be the eyes and ears for Zayah and the
researcher in me.
Still, much of the research involved taking note of what I was seeing in the
classroom. The grade 3s seemed to become detectives, they worked hard at
gaining the skills they needed. It wasn‘t just a game to play on behalf of the
teacher—well, at least I didn‘t get the feeling like it was. Even if it was a game,
they partook it in it with their whole being.
I found that their engagement made teaching so much more enjoyable. Seeing
them become the binaries during the first few sessions, witnessing their joy in
finding Zayah and staring at her with such awe inspired me to play more, to find
more ways to get that eye-popping, mouth-gaping, tongue-protruding look that
a grade 3 often will get when they are truly engaged.
218
Right here at the mall285
―Today we really have to use a bunch of our detective skills because I have a
secret code for you to decipher. Find your pods—play rock, paper, scissors and
the winner come back to me to get the very secret envelope for your group.‖
The children scooted to find their groups; hands flailed. The winners came up to
me with big grins. I gingerly handed them the secret code envelope and said in
a hushed, intense voice:
―Keep this very secret.‖
While the winners headed back to their desks, the other team‘s members were
erecting walls of folders in order to keep the secret safe.
Sounds of ripping were followed by hushed tones.
―They are all handwriting and curved, but what do they spell?‖
Some of the more literate groups continued to wrestle with this idea, trying to
decipher the message. Groups less fixated on reading moved more quickly from
confusion to understanding they were looking at logos.
―Oh, oh, they are all companies, they are all companies, because R for Reese cup,
m & m, Oreo…‖
Nice job! There were times that they looked to me for help, and I
had to hold myself back—the researcher inside of me knew that this
‗data‘ would help me understand what they knew and what they
didn‘t.
285. Sometimes my obsession with collecting teaching materials during my undergrad came in
handy. In one of my various boxes of ‗stuff‘ I found a reference to a documentary on kids‘s
knowledge of logos—for instance, many young children could distinguish the McDonald‘s M
from a multitude of other M fonts. From that I tracked down an artist‘s rendition of the
American alphabet in a lovely collection of logos, starting from A and ending with Z, that
served as the starting point for this lesson.
219
I caught one group glancing at Jude, appealing for help. I quickly skipped over
to her and said, ―Let‘s see what they get without helping.‖
Oh, ouch. My experience with Jared in Mrs. B‘s class comes back to
me. I‘ll have to make sure I touch-base with Jude after, although I
doubt she is as mortified as I was.
When it seemed that all the groups were finishing up, I elicited their answers.
On the rare trademarked letters that stumped them, I gave in and revealed the
secret. While doing this I hit on an unplanned teaching moment—target
audiences. The class realized that Jude, the teacher-assistant and I knew the
logos of various cleaning products, but the students didn‘t. This suddenly
opened the door to play with change of context—a cognitive tool of the
Romantic kind of understanding.
―Imagine laundry detergent being advertised during Sponge Bob Square Pants,
and candies during news programs!‖
Before debriefing the activity in writing, we reflected on it together.
Kym: Here is my question—how did you know they were companies? Did
your teacher teach you those letters?
Kelly: Because we‘ve seen them before at the beginning of products that we
usually buy and they are designed that way.
Kym: You are correct! Companies spend so much time and money on
designing these brands… Why? What do they want you to do?
John: Because they want their brand to be different and they want you to
notice it.
Kym: Yes, so you can see it and recognize it. Once you learn it and walk by
it… if you see a big red truck with a ‗C‘ on it and another ‗C‘ on it..
Students: COCA COLA!
220
Kym: Wow… but I only told you it was a red truck and a C…
John: It is imprinted…
I was impressed! This was a metaphorical look at branding that was far more
original and accurate that I ever could have explained to them. John had
borrowed a concept from a previous unit on owls to help make sense of what we
were discussing. This confirmed that what Jude was doing in the classroom was
engaging enough for students to remember ideas months later— and it helped
me to see how the concept can be explained in a new way.
The Non-Fat Yogurt286
My bits and pieces of IE knowledge were helping guide me away from a more
traditional, research-based media education program. However, because I was
really new at IE and at teaching in general, I could sometimes feel myself slip
into old habits, such as those dreaded worksheets.
They were snazzy
worksheets—Dana had created futuristic media characters that to adorn them,
and I tried to tie in all of the language to the idea of detectives, treating the
worksheets as cases the students had to solve. They worksheets were there to
serve two purposes—to furnish deliverables for Jude and the parents, and also
to give me data to mull over.
At the times when I began to feel myself slipping back into the familiar teaching
territory of ‗regular‘ schooling, I would often visit the IERG website, which
promised to be a treasure trove of IE ideas.287
The website had many
imaginative lesson plans, and although they were often specific to English,
science, math, I thought I would try to manipulate them to fit the ‗theme‘ I was
working with. This approach had mixed results...
…ahem, who am I kidding? Sometimes it was disastrous.
286. Seinfeld episode in which characters obsess over whether their favourite frozen yogurt is
really fat-free. This reminds me of the absurdity of thinking I could get a ―really‖ imaginative
story/lesson off a website and just drop my content into it.
287. Imaginative Education Research Group, www.ierg.net.
221
One lesson that caught my attention was one that Kieran had often talked about
in workshops and lectures—a math lesson focusing on decimal places. The
lesson is built around a story involving a king who want to count the soldiers in
his army, and his clever daughter who outsmarts all of his ―clueless
councillors.‖
First, the king‘s daughter tells each of the five clueless councilors to pick up ten
stones each. Then she has a table laid in the field to which the soldiers will be
marching from their tents. The clueless councilors are asked to stand in line
behind the table, and then a bowl is placed in front of each of them.
As the soldiers go by, the councilor at the end of the table puts a stone in his
bowl for each soldier. Once the ten stones have been put into the bowl, he picks
them up and carries on putting one stone into his bowl for each soldier who walks
past. So he has a rather busy afternoon, putting stones in his bowl as the soldiers
go by, and picking them up and starting again on the next ten.
The clueless councilor to his left has the less arduous job of watching him put
his stones in the bowl, and each time he picks up his ten stones the second clueless
councilor puts one stone into his bowl. When the second councilor has put all ten
stones in his bowl, he too picks them up again, and continues to put one down
each time his fellow councilor picks up his ten.
The third clueless councilor has only to watch the bowl of the second, and each
time the second councilor picks up his ten stones, the third councilor puts one into
his bowl. And so it goes on, with the fifth councilor having a very slow afternoon,
putting a stone down when the fourth councilor picks up his ten.
At the end of the afternoon, the fifth clueless councilor has one stone in his
bowl, the next councilor has seven, the third has none, the second has one, and the
first, exhausted, councilor has six. The daughter looks at the bowls and tells the
king that he has seventeen thousand and sixteen soldiers in his army.
Since I was keen on integrating media education into various subjects in the
class, I thought I would just replace the king, his daughter and the soldiers with
the TV salesman, his daughter and the delivery man. It made perfect sense to
me—really what did it matter if the soldiers were going off to war to save the
kingdom, or if they were delivering windows-onto-the-world housed in wooden
frames—both thought they were a positive force in the world.
What could go wrong?
222
May I suggest the possibility that you're faking?
There seemed to be a little person on my shoulder telling me:
- be more academic!
- don‘t trust Zayah!
- signs and logo hunts are not worthy enough for entire lessons!
Who this person was I will never know, but I really don‘t like them at
all!
I began with the story of this salesman who had all of these TVs in his factory,
but no one knew what they were, so no one was buying them.
―See, he was way ahead of his time!
―Then one day a very famous radio announcer came in and asked about these
strange screened boxes. The salesman explained it was a radio with pictures.
The announcer liked the idea of his audience seeing him—he was jealous of
newspaper reporters who had their pictures in their paper, and he thought he
deserved to have his public see how handsome he was.
―So, with that the announcer went on radio that evening and told people how
fabulous this new technology was; how they could finally see all the people they
had heard for years. The following day people were lined up around the block
to buy the new radio-with-pictures.
―The salesman, however, was not very organized and didn‘t know how he was
going to count all of the TVs to know how many he could sell…‖
Well, the yogurt verdict is in.... FAT!
Alas, my storytelling did little to help the children understand the concept of
place value. As suggested in the IE lesson, I had distributed pebbles to the
students so they could reproduce the counting actions for themselves. But as
the lesson went on, the pebbles and children were being plunked here and there
with little organized sense, and the feelings of confusion grew. The only saving
223
grace was the few students who had a dramatic side and liked to be the centre
of attention. Their portrayal of the TV delivery people carrying extremely large
(remember the old-school) TVs around the classroom was entertaining for
everyone—but comic relief had not been the aim of this lesson!
Those poor kids, I believe I completely confused them on what place
value was. And poor Jude for having to try to untangle the web of
confusion. Not to mention the fact that this clearly had nothing to
do with their cases and their detective-in-training focus.
Why had I done this? The look of engagement I was hoping to find
didn‘t exists at all in their eyes. Plus I had this whole other idea of
creating a timeline to show the proliferation of computers and
media in our lives by drawing a line graph on a timeline—grade 3
Kym, grade 3!!!
The fact is, my sense of mission could still sometimes thwart my teaching
instincts. One student, a very sweet and well-mannered little boy, had brought a
magnifying glass to class one day. Of course, right. They were after all
detectives. But it wasn‘t long before his world became consumed with looking
at the world through the lens. It became so all-consuming that I finally had to
take the magnifying glass away from him—he was ‗checking‘ everything out and
just wouldn‘t pay attention.
What I missed was one of those prized teaching moments. The lens
would have made a great tool, a great metaphor, a great talking
piece... Wasn‘t I actually asking them to magnify the ordinary and
asking them to take a new look at the taken-for-granted? And yet
here I was crushing his spirit and asking him to conform to my
ideas rather than embracing his enthusiasm and using it... where
was my flexibility? Why was I so driven to bull my way through this
lesson—like the math one?
224
The Little Kicks288
―You are going undercover this week.‖
The detective narrative had helped us work our way through an understanding
of advertisements on the streets, on our clothing, in magazines… and finally we
wanted them to talk about TV commercials. In the past, I would have brought in
commercials, but I had become a fan of activities which would let us see their
baseline knowledge before we helped them understand the subject a bit more.
This really became the way we evaluated what they understood and what they
learned, by comparing the before and after results of the cases.
Rather than teaching the characteristics of commercials (characters, theme,
brand representation, etc.), we asked the students to form groups, think of an
object to advertise and develop an ad—that was it! There were no further
instructions, no time limits, and no required number of lines per person: there
was basically very little intervention by the researcher or the teacher. One week
later I brought in a video camera and shot the commercials.
Half of show business is here
We were amazed: the shy children shone, the active children shared the stage,
debates were had, concessions were made, and respect was shown for peers.
Most surprising, however, was how they were able to create commercials almost
as though they were following a standardized, contemporary format. The
commercials were concise and entertaining: they discussed price, included
benefits and results of product use, and the students added music, used
costumes and developed characters—they had developed brilliant commercials
all on their own.
288. Seinfeld episode that hinges on the making of ―bootleg‖ videos of popular films. Quotes are
from The Seinfeld Scripts, ―The Little Kicks‖ (Episode 138), accessed June 21, 2014,
http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheLittleKicks.htm.
225
Due to the ‗low budget‘ format of the commercials, the students became
increasingly aware of the power of language to communicate abstract notions
and ideas. They played with the language and used genres of speech such as
sarcasm, jokes, melodies or jingles to create the world they sought for their
audience.
―Learning, the educational process, has long been associated only
with the glum. We speak of the 'serious' student. Our time
presents a unique opportunity for learning by means of humor—a
perceptive or incisive joke can be more meaningful than platitudes
lying between two covers."289
The students were keenly aware of the nuances the industry uses to target
audiences. They developed ads selling candy to kids using gross humour, but
they were also given the chance to play with the notion of absurdity—candy for
seniors with no teeth! This deepened both their engagement and their
understanding of marketing strategies. The ease with which they took on this
challenge once again illustrated to them, as well as to us, how incredibly
powerful and influential media culture, and particularly marketing, had been in
their lives.
Our commercial-making lesson, which allowed the students to go ‗undercover‘
and become ‗part of the advertising industry,‘ really cemented the notion that
children, indeed, carry a great deal of hidden knowledge. Recalling Steve‘s
notion of Cultural Judo, but also the IE emphasis on valuing students‘
imaginations, I was coming to see this as a key to the planning of effective
lessons.
289. McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium is the Massage, 10.
226
Conclusion:
How does the story end?
How do we resolve the conflict set up between the binary opposites?
Evaluation:
How can one know whether the topic has been understood, its importance
grasped, its content learned?
Once again, it was time for the tune out week. As far as the week itself went, it
was uneventful in terms of me failing or causing some sort of trauma in the
classroom. Many students seemed to have found old games and crafts to occupy
their time, and over half of the class reported having play-dates with peers. The
results seemed quite consistent with the MRR results a few years earlier.
Out of the debriefing process, however, came one of the most significant ah-hah
moments I have had in all my years of media education research.
The zoom-ins, the framing. I was enchanted
During MRR we were fortunate enough to have captured video footage of the
classroom activities, including interviews with parent and children at the end of
the tune out week. The resulting interviews were phenomenal—kids loved the
tune out week, parents adored spending time with their kids, some kids wanted
to continue tuning out all summer—it was the dream interview footage.
In true research mode I wanted to do the same with Media Detectives. I had been
pretty careful throughout the term about where and when I inserted myself as a
researcher. But I had an ‗out‘ in the narrative I had created, because detectives
needed to know how conduct interviews, so rather than me stepping behind the
227
camera, we took a week to develop the tactics and skills involved in being a talkshow interviewer, host and guest.
Jude played a major role in this one, since the students needed a lot of guidance
in developing the questions, and then time to practice doing interviews. She had
taught them to introduce themselves to the other person, to look at one
another, to try to memorize the script so it seemed more natural, and other
useful tips. Each group took turns coming down the hall into the new room
where they found me, my video camera and a few chairs set up facing one
another. The camera was trained on them, but they were talking to one another,
not to the person behind the camera like in MRR.
The students were amazing little interviewers—shaking hands, making inside
jokes, keeping the discussion going. The ‗answers‘ were sometimes very
familiar.
―TV is bad for your eyes.‖
―I never watched any, I only played with friends or went outside.‖
But while in some interviews there were only hints of missing the activity, I also
heard many claims that this was hard, not fun at all: they missed TV, had a hard
time without it, were the only ones in the house trying to do this… One girl even
listed off all the shows she missed.
It was all very sweet, well-choreographed, and I enjoyed showing the students
how to run the camera. The swaying footage was even more fun to watch after
the fact.
228
Do you even know what this scene is about?
Then, on a whim, while the first group of students were gathering their
documents and rearranging chairs before they left, I asked them:
―So, how was tune out week? Was it hard? Did you like it? Would you do it again?‖
Much to my shock they had answers resembling the MRR camera-ready answers,
the ones that had made us feel the program was a complete success. Sometimes
their responses to me were in complete opposition to the ones they had just
given on the ‗official‘ interview! I was floored. What the heck just happened?
The camera was rolling the whole time, but when they spoke to one another it
differed from when they spoke to me.
Of course they were giving me different answers! Wake up and
quit being so naïve! 290
Now this didn‘t happen with ALL of the students, but it was significant and
shocking enough that the whole idea of teacher/researcher-initiated interviews
began to feel like a fraudulent research method.291 This was the first time in the
pilot that I began to question whether the research protocol that I was following
was actually going to work. Could I see a change in the students‘ understanding
in such a short period of time, and what would it look like? Like the teacherfriendly responses I got on camera? That didn‘t seem right. My role as the
researcher was questioned again.
290. Pierre Boudieu, French philosopher and cultural theorist, has a word for what I had
experienced: symbolic violence, ―the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power.‖
Teachers are given power to define appropriate and inappropriate content and learning within
the educational field, and this in turn dictates which views or whose voices will be privileged
or suppressed within the classroom. P. Bourdieu and J.C. Passerson, Reproduction in
Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1977), 5.
291. Bourdieu encouraged teachers to work towards making the codes in their educative system
more visible by encouraging them to become ‗reflective practitioners‘. He contends that
becoming a reflective practitioner does not entail a decrease in agency or an inhibition to act
so long as it becomes a ―craft‖ and the knowledge of the process of reflection is ―embodied in
the agent‖ (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 621).
229
Am I part of the curriculum I am teaching?
And if so, what does this mean for my research?
I could feel myself being shaped as an educator by IE, even as I sought to shape
the content using IE. Maybe I needed to reconsider the focus of the study.
Could it be me? My adventures, not only the students‘?
To be as true as possible to Egan‘s work and the story form, Jude and I carefully
constructed a graduation day complete with a viewing of the commercials and a
short video of our time together—and popcorn of course!
The student walked away with a binder of cases that were solved, a spy book
they created from scratch, and a video disk. They had become full-fledged
media detectives.
The Pitch292
So there it was. How to sum it all up?
I think we really got something here
Overall, I was happy with the detective narrative, and the use of binaries that
seemed to hold the lessons together. The narrative was strong, although it did
waver here and there—but when it worked, it worked! The lessons that worked
best seemed seamless, seemed to be more truthful in nature.
In those lessons, I constantly had to be flexible and work very quickly on my
feet. This helped me realize that a teacher who didn‘t have a strong grounding
in media studies could perhaps do this unit, but would likely find it more
292. Seinfeld episode in which Jerry and George come up with an idea for a TV ―show about
nothing‖ that is identical to Seinfeld itself. Quotes are from The Seindfeld Scripts, ―The Pitch‖
(Episode 43), accessed June 21, 2014, http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/ThePitch.htm.
230
stressful—suddenly becoming an expert in your field became tightly linked with
imaginative education for me.
Who says you gotta have a story?
But then there were the oddities—those forced lessons used to fit the call of the
cognitive tools in the tool chart. These oddities didn‘t fit the narrative as nicely,
like the math unit where I just changed the characters. Or when I felt I needed
to teach them something very specific, I just slapped on the title Case study—
but the kids knew, oh they knew that these didn‘t make sense… that as
detectives they didn‘t need to know this.
Fragmentation found its way into my lessons in other ways. Sometimes it was a
strange disconnect between the worksheets and the oral focus of IE, all under
the huge umbrella of media education. At a micro level it found its way into the
de-contextualization of some activities—specifically the commercial lesson
which seemed start and stop out of nowhere. The flow of the narrative wasn‘t
quite there yet, and because of that we didn‘t get to some bigger issues about
the commercialization of kid culture. Finally, it was the separation of media
education from the rest of the curriculum, when I felt it should fit in seamlessly
everywhere.
See, this should be a show. This is the show
The activities that didn‘t seemed forced, both in planning and execution, felt
more like a conversation with the students, or an exploration, rather than an
exercise in checking off boxes and making sure the content was placed perfectly
in their little heads. I am not saying it was student-directed in the way that is
often seen or talked about in school, i.e. children deciding what and how they
want to learn. It was student-focused in that I created a narrative, involving the
detectives and Zayah, which provided an open framework (because I knew the
material so well) to take the inquiries, questions or confusions of the students
and integrate them into the case studies.
231
There were two sources for this openness. One was my personality—I don‘t
mind taking risks with kids, or staying up late and frantically working on
lessons—and the other was that fact that the lesson hadn‘t fully been
developed, they were still in skeleton form, and whatever came from one class
could be woven into the next. If I hadn‘t had such breadth of understanding of
media studies, this might not have been as easy. But because I could see the
connections, every question the students had become a new tangent into
learning.
Well, as I was saying, I would play myself
Over the course of the unit, I not only became more comfortable with the idea of
waiting to weave in ideas—I got to learn more about Mythic understanding and
became more comfortable with IE in general. It was research of a different kind:
I could reflect on what worked, try out new things, change lesson ideas, without
feeling like I was completely undoing years‘ worth of work. This reflective
process also began to shift my embedded notions of what I was doing as a
media educator. At some point, I realized my aims for media education had
shifted from MRR. I had become less concerned about them reducing their TV
time or changing their behaviours, and much more interested in helping them
become engaged in inquiry and the process of learning. Process suddenly took
on a whole new importance in my understanding of education, and in particular
media education.
I didn‘t have the guilt like I did with MRR—thank goodness. That guilt seemed to
cloud all the goodness of the project, until I had time to really go back (as in
Chapter 4) and analyze all that we did. This Media Detectives Unit felt much
more teacherly than researcherly, although I was quite surprised at the amount
and diversity of the research data I was able to collect—layers of research, to be
exact, for with each moment of reflection new layers appeared…
Again my role as the researcher came up. This was becoming a much more
personal and transformational experience than I had thought.
232
The Pilot293
Jude invited me back for the fall, so I had a chance to correct the oddities and
smooth out the narrative from the first pilot. This second classroom
experience, along with a year of working with the LUCID group, actually helped
me to see IE in a new light.
I wish we could open our eyes
To see in all directions at the same time
Oh what a beautiful view
If you were never aware of what was around you294
My biggest ah-hah moment was something I never thought I‘d say—I needed to
do LESS!
It wasn‘t about slacking off—it was about being less fixated on going round and
round the cognitive tool chart, forcing activities to fit in the narrative I‘d
created. With Jude‘s support, I found the courage to step back and eliminate all
of the lessons that didn‘t work. The narrative of detectives became the
touchstone of the whole unit—if detectives wouldn‘t do it, or if it didn‘t fit with
the idea of the binaries, then out it went! I didn‘t even try to squeeze it to fit… I
just let it go.
And I cannot guess what we'll discover
When we turn the dirt with our palms cupped like shovels295
Because of this simplification, even though the unit was planned for the whole
year compared with only one term, there seemed to be less content. But the
content was much more focused. Suddenly the idea of the detectives came alive
293. Seinfeld episode that concludes the plot line started in ―The Pitch.‖ Jerry and George produce
a pilot for their show Jerry; after various characters comment on its accuracy during its first
airing, the show is promptly cancelled.
294. Death Cab for Cutie, ―Marching Band of Manhattan,‖Plans (Nashville: EMI, 1996);
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/deathcabforcutie/marchingbandsofmanhattan.html.
295. Death Cab for Cutie, ―Soul Meets Body,‖ Plans (Nashville: EMI, 1996); accessed June 10, 2014,
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/deathcabforcutie/soulmeetsbody.html.
233
each week and one unit built upon another; the fragmentation that I dreaded
really seemed to disappear.
Another ah-hah moment came from revisions to the provincial curriculum. Oral
language was now emphasized as a foundation for Language Arts, so Jude and I
no longer found ourselves revamping the lessons to fit a worksheet form. A
more whole-hearted focus on oral language felt much more suited to the kind of
learning that was going on—developing the students‘ Mythic understanding.
And it is true what you said
That I live like a hermit in my own head
But when the sun shines again
I'll pull the curtains and blinds to let the light in296
So things were looking up! I had another shot at the unit, had a teacher who
was more than supportive and the curriculum was starting to ‗agree‘ with IE in
that oral language was valued. I was ready to slow down.
296. Death Cab for Cutie, ―Marching Band of Manhattan.‖
234
Chapter 6. Bringing Order Back to the World297
Porcupine Hunter
Another school, another classroom. I‘ve had half an hour to settle in, since the
absolute LACK of traffic on the road meant I got here way earlier than I
expected. A far cry from the 45-minute stop-and-go traffic I normally fight every
morning.
Luckily the school was open when I got here. I‘m looking forward to finally
meeting Laura and her students. We‘ve been emailing for the past month,
making plans for the spring—but this quick visit to the island has been much
needed to finalize things.
I haven‘t been waiting long before Laura comes strolling into the classroom.
Well, it‘s not actually a stroll—it‘s more like a bounce/gallop/dance all rolled
into one. And I can‘t help reaching for a cliché—she really is a ray of sunshine
on this dark, cold, dreary day! Her energy is very reminiscent of Jude‘s—both
teachers exude this energy, a love for children, and a willingness to shake things
up and try something new.
How do I find myself working with people with such high energy?
Are these the only teachers willing to take chance on me? The only
ones who attracted to something called Imaginative Education?
Hmmm… who takes on IE has always intrigued me… but that‘s for
another time….
297. ―Bringing order back to the world‖ is one way Christie Harris explains Mouse Woman‘s role in
the Mouse Woman stories, ―making everything equal‖ is another. The central principle is that
she helps restore a balance that has been upset by the ill-considered actions of people or
supernatural beings. See Christie Harris, The Mouse Woman Trilogy: 30th Anniversary Edition
(Vancouver, BC: Raincoast Books, 2007).
235
Soon the children are filing in. Laura turns on some music and cheerfully
welcomes them into the class. They jostle for position to dispose of their outer
skins—coats, winter gear, lunch boxes and backpacks. Then the questions start
flying at me.
―Who are you?‖
―Where are you from?‖
―Are you a new teacher?‖
And finally, my favourite:
―Who are you related to?‖
Wow—I am indeed in a very different place from the other schools
where I‘ve taught. I‘ve been asked a tonne of questions, but never
who I am related to.
Even more interesting… when was the last time I lived in a place
where I was actually related to someone? Hmm… guess that‘d be
1991.
I know that the children in this small, largely Haida community are closely
connected with one another; many may actually be cousins. So I guess it may
seem a bit odd that a complete stranger has found their way to the lovely
archipelago of Haida Gwaii and is now standing in their classroom.
―Umm… I‘m not related to anyone, I just know a few teachers and people in the
district and thought I should come and visit your class.‖
The fear of not belonging sits in the pit of my stomach.
Will this answer appease them? Will they care as much as I care?
I am so very aware of my own lack of culture. I have never stepped
foot on my ancestral land, I have little to no understanding of the
236
Scottish culture of Dad‘s family—besides the one time that Dad
brought out his bagpipes and it made me tear up (which then
resulted in immense embarrassment and confusion and stress,
hence the bagpipes never reappeared in my life again)—and
although I have a stronger connection to my Ukrainian roots, it is
muddled by the fact that the language my Babas spoke was a
hybrid of country twang and Canadian, not the high Ukrainian I
learned in school—so even after 5 years of bilingual school I was
still unable to speak to the Babas in their native tongue.
And on top of all this, I am weighed down by the burden of white
guilt, 298 facing these young Haida children whose relatives have
walked the same land since time immemorial, paddled the same
fierce waters, gazed at the same night sky (which reveals more
layers of stars than I ever imagined existed).
Who am I related to?
Slowly the chatter in the classroom shifts to whispers as the morning
announcements come on over the loudspeaker. The school day has begun. My
turn!
As in Jude‘s classroom, there is an open spot, free of desks and chairs, so I ask
if we can all move there. Sitting on the floor, knee-to-knee, it feels familiar and
welcoming; yet looking around and seeing how much older the kids look
compared to the little grade 3‘s I‘ve left behind in Burnaby, I begin to feel
uncomfortable.
―Hi, I am Kym. I am a student in Vancouver at Simon Fraser....‖
It‘s the same spiel I have given children since MRR. But this time it is met with
silence. Not the ‗that‘s kinda cool‘ silence that sometimes I get from kids; a
much more obvious ‗so what‘ silence. The students aren‘t disrespectful, mean,
298. Peggy Mcintosh, ―White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,‖ Peace and Freedom
(July/August 1989): 10-12.
237
loud or disruptive… they just honestly don‘t really care that some stranger,
from some university far away in the Lower Mainland, is here on a mission.
Gulp… what now?!
―Since I study kids‘ media culture, but don‘t really live around many children, I
thought it would be great if you could help me understand kid culture a bit
more… So I thought we could create a Media Detectives in Training agency.‖
I am increasingly convinced by their ‗so-what‘ eyes and general silence
(sprinkled with an occasional groan) that this isn‘t going to fly.
My heart is racing as I scramble for something to say. Yet each
time I open my mouth, fear and anxiety make everything I say come
out odd, wrong, boring as hell.
I laugh nervously and try to make the best of the situation.
―Well, we can change it a bit. Nothing is completely set now, I just wanted to
meet all of you and see your classroom and met your teacher and, well.... can‘t
wait to see all of you in the spring, and we‘ll have a lot of fun together!‖
A few smiles… but their brightness is dimmed by the groans and eye-rolling.
These eye rolls and groans seem to reach in and make a nest in the
depths of my soul. Dramatic, yes, yes… but really, have you had
those times when an activity, discussion, lesson plan flops; when as
soon as you say something, you wish you could reach out and pull it
back? My soul, spirit, confidence, ego… whatever term you prefer,
is drowning in darkness, heaviness… drowning.
I am in trouble!
I turn to Laura; she sees my pain and takes over the class. I slink around the
classroom for the rest of the day, trying to redeem myself by getting to know
the students and suppress the panic that is growing inside me. Little by little the
pain subsides, thanks to the students‘ chatter and Laura‘s lovely demeanor. The
238
space she creates in the classroom is not a robotic stand-and-deliver, worksheet
assembly line. The room is alive, which gives me the perfect opportunity to
spend the day with the children, kneeling by their desks, hearing their stories,
and answering as many questions as possible. This helps me heal.
Three o‘clock rolls around and I flop on the couch at the back, drained
emotionally and physically. Laura, however, is as energetic as the moment she
stepped foot in the class! Again, a very Jude-like characteristic.
My initial suspicion was correct. Even before I jumped on the ferry I
had a feeling—but didn‘t want to admit it—that I couldn‘t just box
up the media detectives program and ship it to Haida Gwaii. It‘s the
thought of starting from scratch, and memories of the chaos from
the first year with Jude when I was ‗trying this or that,‘ that has
been stopping me from fully accepting this challenge. But it looks
like I have no choice. Cramming a pre-made unit down the students‘
throats, however neatly packaged, would not do them any good, nor
would it work for me.
I leave Haida Gwaii happy to have met Laura and the students, but consumed
with apprehension that I‘ll have to start all over again.
This, of course, was Mouse Woman
―Here comes another one!‖
Tayme pipes up from the Baby Bear bed, situated right next to the Mama and
Papa Bear bigger bed in the small loft of the cabin.
Sure enough, we hear the towering cedars in the distance thrash and sway. The
chaos of moshing trees gets louder and louder. We wait and wait and then hold
on tight—to whatever we can, in this case our blankets—like THAT would help!
The cabin creaks and shudders under the blast.
239
Fearful the lining of wood shingles between us and the chaos outside will not be
enough, we contemplate moving our sleeping gear downstairs to the couch. But
the silence in between the gusts lulls us into comfort… until the next one
arrives and rips it out from under us.
The outside whirling of winds is an apt metaphor for what is
happening inside me. In the morning I will finally enter Laura‘s
classroom to start the media unit. Yet even after the weeks of
preparation, I‘m still unsure of myself. I am not Haida nor an
Aboriginal educator. Nor have I entirely come to terms with my
shifting understanding of media education, away from a very
definite protectionist stance to a much more… hmmm…
holistic/critical/open stance.
It‘s not that I don‘t have support. Vonnie, the LUCID Project Leader
for Haida Gwaii, is someone I trust implicitly to tell me what can or
can‘t be done in the schools; Laura is a wonderful colleague. But I
still need more help… from someone or something.
The wind is howling so loud that none of us can sleep. So instead of continuing
to freak out in the crashing, groaning dark, I decided to turn to the little
grandmother who has become part of our night-time reading, to help calm our
fears.
Mouse Woman liked everyone and everything to be proper. To her,
anyone who was disturbing the proper order of the world was a
mischief-maker. And being the busiest little busybody in the
Place-of-Supernatural-Beings, she always did something about the
mischief-makers.299
We cuddle on the big bed in the dimly lit loft as I read aloud. The stories are
filled with sage advice by Mouse Woman on how to deal with the pesky
mischief-makers. As usual, she is the perfect visitor, bringing tiny but precious
gifts. Gradually, she calms our fears of the storm. Eventually our eyes lose
299. Christie Harris, ―Before You Read the Stories,‖ The Mouse Woman Trilogy: 30th Anniversay
Edition (Vancouver, BC: Raincoast Books, 2007), 18.
240
strength and we need to retire, despite the ongoing sounds of the howling wind
and scurrying critters vying for shelter beneath the shingles of our temporary
home.
The next morning I wake to find a tiny note by the door. I quickly scan it for a
signature, and my shoulders sag with relief. Mouse Woman‘s big, busy mouse
eyes must have spotted my apprehension the night before. Being the spirit who
seeks balance, she has kindly left a clue to guide me through this tumultuous
time.
Her note includes a poem I have used in the past.
I’ll tell you the story of Jimmy Jet—
And you know what I tell you is true.
He loved to watch his TV set
Almost as much as you…. 300
Ah-hah, finally a clue to help inspire me for my four-week program
in the new classroom. Since the focus of the project is now on
exploring the media environment and making the normal seem
strange, Mouse Woman (and whatever bits and pieces she leaves me
as clues) will be a perfect co-teacher.
Ever since encountering Mouse Woman on my arrival in Haida Gwaii, I‘ve seen
her efforts to make the world less chaotic and more balanced as an amazing
metaphor for my own efforts to rebalance the chaos created by a highly
mediated, unquestioning childhood. The Mouse Woman stories provide me with
inspiration to move on, to accept the little steps as worthwhile. Even in the face
of complete despair and disorder, Mouse Woman is always able to see her way
out; she doesn‘t give up, she doesn‘t give in; she communicates to those in need
through advice and suggestions, hints and guidance, rather than dogmatic
directions.
300. Shel Silverstein, ―Jimmy Jet and His TV Set,‖ Where the Sidewalk Ends (New York: Harper &
Row, 1974), 28.
241
This is how I‘ve been coming to see media education. I want the students to
investigate the extremes of an unbalanced media world, where marketers are
lurking all around and insinuating their way into every nook and cranny of our
lives. It makes sense for the students to take on the spirit of Mouse Woman and
search for those mischief-makers, always recognizing that balance is possible,
and that it‘s up to all of us to set the world right again. Even though Mouse
Woman is ―the one who knows where we‘re going… who knows the way,‖301 she
leaves the decision making up to the children and those in need. It becomes
part of their struggle and their triumph.
―Mouse Woman,‖ I say once again in an awed whisper, because Mouse Woman is
a spirit and I know I must show my respect, ―thank you for the gift.‖
In return I make sure to leave her a wool bracelet, for it is well known that in
exchange for such advice, wool must be given to this littlest of grandmothers.302
You will see what you will see
The students scamper to their desks, eyebrows raised as they spot the foot-long
knotted pieces of wool in my hands. Soon I have them coming up, one from
each table, to receive a secret clue. Silently I hand each one a piece of wool and
an envelope—and raise my eyebrows right back at them.
―What is it????‖ says Tammy as she dangles this odd piece of wool like a dirty
sock in front of her group. Kerri, scanning the instructions in the envelope,
replies, ―It‘s a code.‖
The ohhhs and ahhhs quickly switch to secretive conversations. Soon enough
the children approach me with gentle feet and quietly whisper ‗Hello‘ into my
301. Harris, ―Before You Read the Stories,‖ 12.
302. The first time I tried my hand at creative writing, it was to tell this story for the IERG
newsletter. I remember sitting in the living room of the cabin after being asked to write a
piece on my work in Haida Gwaii. Dana and I had created newsletters to send home about our
adventures, and his storytelling and quirky sense of humour helped inspire me… but Mouse
Woman was behind it all!
242
ear. In return, I hand them a blank piece of paper—again in silence with raised
eyebrows. Soon each table has papers flapping and voices rising. I unravel a
long, rough-edged scroll and begin telling them the tale of Jimmy Jet.
‚And his brains turned into TV tubes
And his face to a TV screen…‛
I walk around each pod of chairs.
‚And two knobs saying ‘vert’ and ‘horiz’
Grew where his ears had been…‛ 303
Speaking in soft tones, moving in soft gestures, I weave through the pods of
desks. Thankfully the poem rhymes and I quickly find my groove of moving and
talking in rhythm. The students hush each other to hear me speak. Their eyes
widen as I emphasize the great transformation happening to poor Jimmy. Some
ask if they could draw this fantastic creature that was growing in their mind‘s
eye… I nod.
Try not to tell the stories in a way that causes children to reflect
and understand them in the head. Tell them in a way that evokes
a kind of silent thrill of awe (within limits) and in a way that
evokes pleasures and sorrows that continue to echo after the child
has left you, gradually to be transformed into understanding and
interests.304
The room grows more silent; only my footsteps and voice, and the scratching of
pencils on paper can be heard. Even those students who are more precocious
have found deep focus. With each rendition of the poem the students seem to
hear new details, and Jimmy Jet comes alive on the once blank pieces of paper.
Gradually, the frantic scribbling comes to a stop, and the students start to laugh
and marvel at their creations.
―Could this happen for real?‖
303. Silverstein, ―Jimmy Jet,‖ 29.
304. Rudolf Steiner, ―Lecture One: August 21, 1919,‖ Practical Advice to Teachers (Herndon, VA:
SteinerBooks, 2000), 15.
243
―Yah, well, my cousin plays video games all the time, maybe his hands will
become controllers.‖
―Oh cool!‖
The buzz of preposterous what if stories fills the room. I smile and let the
conversation grow and be shaped by the students.
I love it when the kids take on the ideas I throw at them in class;
when the room becomes a chatter of questions and possibilities.
This is really quite a NEW emotion/position for me. There have
been moments in my teaching career when the mere thought of
letting go and allowing the students run with ideas filled me with
fear. I needed to be in control, I needed to fill the space, never
leaving room for questions—what if I couldn‘t answer them?
Now, however, I feel that whatever is thrown at me, I can connect
and pull it back to the narrative frame I‘ve sculpted. There are, of
course, times when I can‘t answer specific questions. But that‘s OK.
I‘m now comfortable saying ‗hey, good question, I‘ll get back to you
on that‘. I take these questions as a challenge to learn something
new, rather than an outing of my lack of ability/knowledge. More,
these dialogues are a route to understanding the students at a much
deeper level, to recognizing how they see/hear/feel the world and
trying to mould my classes around that.
IE is not so much a way of teaching particular topics, as it is a way
of engaging in the world.
I skulk around as the students chatter on and on about their drawing and the
possibilities of friends and relatives becoming media characters. I am waiting to
hear key questions like ‗who did this‘… at which point I can pounce—not to
answer the question, but to spark a bit of wonder by planting the idea that
maybe, just maybe, there are some mischief-makers causing a bit of havoc on
their island.
244
For things were strangely satisfying
The classroom is festooned with images of Jimmy Jet and his ―media-hybrid‖
relatives—all the variations the kids have come up with since I first read them
the poem. I move to the front, holding the well-used Mouse Woman book close
to my chest.
I recall their curiosity about this mysterious blue volume, the first time I
read them one of the stories.
―Do you remember Raven?‖
The day before, a Haida storyteller had told the story of Raven stealing the
sun. The kids were happy to recall it for me.
―But… do you know Mouse Woman?‖
Only Gordy raised his hand. ―We have this book at home, but we don‘t
read it.‖
I opened the book and begin to pace again.
‚ONCE THERE WAS a narnauk
who was upsetting the order of Mouse Woman’s world
by tricking children into trouble.
It was in a time of very long ago, when things were different.
Then, supernatural beings called narnauks
roamed the vast green wilderness of the Northwest.
Some of them were helpful to human beings…
But there were also narnauks
who were harmful to human beings.‛305
I didn‘t use a book in Jude‘s class, where the narrative piece of the framework
came from the students being detectives. This time I am blurring the lines a bit
305. Harris, ―Mouse Woman and the Snee-nee-iq,‖ The Mouse Woman Trilogy: 30th Anniversary
Edition (Vancouver, BC: Raincoast Books, 2007), 63-64.
245
more. Since the students are at the end of grade 3 and 4, I feel more
comfortable merging Mythic with Romantic frameworks and bringing in written
stories. The heroic endeavours of Mouse Woman are providing the narrative,
while the binary opposites of chaotic and controlled are helping shape the
lessons.
Time and place have both played a role in these developments. I want to
connect the unit with the culture of the Haida and the Northwest Coast, so
Mouse Woman and the stories are helping me with that. And I‘ve taken another
long step away from the approach of trying to cram pre-planned lessons and
worksheets into a narrative framework. This unit is much more focused and
integrated, with fewer activities, more time for activities, and a folding of one
activity into the next.
The introduction of Jimmy Jet (and the kids‘ own renditions of mediahybrid characters) was followed by the Snee-nee-iq tale, a story of
temptation, misunderstandings, and bravery. This became a template for
the students to create their own stories of a world where ordinary, playful,
energetic children turned into lonely, anti-social media-hybrid characters.
However, I reassured them that they were not alone in their efforts to
regain balance once more—Mouse Woman‘s wisdom, kindness, magic
spells and mysterious powers could help them with this enormous task.
First we would come up with a script (brainstormed, then orally told to
Laura and myself); then we would prepare and present a dramatic play
for the younger grades and families.
I am really liking this depth, this concentration, and having the activities so
closely tied to the narrative. My anxiety about checking off all the cognitive
tools has passed. I am focusing on Mouse Woman, the media-hybrid kids, and
on getting the students to play with language for their dramatic renditions.
Gordy is sitting in the small groups of desks to my right with three other boys.
As usual, he is quiet, and I wonder what is going on inside. Around him there is
246
a flurry of frantic arms and excited shouts of ―Pick me!!‖ from the other
students.
From the back of the room I hear:
―Dogs, yah, lots of cute fuzzy dogs! My auntie has this dog that is so cute; I
think the world would have lots of them.‖
I smile and begin drawing a furry, odd-shaped dog on the board. Initially I wrote
their ideas on the board, but soon opted for drawings to save time and do
something a bit different. We laugh heartily at my peculiar drawings, but the
ideas are being thrown at me at break-neck speed so there is little time to add
detail.
Another newness for me—bringing in humour. My stand-anddeliver persona didn‘t leave much room for real, authentic humour;
sure, I could place a cartoon strategically in my PowerPoint, or tell
the students a knock-knock joke, but this pre-packaged humour
didn‘t seem as effective or nurturing for the student‘s own
development.
Humour needed to be authentic and based more on a thoughtful
understanding of the absurdities that the children play with in their
everyday life. So my playing with art worked in this moment. It was
humour that sparked openness, friendliness, playfulness… and that
was what I was going for—we were after all dealing with mischief
makers and Mouse Woman, so we needed to learn to be creative,
expressive, and open to the possibility of spirits causing havoc.
I move frantically from the ‗controlled‘ side of the board to the ‗chaotic‘ side
and back again.
―Flowers in bloom….‖
―Bunnies biting people…‖
247
―A bit of scary red sunshine in the sky…‖
―Trees on fire!‖
As I have come to expect from grade 3s and 4s, the bizarre and extreme
(chaotic) side fills up much more quickly than the controlled side.
Over the past week the students and I have come to the
understanding that strange is welcome in my class. They have
embraced this with great enthusiasm. They‘ve realized that I‘m not
usually looking for the correct answer—many times there is more
than one, anyway—but am really open to letting them discuss
possibilities and express their feelings. With this new-found
understanding, they gleefully seek to outdo their peers‘ suggestions
and their ideas flourish. Like Mouse Woman, I am accepting of their
imaginative spirit.
Joe‘s question: ―When have you been asked ‗what do you think?‘‖
I glance at the clock and realize the recess bell is about to ring; I need to wrap
up the discussion, although I know they could have gone on for another half an
hour. I put the finishing touches on the last of the drawings, and we take the
time to admire our collaborative work and chat about it a little, just before the
bell rings.
As the students start to head outside, Gordy approaches the front of the
classroom. Gazing intently at the chalkboard, without even looking at me, he
begins to speak:
‚Mrs. Stewart, if in the chaotic world the trees were on fire,
then in the controlled world the trees would be strong and healthy.
If in the chaotic world the bunnies run around biting people,
in the controlled world they would go around and be friendly to people….‛
I stop in my tracks. Around me, the world stops, too.
248
Gordy is one of the students who has difficulty reading and writing; normally he
is very quiet in class. I have never heard him come out with such a long
statement, let alone one expressed in such a nuanced way.
In this moment, it seems to me that I haven‘t heard Gordy‘s voice before—really
heard it. Why? What has caused him to be silent, or me to be deaf? What did I
do differently this time?
That which is in opposition is in concert,
and from all that differs comes
the most beautiful harmony.306
I hadn‘t prompted Gordy directly to make these connections. He took the
initiative, based on what I assume was a driving need to express what had been
stirring in his mind/body.
A terrifying thought—what would have happened if I had passed
out worksheets?
I would never have encountered him in this way.
Witnessing Gordy‘s transformation, I experience my own in return.
Stand still.
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you
Are not lost.
Have I been learning to stand still, to listen?
Is this, too, Imaginative Education?
At another point in my life, I might have listened to Gordy politely and said,
―Wow, that was a really neat connection.‖ I might have smiled, said ―Good job,‖
and then asked him to head out for recess. But instead I stand still, letting the
surprise of his connections wash over me.
306. Attributed to Heraclitus; Thomas Nielsen, personal communication. Oct 16 th, 2006.
249
His silence during the class was not devoid of thought…
I can only assume the time I allowed the lesson, in my new, slimmed-down,
focused mode of using IE, meant these ideas could grow, lingering deep within
him, even while I launched myself from one side of the board to the other, until
he couldn‘t keep them inside any more.
What encounters did I miss in Jude‘s class while I was trying to work
my way around the circle chart of cognitive tools? Did I not stand
still long enough to hear/see the students in a way I can now?
Gordy helped me SEE the cognitive tools in action, in embodied form. They were
alive and growing in the students, not trapped in a static framework or
dependent on me to teach them.
The small had vanquished the big
The children come up one-by-one to the round table in the corner for their oneon-one conference with me, the Production Company Director in charge of
funding their theatre production.
My title doesn‘t really fit into the narrative, but they couldn‘t care
less what I‘m called—they are excited to tell me their stories.
We sit, and each child begins to tell his or her story. This is very different from
the interviews we did after MRR. Now my questions and carefully crafted
tangents are used to bring complexity into play. This means we need time
together. This can‘t be a rushed engagement with one another. The ideas need
to bubble up; we need time to toss them back and forth, let them linger, digest
them; then new ideas bubble up and we need to engage in the whole process
again.
250
I am so happy we have time to play—with language, character
development, humour and movements. It‘s a whole process; the
growth in their stories from the moment they sit down to the
moment they leave is dramatic.
I have been driven to create this play, despite a complete lack of experience, for
two reasons. Firstly, I want dearly to provide some of the students who have
been typecast with an opportunity to be someone else. The shy child can become
a loud trickster, the so-called ‗bully‘ can be Mouse Woman, helping others to
regain control through her own carefully chosen words. I want the students to
play with different personalities, movements, interactions and relationships.
Secondly, I want to celebrate orality via this art form. Tayme‘s school had the
children involved in plays starting in kindergarten and I saw how she could fully
embody a character, could learn and play with language via those performances.
As the weeks have passed and I have met with more experiences like the one
with Gordy, this need to celebrate orality is becoming more apparent, necessary,
and pressing.
The days fly by in a happy (though for me, increasingly desperate) chaos of
ideas and preparations. The day of the play is very much influenced by a gaggle
of mischief makers; Mouse Woman must be wrinkling her nose something
fierce, because all does not go smoothly. We have kids flying off the stage,
forgetting their lines, not leaving backstage… but we also have magnificent
portrayals of mischief makers and mouse women and the struggle to bring
order to the world. There are moments, either during the story-telling or the
play itself, when the children seemingly surrender themselves to the experience;
they embody it.
251
In surrendering to something, feelings and excitement are released
and affect your whole being, not just the head and heart.307
I vow that day to NEVER, EVER, attempt a play again—I completely,
totally, 100% miscalculated the time and energy it took from the
moment of script to stage time. I know—anyone who has any
experience with stage productions will be doing a face-palm right
now. But this was my, our, first time… so give us some slack.
Despite our muddle-headed moments, Mouse Woman would be happy with the
ending of the media unit. The small have vanquished the big. Voices which have
been silenced have now been heard, young people have been guided and
supported in their growth and decisions.
She would find it strangely satisfying that the island of Haida Gwaii has forever
altered my perception of imaginative education.
Do not spit into the sea
I stepped through the cabin door into a full fledge jibber-jabber fest of a very
excited seven year old rushing to tell me of the day she had with Daddy. In
between ―And then we did…. and then…‖ came the muffled sound of northern
CBC radio personalities on the stereo/record player—a fantastic new technology
never before seen by our curious daughter, who loved to watch the warped
records spin in a wondrous circular wobble.
Our semi-technology-free environment (no phone, TV, internet) was like a forced
media cleanse for all of us. Like the kids in MRR, we felt the effects immediately:
initial symptoms of withdrawal, then a vague feeling that something was
missing, and fairly quickly embracing new everyday habits—painting, writing,
knitting, and storytelling.308
307. Steiner, ―Lecture One,‖ 14.
308. Upon our return we went through a very rapid and disruptive reabsorption back into the fastpaced, media-saturated world of Vancouver.
252
Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his
variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn
finds every new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes,
as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the
plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms.
The machine world reciprocates man‘s love by expediting his
wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.309
Adopting new habits meant awakening senses that had become numbed or had
lain dormant in a tech-filled, fast-paced world.
―We‘re going to the beach now, Mommy!‖
It was only 3:15; I didn‘t have to mark or read for classes or fight hours of
traffic in the morning; so this seemed like a very logical plan. We grabbed
raingear and hopped into our little yellow car. Along we wound, right and left,
up and down, along a real-life version of Emily Carr‘s giant cedar paintings.
Finally it led us to a small exit onto the beach. We jumped from the car and
headed towards the sand, but first we had to scale the mountain of driftwood
scattered wide and high before making it onto the flat, empty beach.
Our afternoon adventures began with Tayme‘s favourite catch-me-if-you-can
game. The fierce waves licked at our heels as we squealed and ran for safety
onto the damp sand. This game soon shifted from us being the chased to us
becoming the chasers, and we sped off across the beach in a Seinfeldian pier
run, pelting after flocks of birds.
Back and forth we alternated, moving from frolicking in the waves, chasing the
flocks, and hurdling over great swathes of endless white sea foam.
‚…the Real People moved in awe of the Ocean People
who could help them or harm them‛ 310
309. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1964), 46..
310. Christie Harris, ―Mouse Woman and the Monster Killer Whale,‖ The Mouse Woman Trilogy.
(Vancouver, BC: Raincoast Books, 2007), 99-100.
253
The sun was setting and with it the warmth of the day. We were tuckered out
and getting hungry, so we decided it was time to head home.
Back across the wide beach, which had narrowed because of the rising tide, over
the mountain of driftwood, and onto the small patch of dirt road where our
little yellow car waited.
We all stood by our appropriate car doors. I peered over the roof to see Dana
doing his pat-the-pockets-looking-for-keys dance.
―You got the keys?‖
I flew into my own pat-down-the-pockets dance. Feeling my face becoming paler,
I turned to him.
―No…‖
Our gaze turned to the endless, sea-foam-laden beach we had just left.
Without a word, we turned back, scaled the mountain of driftwood like pros,
and started to retrace our scattered, purposeless steps.
Cursing the sale-item yellow raincoat with shallow pockets, I walked back and
forth, envisioning how we‘d get our daughter safely home through the mossdraped forest that now reminded me of the headless horseman‘s trail.
Curse you, Disney, what are you still doing in my head?
The thought was daunting. The walk would be too long, too dark and too
isolated for our liking—we feared our city-infused blood might be too tempting
for the biggest black bears on the continent.
Our spirits were fading, and so was the light from the setting sun.
Jokingly, in an attempt to divert Tayme from our growing fears, we began to
play with various ideas of why this might have happened. We‘d been reading
254
about Mouse Woman and her adventures with various mischief-makers on the
Island. Were we at the receiving end of some such mischief-maker?
Or… had we offended someone in the Place of Supernatural Beings?
We reflected back on our time at the beach. Of course! It must have been the
bird chasing. Perhaps we were now being made to pay for such lack of respect.
Could Seafoam Woman311 be playing a trick on us?
We moved from worry to laughter and playfulness—from the anxious drudgery
of searching for the keys to a more light-hearted way of embracing our
predicament. We did it for Tayme‘s sake—but it was altering us as well.
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1986/1998) associates play with
performance and the dynamism of play with creating of self. …The
player is subsumed by the play, playing without purpose or effort,
absorbed into the structure of play, and relaxed by it. … He
continues, play is… a process that takes place ―in between.‖… Play
does not have its being in the player‘s consciousness or attitude,
but on the contrary play draws him into its dominion and fills him
with its spirit.312
Within minutes of coming up with this new perspective on the situation, Dana
glanced across the beach and spotted, in a pile of light, fluffy foam, something
shiny—the ONE and ONLY key to our precious little yellow Aveo.
We were saved!
Tayme and I turned towards the sea and yelled, ―Thank you, Seafoam Woman,
we‘ve learned our lesson!‖
Once we started to play, it seemed like our ability to see the empty
beach changed. It was not devoid of life, as we initially thought; it
was full, alive, crawling, ever-changing, sparking, beautiful.
311. Seafoam Woman was not a spirit we had read about, but Tayme had never seen sea foam
before and it seemed to be a feature of the islands that obviously would have its own spirit.
312. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1998); quoted in Donna
Trueit, ―Play Which is More than Play,‖ Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and
Education 3, no.1 (2006): 100.
255
For Gadamer play infuses the creative space of being, of selfcreating. Each performative occasion is an opportunity to create, to
reinterpret and to grow through the experience. The extraordinary
occurrence of play, the ‗moreness,‘ derives from the powerful
dynamism of relations and interactions, the circumstances for the
emergence of the new and for transformation.313
But why did it take this stressful situation and Mouse Woman to
remind me to be playful? Why had I stopped losing myself in play,
story, wonder?
Most adults hardly notice the cracks in the sidewalk or between
paving stones. For most children, however, such cracks are
fraught with fantastic meaning.314
When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown
The dream is gone
I have become comfortably numb. 315
Had I become comfortably numb? And if so, could the process be
reversed? Could I learn to live, teach, think, see, feel more playfully?
Was this, too, Imaginative Education?
313. Ibid.
314. Kieran Egan, Primary Understanding (New York: Routledge, 1988): 20.
315. Pink Floyd, ―Comfortably Numb,‖ The Wall (London: Harvest, 1980); song lyrics accessed June
10, 2014, http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/pinkfloyd/comfortablynumb.html.
256
To strengthen spirit power for the journey
‗I shall mount to paradise/By the stairway of surprise.‘ By
deepening and purifying the ordinary functions of our heart and
minds, we can allow them to become surprising again.316
Following our return from Haida Gwaii, Tayme‘s school became another site for
my educational research. Brian, Tayme‘s teacher (who according to the Waldorf
system moved with her from grades 1-8) became a good friend of ours. I could
re-live my days of PhD classes by just asking him one pedagogical question—
he‘d be off for hours; much to my delight. It was the perfect combination of
practice and theory, with Tayme, her main lesson books and the school
activities as a kind of case study in the application of Steiner‘s ideas.
In addition to this, Elaine, a retired Waldorf high school teacher, embarked on
the adventure of teaching parents one morning a week. It was through this
North Shore Mouse Woman that I was introduced to Michael Lipson‘s book
Stairway of Surprise: Six Steps to a Creative Life. Lipson tested his theories out in
his work with dying children and their families at Harlem Hospital in New York
City; his book was a heartfelt mix of theory with practice. The six exercises he
discussed in the book were based on Steiner‘s: Concentration of thought,
Initiative of will, Equanimity, Positivity, Freedom from prejudice, Forgiveness. 317
Lipson simplified these somewhat to thinking, doing, feeling, loving, opening and
finally thanking. He suggested that similar exercises or ideas could also be
found in other disciplines, e.g. the Buddhist six paramitas or the Hindu chakras;
they also had echoes in the world of Hungarian chemist/psychologist/ linguist
Georg Kuhlewind and Ralph Waldo Emerson‘s essays.
316. Michael Lipson, Stairway of Surprise: Six Steps to a Creative Life (Herndon, VA: SteinerBooks,
2002), 12. The quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson‘s poem ―Merlin.‖
317. Lipson quotes Steiner‘s Guidance in Esoteric Training. (London: Rudolph Steiner Press, 1994).
257
We all could benefit from thinking with less distraction, more
concentration, more intervention. We all have difficulty in carrying
out our intentions (doing). We all could benefit from turning our
self-oriented emotions outward, and understanding the world
through feeling. If we are honest, we admit that we can become
more loving, and so throw the weight of our awareness on the side
of the Good. Through opening, or freedom from prejudice, we
could find ourselves more available to the intuitions at the basis of
this world and the intuitions still waiting for us to realize them.
We already sense that the moment of thanking makes us intimate
with the source of what is given.318
Seems plausible enough. But there are surprises in store.
Elaine walks around the small kindergarten classroom and hands a paperclip to
each of us. We look at the clip, and then her; and then at the clip, and at her
again. She smiles.
―Today we are going to learn how to nurture our focusing.‖
Normally, by that time we reach adulthood, we find it difficult to
bring our whole selves to any task. The complete absorption that
small children demonstrate in play and in learning language gives
way in later childhood and adulthood to a mind full of
distractions, associations and worries. Yet our powers of
absorption never quite disappear. We can always pay some
attention. This most fundamental human capacity—the capacity
to attend—is the human extra. It can be strengthened so that we
apply ourselves more creatively to our chosen work and play,
regaining something of the small child‘s absolute immersion.319
―Now, hold the paperclip in your hands and examine it. Learn to stay with the
paper clip. There will be many different images/thoughts/distractions that will
flash before you, trying to take your attention away from this very ‗boring‘
paper clip exercise…‖
318. Lipson, Stairway of Surprise; 11.
319. Lipson, Stairway of Surprise; 10.
258
[We can] create moments in life when we can withdraw into
ourselves in silence and solitude. In these moments, we should not
give ourselves up to our own concerns. To do so would lead to the
opposite of what we are striving for. Instead, in such moments, we
should allow what we have experienced—what the outer world has
told us—to linger on in utter stillness. In these quiet moments,
every flower, every animal, and every action will disclose mysteries
undreamed of. This prepares us to receive new sense impressions
of the outer world with eyes quite different than before.320
McLuhan would be proud of me now—I am training my senses!
As we grow older, we dim down the sensory responses, and
increase the sensory inputs, turning ourselves into robots.321
―Acknowledge these distractions, let them go, and focus again on the paperclip.‖
Hmmm…. so what do we do with the paperclip?
―Well, I often ask questions of it. Where was it made, how, by whom? I‘ve used
a button for this focus exercise for the past five years.‖
Oh geez, what am I going to ask a paper clip?
―But don‘t answer these questions. Don‘t run home and Google it. This is an
exercise in focusing, in living with one object and finding the wonder in it again
and again.‖
Why question something that I cannot answer or to which I cannot
find the answer? I think it is a personality thing—Dana isn‘t like
this. He wonders way more than I do. I don‘t have time to wonder.
Gotta get things DONE!
―OK… I‘ll time you for 2 minutes. Begin!‖
320. Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1994), 23.
321. Eric McLuhan, ―Marshall McLuhan‘s Theory of Communication,‖ Global Media Journal 1
(2008): 27. McLuhan suggests that when the sensory input is dim (cool versus hot; missing
information, like poetry or abstract art) that we have to do the work and thus the sensory
response is strong.
259
Now I must admit this exercise was ‗out there,‘ but I completely trusted Elaine.
As I sat staring at the paper clip, I realized that my mind truly was flooded with
distractions.
Distractions from thinking are fascinating liars. They don‘t
announce themselves as distractions at all. They slink into our
consciousness, wolves in sheep‘s clothing, disguised as our very
own thoughts.322
Yes, yes, I need to remember—
to order that book from the library…
that we need groceries…
that Tayme needs a birthday present for a friend this weekend…
that I need gas in the car…
that I need—
later, later, I need to focus now.
For one thing, we notice that our distractions are never creative.
They are all about ‗me‘ in one way or another—what I already want
or dread. They never really break new ground.323
After we‘ve sat with our paper clips, Elaine asks us to take a moment and
write/draw/ sketch our experience. Then we talk about it. We all had a hard
time, even those who meditated.
I have an even harder time imagining doing this every day for
years!
Thinking about the experience later, though, it dawned on me: if I could find
the wonder, if I could find engagement in the same object every day for years,
then wouldn‘t I be training my senses to see the world around me in a much
322. Lipson, Stairway of Surprise, 36.
323. Ibid., 37.
260
more vibrant, engaging way? And isn‘t that what IE is about? Being more
in/with/wholly part of the world?
I thought back to Haida Gwaii—how it had abstracted me from the technological
whirl I had created around myself, and forced me to be more grounded in the
world of the everyday. Now my North Shore Mouse Woman had handed me a
man-made object, a boring, simple paper clip, and asked me to find the same
wonder as I had in the moss-draped forests and foam-strewn beaches of the
island of spirits.
The less we can focus, the less we receive the significance of the
world—like tired readers who see the words but no longer get the
sense of the text…We hasten through a senseless world with
restless minds.324
Suddenly I realized that the inner development of the teacher was as important
for imaginative education as memorizing the cognitive tools or being a whiz at
collecting bits and pieces of info for the topic at hand. We needed to train
ourselves. My early schooling had pretty much failed to instill the drive to find
wonder (head down, stay out of trouble does NOT equal asking question or
nurturing curiously), and now our media-saturated world easily provided us
with the means to entertain ourselves endlessly, leaving us adrift like tired
readers with restless minds.
I am, as usual, at a coffee shop writing. Next to me are two 20 year-old
undergrads. The conversation wanders to this and that and eventually
hits on favourite TV shows.
The girl says she has been watching Once upon a Time. My interest is
piqued—Tayme and I have been watching this too. The boy asks, ―What‘s it
about?‖
324. Lipson, Stairway of Surprise, 32.
261
―Well, it‘s like fairy-tale characters in real time. So there is Snow White and
Prince Charming and, well, they live now and... oh … just Wikipedia it,
they will explain it better.‖
He does. He reads it.
―Oh, it‘s a TV series.‖
―Yah.‖
He scans the list of characters and finds a name that both of them know.
They laugh at the connection and move on.
Are we now teaching students in schools who have completely lost
the ability to wonder about things? Are we teaching students who
are so desperate to be told—and told quickly—why something is
the way it is, that we have completely lost the ability to be curious?
Are learners waiting to be told how to think because we are so
eager to tell them how to think? Perhaps there is no time for
wondering any more. I read somewhere that the average wait time
is a maximum of twenty seconds for a Google search engine to
fulfill its mission in finding the information we seek.325
Most of the time, most of us don‘t really want the world around us
suddenly to be more expressive. We want things to stay quiet and
safe as we have always known them. Nor do we want suddenly to
have more energy and power. We are quite content to complain.326
With Elaine we worked through Lipson‘s various exercises. Some took us
outdoors, or helped us reconnect with our underused art skills; some took us
deep within, asking us to change the way we think of the world, change our
inner dialogues. All were simple yet complex. All were possible to do, yet
seemingly impossible to find the time to do.
I am coming to realize that the process of focusing and simplifying
my teaching, or learning to be present and really listen to students,
extends way beyond the classroom.
325 Thomas Nielsen, Rudolf Steiner's Pedagogy of Imagination: A Phenomenological Case Study
(New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 111-112.
326. Lipson, Stairway of Surprise, 20.
262
The same goes for unplugging from media. It‘s also a matter of
unplugging from the constant need to fill spaces and relearning
how to dwell in silences. Along with those silences it seems one can
find a very inner-centric development of connectedness,
intertwining and communication… and living in the world.
But it can be scary to take the time to digest ideas, or to live with the
unknown.
And I'm afraid, to sleep because of what haunts me
Such as, living with the uncertainty
That'll never find the words to say
Which would completely explain, just how I'm breaking down327
This requires in the first place that we be honest with ourselves in
the depths of the soul. We can no longer have any illusions about
ourselves. We must look our own mistakes, weaknesses, and
shortcomings in the eye with inner truthfulness. Each time we find
an excuse for a weakness, we place an obstacle before us on our
upward path. Such obstacles can be removed only by becoming
enlightened about ourselves. There is but one way to overcome
failings and weaknesses—to see them for what they are, with inner
truthfulness. All that lies dormant in the human soul can be
awakened. Even intuition and reason can be improved if—calmly
and detachedly—we become clear why we are weak in these areas.
Such self-knowledge, of course, is difficult. The temptation to
deceive oneself is enormous. But if we make a habit of being
honest with ourselves, the doors to greater insight open for us.328
The exercises are with me now. When I stumble and fall off the routine, I find
myself picking myself up—and always there is a paperclip staring right back at
me.
327. City and Colour, ―Sleeping Sickness,‖ Bring Me Your Love (Toronto: Universal Music Canada,
2008); song lyrics accessed June 23, 2014,
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/cityandcolour/thesleepingsickness.html.
328. Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds, 86.
263
At times so self destructive
With no intent or motive
But behind this emotion,
There lies a sensible heart
A sensible heart329
… the qualities of wonder, love, and energy we normally put off
until the hereafter can be found right here on Earth. Paradise is an
earthy project. By intensifying and concentrating our soul, we
draw the heavens and Earth together. We find occasions for
wonder and surprise in the very fact of being here. These
practices do not remove us from our obligations and relationships,
but make us stronger so that we can perform them with delight.330
Thank you, Elaine. I haven‘t finished learning the lesson you had to teach… but
I‘ve made a start.
Sometimes I think I’m a muddlehead myself
For a long time, I never really thought about whether knowledge could be dead
or alive—knowledge is knowledge. You got it or you don‘t!
But Tayme‘s teacher Brian really got me thinking when he was talking about
helping the children develop an image and gesture of a topic, so it lives within
them. Lives as in, has life—not given to them dead on arrival. Definitions, he
claimed, are such dead knowledge. They cannot grow, change or live within the
child; cannot become a gesture or a gift.
Hmm… what does this remind me of?
What are the times when I‘ve found knowledge lying lifeless within
me?
329. City and Colour, ―Sensible Heart,‖ Bring Me Your Love (Toronto: Universal Music Canada,
2008); accessed June 23, 2014,
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/cityandcolour/sensibleheart.html.
330. Lipson, Stairway of Surprise, 12.
264
I began to reflect on what was happening when I read texts that gave definitions.
What did I do with these? How did I react? It did seem to be significantly
different from those texts that made me stop, re-read, ponder, curse.
Now what about THE book—Egan‘s book—The Educated Mind? Did I see it as
alive or dead? I know, for sure, the first time I read it (OK, let‘s be honest, the
second or third time too) it sounded very commonsensical.
My inner dialogue while reading his book probably went a little like:
Yah… uh huh… yah, makes sense.
It was, after all, thoroughly explained and historically
contextualized; it was all there. I didn‘t know how to question it or
talk back to it.
So much so that when I first entered Jude‘s class the IE frameworks were like
my safety blanket draped around my shoulders and tightly knotted by my heart.
The first pilot was very much a child of the Mythic framework and Tannis‘s
circular planning charts. Each cognitive tool‘s definition became my mantra as I
buttressed my position as a media educator in the classroom.
And we all now know how that turned out.
I wasn‘t prepared for this lack of smooth sailing.
My knowledge of IE was
embedded IN those frameworks. When they ended up hindering the project, as
they did in my first pilot with Jude, I was lost.
What had I missed? Grade 3‘s were powerful, but were they
powerful enough to bring down a theory of education with a few
questions and eye-raises?
Couldn‘t be. Something else had to be going on.
Good thing I am stubborn—otherwise I might have abandoned IE, or called what
was working well in the class IE and the other parts, well, just education. But I
265
sensed there was something I was still not getting. Something needed bringing
to life.
I returned to Egan‘s book looking for the answers.
Kinds of understanding are just the ways the mind works when
using particular tools. All the kinds of understanding are potential
or embryonic in all minds, along with an indeterminate range of
other kinds of understanding that are so little evoked in our
cultural environments that we hardly can recognize them.331
Was this my problem—did I not recognize them? Did they look
different then I had anticipated them to look? Was I assuming that
Mythic understanding was to be found in one particular form and
not actually listening to the children, not seeing who they really
were?
One general principle is that the best kind of teaching will always
be ‗outward looking.‘ That is, if we bear in mind that these kinds
of understanding are not discrete stages but coalesce in a
significant degree, then, while primarily teaching to develop, say,
Mythic understanding, we should try also to include some stimulus
to Romantic, and even Philosophic and Ironic, understandings.332
Did I need to expand and blur the lines of the framework? Was I too
focused on just one kind of understanding rather than the full
range of what the children were capable of?
I kept having the sense that IE principles called for more—more
depth of understanding, a wider and richer understanding.333
That rang a bell. In Jude‘s class, I was fluttering around the
framework hitting all the points without grounding them strongly in
the narrative. I didn‘t really know what the children could do—the
331. Egan, The Educated Mind, 176.
332. Ibid., 240.
333. Kieran Egan, The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground up (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 153.
266
lessons were supposed to fit with them yet I had forgotten to really
see them, to hear them.
I was reminded of a grade 4 student in Laura‘s class.
Every day he would come up to me and tell the same joke. It‘s wasn‘t very
funny, as a joke… I couldn‘t remember the details, something to do with a
chicken. But I still had the happiest memories of him coming up to me each day
and telling it to me and then we‘d both burst out laughing. And then I‘d come
home and tell it to my and they‘d burst out laughing. It was the joy he/we got
from the joke (funny or not) that made this such a memorable experience.
Jokes and humour are a cognitive tool in the Mythic framework. But telling a
joke in class, for the sake of checking off the cognitive tool, was completely
different from the practice of listening to this grade 4 student. I became
watchful of his practice of playing with humour. It was a clue to his relationship
with the world.
Early on I saw cognitive tools as a means to be a good teacher—hammers and
screwdrivers in my ever-expanding professional toolkit for teaching the child.
But as I started to relax and listen, I started to treat them differently. They
became points of intersection—ways for the students and me to meet on
common ground.
I wouldn‘t have seen Evan‘s use of humour as important and valuable if it wasn‘t
for IE. With that recognition came space to expand and explore his developing
inner Seinfeld. It moved me from being a mission-focused authority figure, and
him from being the object of my pedagogy… we met in the middle.
The in-between-ness was the space where the learning happened. This meant I
needed to open myself to surprises in the classroom, rather than closing in and
controlling the space by filling it with talking or activities, for fear they‘d get
bored and jump through the windows.
267
I am painfully aware of the times in my own teaching when I lose
touch with my inner teacher, and therefore with my own authority.
In those times I try to gain power by barricading myself behind the
podium and my status while wielding the threat of grades. But
when my teaching is authorized by the teacher within me, I need
neither weapons nor armour to teach. Authority comes as I
reclaim my identity and integrity, remembering my selfhood and
my sense of vocation. Then teaching can come from the depths of
my own truth—and the truth that is within my students has a
chance to respond in kind.334
It meant I had to shed the framework blanket draped around my shoulders, and
the pretense that it justified my ways in the classroom. And I had to let go of
the hope that a boxed program—or a boxed theory—would somehow make life
oh-so-easy if only I mastered it properly.
Boxes didn‘t bring knowledge or thinking alive. They encouraged deadened
thought.
I hear McLuhan applauding:
Look, I don‘t have a theory of communication. I don‘t use theories.
I just watch what people do, what you do…335
With big busy mouse eyes I begin to watch.
334. Parker Palmer, ―The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and Integrity in Teaching,‖ Change 29
(1997): 14-21, accessed July 1, 2009
http://www.newhorizons.org/strategies/character/palmer.htm.
335. ―It is a matter of how you begin: if you begin with theory, then one way or another your
research winds up geared to making the case for or against the truth of the theory. Begin with
theory, you begin with the answer; begin with observation, you begin with questions. A theory
always turns into a scientist‘s point of view and a way of seeing the job at hand. Begin with
observation and your task is to look at things and to look at what happens. To see. That
necessitates detachment, and training of critical awareness.‖ Eric McLuhan, ―Marshall
McLuhan‘s Theory of Communication,‖ Global Media Journal 1 (2008): 27.
268
Copper Canoeman
Postman—you‘ve been there since the beginning of my adventures. What
you gotta say for yourself now?
Oh, you‘ve got a plan for education written in the late 1960s? 336 OK, let‘s
hear it. I‘ve invited a few others into the conversation… folks I think you‘ll
get along with.
Go on, I‘m listening…
Elaine takes us outside, to the little kindergarten backyard—the very same one
that Tayme played in at her first school in Canada.
1. Your first act of subversion might be conducted in the following way: write on
a scrap of paper these questions:
What am I going to have my students do today?
What's it good for?
How do I know?
Tape the paper to the mirror in your bathroom or some other place where you are
likely to see it every morning. If nothing else, the questions will begin to make you
uneasy about shilling for someone else and might weaken your interest in
'following the syllabus'. You may even, after a while, become nauseous at the
prospect of teaching things which have a specious value or for which there is no
evidence that your anticipated outcomes do, in fact, occur. At their best, the
questions will drive you to reconsider almost everything you are doing, with the
result that you will challenge your principal, your textbooks, the syllabus, the
grading system, your own education, and so on. In the end, it all may cost you
your job, or lead you to seek another position, or drive you out of teaching
altogether. Subversion is a risky business—as risky for its agent as for its target. 337
Our task is to find a tree and pretend there is a tiny ladybug walking on a leaf.
We are to keep our eyes glued to the itsy-bitsy ladybug as they navigate the edge
of the leaf and draw what we see—without looking down at our paper or taking
our pen off the paper.
336. Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (New York:
Delacorte Press, 1969).
337. Postman and Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 193-194.
269
For me as for many others, the arts provide new perspectives on
the lived world.338
With pen and paper we walk determined to take this challenge head on. Before
we begin, Elaine warns us:
―If I see any straight lines or perfectly smooth leaves I will know you didn‘t see
the ladybug walking along.‖
I am confused.
I walk up to the red-leafed maple tree in the backyard. Stare at it, put pen to
paper and—ahhhhh… that is what she was talking about… the leaf is riddled
with tiny jagged creases; it is full of little rises and falls.
As I view and feel them, informed encounters with works of art
often lead to a startling defamiliarizing of the ordinary. What I
have habitually taken for granted—about human potential, for
example, or gender differences or ecology or what is now called
‗ethnic identity‘ or the core curriculum—frequently reveals itself in
unexpected ways because of the play I have seen, a painting I have
looked at, a woodwind quintet I have heard.339
If asked to draw a leaf I never would have included these nuanced segments.
There are so many—the micro-world of the leaf is such a surprise.
To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to
the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its
surroundings fade away. In Benjamin's terms, to be lost is to be
fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in
uncertainty and mystery.340
We draw for two minutes. My eyes stay peeled on the imaginary ladybug I‘ve
named Maynard; I concentrate. Leave the world of ‗what the hell am I doing‘ far
away.
338. Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), 4.
339. Ibid.
340. Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (New York and Toronto: Penguin, 2005), 6.
270
I trust Elaine, she is my friend.
341
I don‘t even peek at the paper. It doesn‘t matter what my piece looks like.
Maynard is moving up and down and I follow him so precisely.
If we seek only to enjoy—consume—one sense impression after
another, we will blunt our capacity for cognition. If, on the other
hand, we allow the experience of pleasure to reveal something to
us, we will nurture and educate our cognitive capacities. For this to
happen, we must learn to let the pleasure (the impression) linger
on within us while we renounce any further enjoyment (new
impression) and assimilate and digest with inner activity the past
experience that we have enjoyed.342
―Time‘s up.‖
We make our way back inside and self-critique our odd little drawings, but also
share the shock of the complexity we have just encountered, there under our
noses.
Maybe it was a flash of green in an unlikely spot, or maybe I was
becoming more perceptive and less cerebral; perhaps it was just an
accident. Anyway, when I bent to pick up the green object, I found
I had in my hand a stone far heavier than I had anticipated. There
was a moment of surprise, a shock to the senses, a tactile non
sequitur indicating that something was wrong, like that
experienced by a child lifting a styrofoam boulder. The unexpected
weight of this tiny green rock told me that I had found copper. All
teaching has these moments of surprise discovery, when an
unexpected flash catches a student‘s attention and tears a hole in
the fabric of her/his perception, when the ―familiar‖ idea
encountered anew is suddenly charged with unexpected weight, a
potentially seismic change opening new realms for thought and
imagination.343
How often do I assume I know something, yet have never really seen
it for what it is?
341. Seinfeld, ―The Hot Tub,‖ Episode 115.
342. Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds, 23.
343. Sean Blenkinsop, ―Seeds of Green: My Own Arctic Copper/Mine‖, Canadian Journal of
Environmental Education, 11 (2006): 160-161.
271
Merleau-Ponty (1962) showed that turning to the phenomena of
lived experiences means re-learning to look at the world by reawakening the basic experience of the world (p. viii). This turning
to some abiding concern of lived experience has been called a
turning ‗to the things themselves,‘ Zu den Sachen (Husserl,
1911/80, p. 116).344
How often am I missing the nuances of people, place, things,
relationships?
We are asked to write for 5 minutes about the experience and then ask in the
group ask questions—but with a twist (there is always a twist with Elaine): throw
questions out about the experience, but do not answer them.
2. In class, try to avoid telling your students any answers, if only for a few lessons
or days. Do not prepare a lesson plan. Instead, confront your students with some
sort of problem which might interest them. Then, allow them to work the problem
through without your advice or counsel. Your talk should consist of questions
directed to particular students, based on remarks made by those students.345
Those brave enough start:
―Why have I never noticed the ridges on a leaf?‖
―Can my six year old do this exercise?‖
―Oh, I‘ve tried it with—‖
Elaine stops her. ―No, ask a question. Don‘t answer.‖
If a student asks you a question, tell them you don‘t have the answer, even if you
do.346
―Oh…if my ten year old can do it, I wonder if a young child could do it?‖
Don‘t be frightened by the long stretches of silence that might occur. Silence may
mean that the students are thinking.347
344. Max Van Manen, Researching Lived Experiences (London, ON: The Althouse Press, 1997), 3132.
345. Postman and Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 194.
346. Ibid.
272
As each question hangs in the air, sometimes for an uncomfortable time, it
seems it would be so much easier for us to throw out a few questions and then
give our opinions/answers.
So have I been selling myself short by searching out answers to the
first questions that came to mind? What would have happened if I
let them linger, develop, grow tangents and interconnectedness?
And yet, isn‘t this what this thesis has become? It has morphed
from the simple (or simplistic) question of what an imaginative
media education unit might look like, to questions about the role of
the teacher, wonder, and play, to an exploration of how imaginative
education can become a transformative experience for teachers
inside and outside of the classroom….
Maybe the first rendition can never be the root question that lives
within the student/researcher, and one must discover the question
in the course of the search for answers.
And now and then, when I am in the presence of a work from the
border, let us say, from a place outside the reach of my experience
until I came in contact with the work, I am plunged into all kinds
of reconceiving and revisualizing. I find myself moving from
discovery to discovery; I find myself revising, and now and then
renewing, the terms of my life.348
Try listening to your students for a day or two. We do not mean reacting to what
they say. We mean listening… It is important for us to say that the principal
reason for your learning how to listen to students is that you may increase your
understanding of what the students perceive as relevant. The only way to know
where a kid is 'at' is to listen to what he is saying. 349
As we sit in silence, we are creating a web to be thrown out again. It is actually
fun—liberating. But we laugh every time someone starts to give an answer.
347. Ibid.
348. Greene, Releasing the Imagination, 4-5.
349. Postman and Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 194-195.
273
We leave for the day wondering what will happen next week. I pass by the
maple tree on the way out of the yard and know that my North Shore Mouse
Woman made an impact on me.
You can't do this if you are talking.350
The Magical Hat
10. Before making our final suggestion, we want to say a word of assurance about
the revolution we are urging.
There is nothing in what we have said in this book that precludes the use, at one
time or another, of any of the conventional methods and materials of learning.
For certain specific purposes, a lecture, a film, a text-book, a packaged unit, even a
punishment, may be entirely justified.
What we are asking for is a methodological and psychological shift in emphasis in
the roles of teacher and student, a fundamental change in the nature of the
classroom environment.351
Tayme comes home with a new homework assignment—a report on an animal
of her choice.
Reliance on the natural attitude—a common sense taking for
granted of the everyday—will not suffice. In some fashion, the
everyday must be rendered problematic so that questions may be
posed.352
Learning that is entertaining usually provides an uncomplicated
pleasure and is generally easily accessible to students. Learning
that serves as an aliment also properly provides an aesthetic
pleasure, but one that is more complicated. Such learning requires
that expenditure of intellectual energy, has to overcome resistance,
and requires continual intellectual courage. Learning that expands
awareness and calls on these qualities yields this more complex
pleasure. Such learning is difficult enough with the best of
teaching; with inadequate teaching, students' only hope of
educational development is to make for themselves the
achievements that took millennia of indefatigable intellectual
350. Ibid., 196.
351. Ibid., 205.
352. Maxine Greene, Teacher as Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age (New York:
John Wiley, 1973), 11.
274
energy and genius. This is not to be expected. The cost of
inadequate teaching, then, is students' inability to make
educational progress; they will likely spend their time on
entertaining learning. 353
Now I remember quite clearly the animal reports I did for school in grades 5 and
6. My first report was on dolphins. My parents went to SeaWorld when I was
one and my dad got to feed a dolphin; this was one of my favourite photos and
an object of much envy; I also spent a lot of time watching Danger Bay and reruns of Flipper… anyways…. Back in those days before Google, I went to the
library, looked in an encyclopedia, copied or rewrote as much information as I
could about dolphins, drew a picture on the front, and strung the pages
together with blue wool. Wha-laaa… my report.
In fact, one model for such an environment already exists in the schools—oddly, at
the extreme ends of the schooling process. A good primary-grade teacher as well
as a good graduate-student adviser operate largely on the subversive assumptions
expressed in this book. They share a concern for process as against product. They
are learner and problem-oriented. They show a certain disdain for syllabi. They
allow their students to pursue that which is relevant to the learner. 354
When it came to T doing her report, they were instructed to do something a bit
different… First, find an animal you can observe.
An inquiry which would not be used as a means to resolutions or
improvement of a skill, but a way of awakening, disclosing the
ordinary, the unheard, the unseen and the unexpected.355
Observe it for a few days in a row. Take notes on its behaviour.
It is becoming fully of the world, full of lived experiences. ‗Being
experienced‘ is a wisdom of the practice of living which results
from having lived deeply.356
Try to understand it from your observations.
353. Egan, The Educated Mind, 107.
354. Postman and Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 205.
355. Greene, Releasing the Imagination, 28.
356. Van Manen, Researching Lived Experiences, 32.
275
The intention of such exercises is simply to enter the realm of
imaginative doing, and so to change the quality of the experience
from our normal emphasis on usefulness to a more unusual
emphasis on meaning, on telling a story with our deeds. Even a
momentary immersion in role playing or song will convince you
that it changes the quality of the experience.357
Think of 3 experiments to do (being ethical of course).
[T]o do research is always to question the way we experience the
world, to want to know the world in which we live as human
beings. And since to know the world is profoundly to be in the
world in a certain way, the act of researching—questioning—
theorizing is the intentional act of attaching ourselves to the
world, to become more fully part of it, or better, to become the
world. Phenomenology calls this inseparable connection to the
world the principle of ‗intentionality‘. In doing research we
question the world‘s very secrets and intimacies which are
constitutive of the world, and which bring the world as world into
being for us and in us. The research is a caring act: we want to
know that which is essential to being. To care is to serve and to
share our being with the one we love. We desire to truly know our
loved one‘s very nature. And if our love is strong enough, we not
only will learn much about life, we also will come to face to face
with its mystery.358
In T‘s case it was hummingbirds and the experiment looked at coloured sugar
water, sugar water and water as potential food sources. She had to anticipate
the results, try the experiment, and as carefully as possible describe the results.
Finally she had to compare the anticipated with the actual results. As the report
was coming together she wrote up the experiment and drew what the
hummingbird looked like from her grounded perspective—what she saw.
The artist is a person who is especially aware of the challenge and
dangers of new environments presented to human sensibility. The
ordinary person seeks security by numbing his perception against
the impact of new experience; the artist delights in this novelty
and instinctively creates situations that reveal it and compensate
for it. The artist puts on the distortion of sensory life produced by
new environmental programming and creates artistic antidotes to
correct the sensory derangement brought by the new form. In
social terms the artist can be regarded as a navigator who gives
357. Lipson, Stairway of Surprise, 53.
358. Van Manen, Researching Lived Experiences, 5-6.
276
adequate compass bearings despite magnetic deflection of the
needle by changing environmental forces. So understood, the artist
is not a peddler of new ideals or lofty experiences. He is the
indispensable aid to action and reflection alike. 359
Now… that‘s a science report! I myself now know more about hummingbirds,
what they sound like, how they move, where they like to fly, how high they fly,
etc., than I know about dolphins… and I wrote the damn report about dolphins.
This isn‘t revolutionary. Scientists have been using this type of observational
reporting for centuries but for some reason as educators we seem to bypass this
and head to the book… books are the truth!
But there is a fifteen-year gap between the second grade and advanced graduate
study. The gap can be filled, we believe, by teachers who understand the spirit of
our orientation.360
If one sees educational development in part as a process whereby
individuals recapitulate the developmental process of the culture,
the teacher ideally needs to be aware of that process, in both its
historical and individual dimensions. Such awareness can exist
only in people who have achieved a rich ironic understanding, and
so it follows that, ideally, teachers should be at the ironic stage.
Teachers who are at, say, the romantic stage will of necessity lack
any over-view of the process of educational development, and
consequently will be unable to make a distinction between learning
that will serve as an aliment to students' development and learning
that is entertaining. 361
In every human being there slumber faculties by means of which
he can acquire for himself a knowledge of higher worlds. The
Mystic, the Gnostic, the Theosophist, have always spoken of a
world of soul and a world of spirit which are just as real to them
as the world we can see with physical eyes and touch with physical
hands. Anyone who listen to them may at every moment say to
himself; that of which they speak I too can know, if I develop
certain powers which today still slumber within me. It can only be
a matter of how to set to work to develop such faculties. 362
359. McLuhan, ―Marshall McLuhan‘s Theory of Communication,‖ 29.
360. Postman and Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 205.
361. Egan, Educational Development, 107.
362. Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds, 9.
277
Taking cultural visions and imagination seriously requires a
radical new mindset, one that is willing to try on different lenses,
to add and subtract them in combination without fear of losing the
identity or integrity associated with 'owning' or understanding one
particular lens.363
It is neither required nor desirable that everything about one's performance as a
teacher be changed. Just the most important things. 364
Town of the Bear People
11. Our last suggestion is perhaps the most difficult. It requires honest selfexamination.365
We all file in and gravitate towards our child‘s desk. We are secretly alert for
clues providing a bit of insight into a world we aren‘t truly a part of.
I think of the ‗forlorn-ness‘ about which Jean-Paul Sartre used to
write, describing what it signifies to be alone with no excuses
(1947). A kind of homesickness accompanies such knowledge,
even when the individual realizes that he or she is not literally
alone but caught up in intersubjectivity. That is why so many
people including our students still turn eagerly toward the stable,
the monolithic, and the monological. We all want a foothold in the
face of collapsing hierarchies, when the world is increasingly
viewed as ‗continuously changing, irreducibly various, and
multiple configurable‘ (Smith, 1988, p. 183).366
Ask yourself how you came to know whatever things you feel are worth
knowing.367
Schemes for the curriculum are commonly a covert from of
autobiographical writing. Those eager to propose curricula tend to
recommend practices that will shape children to become like
themselves—without the defects they might be ready to
363. Donald W. Oliver and Kathleen Waldron Gershman, Education, Modernity, and Fractured
Meaning: Toward a Process Theory of Teaching and Learning, (New York, State University of
New York Press, 1989), 55.
364. Postman and Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 205.
365. Ibid.
366. Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination, 114-15.
367. Postman and Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 205.
278
acknowlege. (This doesn't apply to me, of course.) Spencer is an
embarassingly obvious example of this tendency. His own peculiar
education by his father and uncle focused almost exclusively on
making him a scientist.368
The educator has to be an ‗artist of the will‘. The teaching of
content is important as well, both to educate the feeling life and to
discipline the will life. Yet, what is most important is to awaken
people‘s independent will—more specifically, the will to learn.369
Brian hands out large pieces of paper. It looks and feels like newsprint: smooth,
with subtle hints of grey. We fish out our pencils as he moves to the board and
with a fresh piece of white chalk positions his arm, outstretched and to the top
right. We look at him, the paper, at him, the paper, tentative about where to
start.
―Ready with your pencils? Here we go.‖
This may sound like a rather abstract inquiry, but when undertaken seriously if
frequently results in startling discoveries. For example, some teachers have
discovered that there is almost nothing valuable they know that was told to them
by someone else.370
The central constituent of irony is a high degree of reflexiveness
on our own thinking and a refined sensitivity to the limited and
crude nature of the concept resources we can deploy in trying to
make sense of the world.371
I follow Brian‘s curves with grand swooping gestures, and find myself not only
moving my arm to accommodate the space on the page but breathing deeply,
rhythmically as I move inward and outwards. My body moves in unison from
the inside out. With each pass I intersect the center, move outward, gather
breath, and retreat to the center, passing each time through a new space on the
page.
368. Kieran Egan, Getting it Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert
Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 123.
369. Coenraad van Houten, Awakening the Will: Principles and Processes in Adult Learning
(London: Temple Lodge, 1995), 13-14.
370. Postman and Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 205.
371. Egan, The Educated Mind, 155.
279
Other teachers have discovered that their most valuable knowledge was not
learned in a recognizable sequence. Still others begin to question the meaning of
the phrase 'valuable knowledge' and wonder if anything they learned in school
was' valuable'.
Such self-examination can be most unsettling, as you can well imagine.372
What mental image do we carry of ourselves, our students, our
colleagues, our academic field, our world?
What do we assume about how students learn and what they bring
into the classroom? What do we assume about how we teach and
what we bring into the classroom?
What assumptions about knowledge itself undergird the dominant
academic culture and our pedagogical practices?
How might we engage those assumptions creatively toward a
philosophy of education that is more supportive of integrative
forms of teaching and learning? 373
'Why am I a teacher, anyway?'374
A truly integrative education engages students in the systematic
exploration of the relationship between their studies of the
‘objective’ world and the purpose, meaning, limits, and aspirations
of their lives. The greatest divide of all is often between the inner
and outer, which no curricular innovation alone can bridge. The
healing of this divide is at the heart of education during the college
years, rightly understood.375
Some honest answers that this question has produced are as follows:
I can control people.
I can tyrannize people.376
372. Postman and Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 206.
373. Parker J. Palmer and Arthur Zajonc, with Megan Scribner, The Heart of Higher Education: A
Call to Renewal, Transforming the Academy through Collegial Conversations (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 2010), 6.
374. Postman and Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 206.
375. Palmer and Zajonc. The Heart of Higher Education, 10.
376. Postman and Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 206.
280
How do I break through the circles I am likely to create? What do I
do about what Gadamer calls my ‗prejudgements‘? (1976, p. 9). It
is with that sort of unease and in the midst of interrogation that I
find my freedom, it seems to me, because the initiatives I find
myself required to take open spaces in which I must make choices
and then act upon the choice I make.377
I have captive audiences.
I have my summers off. …
I don't know.378
If we as teachers persist in denying and concealing our limitations,
those limitations will wind up being folded into our own personal
shadows, which we may then cast onto our students. What is the
shadow? In Jungian terms, the shadow is all of those aspects of
ourselves that are always emerging from the unconscious—the
more ‗threatening‘ of which we often attempt to deny or repress.
…Coming to terms with one‘s shadow allows one to harness its
energy for constructive purposes. No minor undertaking, this is a
task that carries serious risk. For, ‗to confront the shadow …
means to take a mercilessly critical attitude towards one‘s nature‘
(p. 113). Yet, in the long run, not confronting one‘s shadow is even
riskier, both psychologically and morally… Bitter as the cup may
be, no one can be spared it. For only when we have learned to
distinguish ourselves from our shadow by recognizing its reality
as part of our nature, and only if we keep this insight persistently
in mind, can our confrontation with other pairs of psychic
opposites be successful. For this is the beginning of the objective
attitude toward our own personality without which no progress
can be made along the path of wholeness. 379
As soon as a teacher recognizes that this is, in fact, the reason he became a
teacher, then the subversion of our existing educational system strikes him as a
necessity.380
Looking up and looking down, breathing in and breathing out, I take in what he
is saying and make it my own on the page.
377. Greene, Releasing the Imagination, 113.
378. Postman and Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 206.
379. Clifford Mayes, ―The Teacher as Shaman,‖ Journal of Curriculum Studies 37, no. 3 (2005): 336.
380. Postman and Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 206.
281
I fold in his words, like the words of so many other scholars and teachers who
have called for me to stop and listen, to step into the space of the in-between.
The choices of what stones to use and where to put them were
mine, in some sense, but in some sense, too, they were not mine.
Something hidden from us urges one choice rather than another,
one aesthetic principle rather than another. Something that is part
of the baggage that comes with us, in our genes and from our
upbringing, does much of the choosing for us. The garden is one
of the things that has happened to happen, and I have been a
somewhat bemused instrument in its construction.381
As we have been trying to say: we agree.382
The Vanished Princes
What is the role of pedagogy in media education? It seems that media educators
have been debating this since the 1980s, to judge from the archives of Screen
(the international journal) dating back to 1969. Like an archaeologist, I dig to
find the turning points, the points of contention… How can it be that the field
has not moved beyond the feeling and practices of disconnection that I
experienced in MRR and my previous media studies endeavours in the
educational system?
As early as 1981, Williamson (foreshadowing Masterman‘s work) claimed the
debate over what to teach had systematically silenced questions how to teach.383
Williamson urged a more thoughtful look at what was actually going on in the
students' heads. Since students could seemingly say all the right things but act
in quite contradictory ways, she argued that more effective transformational
pedagogies were needed.384
381. Kieran Egan, ―Conclusion: Finishing As Spring Comes Again,‖ accessed June 23, 2014,
http://www.educ.sfu.ca/kegan/Jgardenconcl.html.
382. Postman and Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 206.
383. Judith Williamson, ―How Does Girl Number 20 Understand Ideology?‖ Screen Education 40
(Autumn/Winter 1981): 80-87.
384. See also the commentary by David Lusted, ―Why Pedagogy: An Introduction to This Issue,‖
Screen 27 (5) (1986) : 2-16; doi: 10.1093/screen/27.5.2.
282
In Teaching the Media (1985) Masterman laid out the issues in his own way,
claiming media education was lacking in three vital areas:
1. A theoretical framework which could enable teachers and students to
make coherent sense of this diverse field;
2. Core concepts and principles, which should be, in Jerome Bruner‘s
famous formulation, ‗as simple as they are powerful‘ and ‗may be
taught to anybody at any age in some form‘;
3. A characteristic mode of enquiry or method of investigation.
Critiquing the book in a special issue of Screen, David Buckingham argued that
this analysis still did not get at the heart of the problem, which was that
students did not necessarily internalize and act upon what they were taught. He
argued for the importance of a theory of learning as well as a richer conception
of student and teacher identities and relationships.385 In reply, Masterman
asserted that the essential need was ―to define the processes and principles
which will enable students to stand as quickly as possible on their own two
feet.‖ 386
My sympathies here are more with Buckingham. He seems to have a
better notion of the diversity of students and the complexity of the
relationships that can develop in the classroom.
And indeed, it is Buckingham in his 2003 book on media education who brings
added focus to the issue by asking more specifically, ‗What kind of theory of
learning do we need in media education?‖387 This particular chapter of my copy
is well examined, marked up, sticky notes protruding from every angle of the
book and penciled stars on every paragraph. What got me so excited? Well,
after acknowledging various theories such as behaviorism, developmentalism,
385. David Buckingham, ―Against Demystification: A Response to ‗Teaching the Media‘,‖
Screen 27 (5) (1986): 80-95, doi: 10.1093/screen/27.5.80
386. Len Masterman, ―A Reply to David Buckingham,‖ Screen 27 (5) (1986): 96-103,
doi: 10.1093/screen/27.5.96
387. Buckingham, Media Education, op. cit.
283
and even Gardner‘s multiple intelligences as potential fields of influence, he
wants to shift the reader‘s attention to two areas of learning theory, which he
proposes will help to alleviate the limitations of traditional approaches to media
education.
The first of these connects nicely to IE—the sociocultural theory of Vygotsky. In
IE, Vygotsky helps provide a more detailed lens on classroom practice and the
learning trajectories of individual students. For media educators, Vygotsky
helps affirm that children come to educational situation with their own
understandings, even though knowledge can also be scaffolded via the
interaction of teacher and student. This is of course a vast contrast from the
ages and stages and waiting till the kids are ready perspective which has tended
to dominate in the English-speaking countries. Taking account of students‘
existing knowledge has been a cornerstone of Buckingham‘s work, and of course
Steve‘s—remember cultural judo!
A side note—close to 8 years after I bought Kline‘s book, I re-read
his section on ‗Limited Scripts,‘ and found:
As the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky argued: ‗The imaginary
situation already contains rules of behaviour, although it is not a
game with formulated rules laid down in advance‘. … This makes
the discourse children have around and in play one of the most
interesting aspects of pretending, and possibly one of the most
developmentally useful.388
Oh, wow. Suddenly I see our Rescue Heroes and media lab research
in a different, Vygotskian light!
In Buckingham‘s insistence on the validity of Vygotsky‘s work, I see meaningful
connections with IE and my own work. Acknowledging first that the students
come to class with knowledge formed in the context of daily life, the role of the
classroom teacher is to provide a space for the students to reflect along with the
language to poke, prod and transform their everyday, spontaneous concepts.
388. Lev Vygotsky, ‗Play and Its Role in the Mental Development of the Child,‘ in J.S. Bruner, A.
Jolly and K. Sylva, Play, Its Role in Development and Evolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1976); quoted in S. Kline, Out of the Garden, 333.
284
Vygotsky argues against the ‗direct teaching‘ of concepts—which
he suggests will result in ‗nothing but empty verbalism, a
parrotlike repetition of words by the child.‘389
This is the direction my own work took—the avoidance of direct
teaching. Secret codes, followed by logo alphabets and tagging
magazines with sticky notes, is a very different pedagogy from
stand-and-deliver.
Buckingham then merges the cultural development of knowledge from
Vygotsky‘s work with the multiliteracies work by Cope and Katantzis to envision
a dynamic, dialogical learning environment. In a third move, he asks students
to position themselves in the media landscape and develop their selfunderstanding through media autobiography and reflections on experience.
Overall, he invokes a dialectical model involving ―an ongoing dialogue or
negotiation between students‘ existing knowledge and experiences of the media
and the new knowledge that is made available by the teacher.‖390
The aim of media education, then, is not merely to enable children
to ‗read‘—or make sense of—media texts, or to enable them to
‗write‘ their own. It must also enable them to reflect
systematically on the processes of reading and writing, to
understanding and to analyze their own experiences as readers
and writers.391
So much of Buckingham‘s chapter on defining pedagogy fits with my own
perspectives, but stops short of what I would consider a truly rich pedagogical
description of a media education experience. He does provide extensive
examples of his own work, and this helps to contextualize the theoretical
discussion. Yet in IE, we have an educational theory that not only discusses the
how, but the why; the curriculum, but also child development—and don‘t forget
teacher development too! It seems worth taking a moment, then, to consider
what IE can bring to the table.
389. Buckingham, Media Education,, 142.
390. Ibid., 153.
391. Ibid., 141.
285
The Golden Feathers
My digging into the field has helped contextualize the fears and sense of
disconnection I felt as a media researcher heading into the classroom. It has
also helped to solidly the comfort I felt as I adopted IE and merged my passion
for media education with my desire to learn and be more imaginative. Thinking
back over the journey recounted in this thesis, I see four major strengths in IE—
four gifts it can bring to media education.
First Feather: Imagination
If we are going to talk about and work with the media as they shape children‘s
lives, we have to deal all the time with imagination. For this reason, media
education and IE are a unique fit for one another—a symbiotic relationship.
Media education has often been marginalized, even though educators have
worked hard to find a place for it in compulsory schooling. This relegation to
the margins has meant teachers often have access to bits and pieces of great
lessons, amazing research projects and rewarding activities, but are left alone to
decipher it all. The how to teach that Masterman and Buckingham so eagerly
sought has only been talked about in generalizations. IE offers a framework and
a language for that conversation.
Dealing with imagination does mean, however, that the tricksters and mischiefmakers will never be far away.
Second Feather: Theory and Practice
Although Egan‘s works are central, IE teachers and researchers like Mark Fettes,
Sean Blenkinsop, Thomas Nielsen, Anne Chodakowski, Gillian Judson, Annabella
Cant and others have been pushing towards a blurring of the static lines of
frameworks and ‗stages‘ that are often read in Egan‘s work—regardless if this
was meant or not. This blurring, breaking, shattering of the ‗oh it‘s just common
286
sense‘ attitude is necessary. There is such richness in the theory that is often
overlooked; we forget to slow down, take time, and integrate it into our lives as
well as across the curriculum. We need time to play with the ideas, to move
back from them and re-introduce ourselves to them. This needs to be seen as a
life-long process; not for ‗in-school use‘ only. IE isn‘t just a classroom practice to
entertain children with Kardashian eye-popping antics. It is a life practice. A
practice that calls for our attention as educators, as parents, as researchers.
Here is where my inner Raven comes in. If I can support media educators in
their adoption of IE, then I believe this way of thinking, this way of being in the
classroom will become natural to them and travel seamlessly to other
spaces/places in their teaching—for ―trickster is a boundary-crosser‖392 who
won‘t stay tied down:
He passes through each of these [places] when there is a moment
of silence, and he enlivens each with mischief, but he is not their
guiding spirit.393
If we can create a language, create a community of learners conversing about
change, imagination and inner work, then this theory can become more deeply
embedded in the everyday.
Third Feather: Inner Work
And there‘s more! Here is where things become relational in a very Mouse
Woman way; the place where we need a guide to mentor the hard work that
needs to happen after the trickster has awakened us.
I am endorsing this hard inner work in IE; I also see it as a vital part of any
media educator‘s life. Media have become extensions of ourselves, and thus of
our teaching. This has been evident in the shifts we‘ve seen in the field, e.g.
from protectionism to teachers who themselves had grown up with television
392. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2010), 7.
393. Ibid., 6.
287
and didn‘t feel the need to run away screaming. If we are to become nonconfrontational, non-judgmental educators, we urgently need to address the
relationship we ourselves have with the media. This may mean facing crisis
points like I had; it may mean finding spaces of silence and slowing down—
finding a balance to the media whirl we find ourselves in. Whatever the
individual details, if it is paired with a practice, within a community where
dialogue is commonplace and powerful sages are present, these crisis points
may be welcomed.
I think being a parent in a situation such as we‘re all in now
requires almost an act of rebellion or insurrection against the
whole culture. It‘s very hard constantly having to say to the
children, ‗Well, you know what you just heard is not true, ‗ or ‗The
things they‘re telling you to buy are probably just junk,‘ or ‗You
know diking‘…. You‘re constantly arguing against all these
messages. You can‘t solve your problems just by buying Scope.
That‘s not the way life is. If you have problems with your sexuality
or sociality, you can‘t solve problems like that just by buying
chewing gum, which is what the commercials tell you.
If you‘re doing this all the time, it‘s exhausting and not many
parents have the time, the energy or even the will to do that sort of
thing. It has to be done with some delicacy and tact. For example,
I‘m a great believer in talking back to the television so that when
commercials are on and suddenly someone is saying….. But I must
confess there were times when all this seemed very annoying to
them and they would say, ‗Will you cut that out? I‘m trying to
watch the show‘.
So it does have to be done with discretion. After all, you have to
realize this is your child‘s culture. This is it for them. It‘s always a
little risky, even if you‘re a mother or father, to be poking fun,
critiquing, ridiculing, calling into question all of these things.394
It‘s not easy. We need a community. We need time to unpack, question, let
ideas linger. This slowing down helped shape me. I no longer saw how media as
‗impacting us,‘ or the teacher/content/environment as ‗impacting us,‘ I saw that
we were in relation with the media and educational settings. The idea of
relationships, the Medium is the Message, took me a little longer to see/feel
394. Longfellow Robinson, ―Childhood; can it be preserved? An interview with Neil Postman,‖ 340.
288
because I had perceived the delivery as all-powerful and the receiver as
vulnerable. But my passion for media studies research, woven into my life as a
parent, altered this perception and I began to recognize the agency I had for
internal work—to fulfil the call of so many media theorists and philosophers to
live more fully, more in and of this world.
Fourth Feather: Living in the In-Between
Not only will self-development/internal work, via some of the exercises that
Steiner suggests—or other techniques for developing awareness and
understanding—help to bring our own cognitive tools more alive, it will I believe
rectify some of the long standing beliefs of some educators about media. If we
learn to hear the children, learn to see them, we will quickly recognize that the
simple, neat perception that they are vulnerable and media is a malicious
force—or the other side, that there is little or nothing to worry about—cannot be
true. The children will prove that to us themselves, if only we learn to recognize
the capacities they have… capacities often dismissed in child development and
education theory.
This is the ‗in‘ we are always looking for in media education (and education
overall). We don‘t need to rely on pop culture or foods/festivals/fun to engage
the students. We can access their engagement just by learning more about how
they understand the world. All by itself, this will deepen learning, create trust
and be meaningful. Along with this, however, we need to gain courage to live in
the in-between, in the messiness of complexity, rather than hanging on to
comforting labels or theories. Just keep looking, keep listening to the children
as well as to yourself; seek out those moments when the cognitive tools come
alive. Make those moments.
This living in the in-between has allowed me to finally touch that elusive
integration I wanted from the very first media education project. Interesting,
then, that integrative education and related ideas have started to surface via
works such as those of Parker Palmer and Arthur Zajonc, as well as fields such
289
as Aboriginal and holistic education. This complexity needs to be acknowledged
and engaged with. It‘s time.
It is time again for Mouse Woman to emerge from the shadows, to
once again give nurture and help to a generation of young people
facing new kinds of trouble, needing guidance through new threats
on the cosmic scale of Mouse Woman‘s supernatural realm: the
earth warming, oceans rising, ghost armies of terrorists
threatening, families dissolving. Respect for the earth‘s balances
is out of whack. Mouse Woman‘s feisty insistence on restoring the
world‘s social and natural order is still needed—will always be
needed.395
One parting gift of wool
Learning how to engage the children in the classroom sent me on a surprising
adventure of self-discovery. It gave me the courage to embark on métissage, to
trust my truths, to learn to be more awake in the world for myself, my students,
my daughter.
It was quite the adventure, and I feel like I am just getting started. However,
like the wool lovingly ravelled in Mouse Woman‘s hands and then tossed into
the fire, I must unravel the thesis from my grip; it needs to transcend from my
head/heart/hand to live in another form. I need to say goodbye; I need to let go.
When society constructs
Our human nature oh
Live by the rules
Live by the laws
Live by commandments
Notions preconceived
Can lead to utter madness396
Mark sits beside me and points to a passage on the screen—―Look here, this is
you. I HEAR you.‖
395. Moira Johnston Block, ―My Mother and Mouse Woman,‖ in Christie Harris, The Mouse Woman
Trilogy: 30th Anniversary Edition (Vancouver, BC: Raincoast Books, 2007), 15.
396. Luba, ―Let It Go,‖ Secrets and Sins (Capitol-EMI of Canada, 1984), song lyrics accessed June
23, 2014, http://www.metrolyrics.com/let-it-go-lyrics-luba.html.
290
Let it go
Let it go
The trickster device of métissage has helped release me from my fears,
providing me with the courage to speak the words that often reside so silently
within. It has allowed me to air my grievances, my shame of unknowing… yet at
the same time relive those moments of success, of pure love, that have found
their way to me via my adventures in imaginative education, where I learned
some of my deepest lessons:
stand still…
listen…
play…
open up.
In many ways, this adventure seems more for me, for my growth, than for
public consumption. But I need to step forward again, into the in-between,
against the pull of cultural gravity397 that would have me revert back to a
sanctioned way of speaking, to a quantified notion of experience. The
temptation not to step over the threshold now is no match for Mark‘s glances
and words reminding me to be courageous.
―You‘ve found your voice. Don‘t lose it. Find those edges, those moments when
you just speak. Always ask… what would Mouse Woman do?‖
Let it free your body
Let it move your soul
Let it go…
There have been sages in my life before, but never before have I needed them so
deeply.
Thank you, Mouse Wo(men). I am off to do a little dance now.
397. Mark‘s expression for the pull towards the status quo.
291
References
Adams, Tony. E. ―Seeking Father: Relationally Reframing a Troubled Love Story.‖
Qualitative Inquiry 12, no. 4, (2006): 704-723.
Aerosmith. Walk This Way. New York: Columbia Records, 1975.
A-ha. Take on Me. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers,
1985.http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/aha/takeonme.html.
Annenberg Public Policy Center. Television in the Home: The 1997 Survey of
Parents and Children. Washington, DC: Annenberg Public Policy Center of
the University of Pennsylvania, 1997.
Aoki, Ted. ―Teaching as In-Dwelling Between Two Curriculum Worlds." In
Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki, edited by
William. F. Pinar and Rita.L. Irwin. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005.
Armstrong, Miranda. ―BRAIN SOUP LACED with IMAGINATION: An Australian
Perspective on Imagination Curriculum Design Across the Disciplines.‖
Paper presented at 2nd International Conference on Imagination and
Education, Vancouver, B.C July 14-17, 2004, accessed June 10, 2014,
http://www.ierg.net/confs/2004/Proceedings/Armstrong_Miranda.pdf.
Atkinson, Paul and Delamont, Sara. "Rescuing Narrative from Qualitative
Research." Narrative Inquiry 16, no. 1 (2006.): 164-172.
doi8:10.1075/ni.16.1.21atk.
Bad Religion. 21st century digital boy. New York: Atlantic Records, 1994.
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/badreligion/21stcenturydigitalboy.html
Baie, Annette C. Moral Prejudices; Essays on Ethics. USA: First Harvard University
Press, 1995.
Bandura, Albert. Social Foundations of Thought and Action. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1986.
Bandura, Albert. Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: Freeman, 1997.
Barone, Tom. Aesthetics, Politics and Educational Inquiry. New York: Peter Lang,
2000.
292
Beresin, Ann Richman. ―Double Dutch and Double Cameras; Studying the
Transmission of Culture in an Urban School Yard.‖ In Children‘s Folklore:
a Source Book, edited by Brian Sutton-Smith, B., Jay Mechling, Thomas W.
Johnson, and Felicia R. McMahon, 75-91. Logan, UT: Utah State Up, 1995.
Berkey, Catherine. S., Rockett, Helaine. R., Field, A. E., Gillman, Matthew. W.,
Frazier, A. Lindsay., Camargo, Carlos. A. Jr and Graham. A. Colditz.
―Activity, Dietary Intake, and Weight Changes in a Longitudinal Study of
Preadolescent and Adolescent Boys and Girl.‖ Pediatrics 105, no. 56,
(2000): E561-E569. doi:10.1542/peds.105.4.e56.
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of
Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage Books, 1976.
Blenkinsop, Sean. ―Seeds of Green: My Own Arctic Copper/Mine‖, Canadian
Journal of Environmental Education, 11 (2006) 160-161, accessed June 25,
2014 http://cjee.lakeheadu.ca/index.php/cjee/article/view/511/416.
Blood, Narcisse, Chambers, Cynthia, Donald, Dwayne., Hasebe-Ludt. Erika and
Ramona Big Head, ―Aoksisowaato‘op: Place and Story as Organic
Curriculum.‖ Presentation at The 4th Biannual Provoking Curriculum
Conference, Ottawa, ON. May, 2009.
Bochner, Arthur. P. and Carloyn. Ellis. Ethnographically speaking:
Autoethnography, literature and aesthetics. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira,
2001.
Bon Jovi, Jon, Sambora, Richie and Child, Desmond. You Give Love a Bad Name.
Chicago: Mercury Records, 1986.
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bonjovi/yougiveloveabadname.html.
Bonson, Fred. The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits. New York: Billboard Books,
2003.
Bourdieu, Pierre and J.C. Passerson, Reproduction in Education, Society and
Culture. London: Sage, 1977.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary
Society. Translated by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson et al., Cambridge:
Polity, 1999.
Bowie, David and Eno, Brian. Heroes. London: RCA, 1977.
http://www.metrolyrics.com/heroes-lyrics-david-bowie.html.
Bruner, Jerome. On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand. Cambridge: Belknapp
Press of Harvard University Press, 1964.
Bruner, Jerome, Jolly, Alison and Sylva, Kathy. Play, Its Role in Development and
Evolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1976.
293
Bruner, Jerome. ―The Autobiographical Process‖ in The Culture of
Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, edited by Robert
Folkenflik. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,1993: 38-56.
Buckingham, David ―Against Demystification: A Response to ‗Teaching the
Media‘,‖ Screen 27 (5) (1986): 80-95.
Buckingham, David. Watching Media Learning: Making Sense of Media Education.
London: Angleterre, 1990.
Buckingham, David. Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary
Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.
Chambers, Cynthia, Donald, Dwayne and Erika. Hasebe-Ludt. ―What is
Métissage?‖ Educational Issues 7, no. 2, (December 2002):
http://einsights.ogpr.educ.ubc.ca/v07n02/metissage/pdf/whatis.pdf.
Chambers, Cynthia, Hasebe-Ludt, Erika, Donald Dwayne, Hurren, Wanda, Leggo,
Carl. and Antoinette. Oberg. ―Métissage: A Research Praxis.‖ In Handbook
of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples,
and Issues, edited by J. Gary Knowles & Ardra L. Cole, 141-154. Thousand
Okas, CA: Sage, 2008.
Chambers, Cynthia, Hasebe-Ludt, Erika, Leggo, Carl.,and Oberg, Antoinette.
"Embracing the World, with All Our Relations: Métissage as an Artful
Braiding," in Being With A/r/tography, edited by S. Springgay, R. Irwin, C.
Leggo, and P. Gouzuasis. 58-67. Rotterdam/Taipei: Sense Publishers,
2008.
Chambers, Cynthia. M. ―Building Dwelling.‖ Presentation at The 4th Biannual
Provoking Curriculum Conference, Ottawa, ON. May, 2009.
Chambers, Veronica. ―It‘s a Spice World. Again.‖ Newsweek 130, no. 19 (1997):
75.
Channel Zero. ―Prelude to Vegas: Neil Postman gets interviewed,‖ accessed 1996,
http://www.channel-zero.com.
Centre for Health Policy/Centre for Primary Care and Outcomes Research,
―People: Thomas N. Robinson, MD, MPH.‖ accessed June 9, 2014,
http://healthpolicy.stanford.edu/people/thomas_n_robinson.
Centre for Media Literacy. ―Voices of Media Literacy: International Pioneers
Speak: Len Masterman Interview Transcript‖ (interviewed by Dee
Morgenthaler, Nov. 3, 2010), accessed June 10, 2014,
http://www.medialit.org/reading-room/voices-media-literacyinternational-pioneers-speak-len-masterman-interview-transcript.
City and Colour. Sensible Heart. Toronto: Universal Music Canada, 2008.
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/cityandcolour/sensibleheart.html.
294
City and Colour. Sleeping Sickness. Toronto: Universal Music Canada, 2008.
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/cityandcolour/thesleepingsickness.
html.
Cobb, Ed. Tainted Love. (cover by Soft Cell). London: Some Bizarre, 1981.
http://www.lyricsondemand.com/onehitwonders/taintedlovelyrics.html.
Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and
Rockers. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge 2011.
Comstock, George. Rubinstein, A. Ellen, and John P. Murray, Television and
Social Behavior: Reports and Papers. Washington, DC: Surgeon General's
Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior, National
Institute of Mental Health, 1972.
Cook, Thomas D., Appleton, H., Conner, F. Ross, Shaffer, A., Tamkin, Garry. and
Stephen J. Weber. Sesame Street Revisited. Ithaca, NY: Russell Sage
Foundation, 1975.
Corder-Bolz, Charles. R. "Television Literacy and Critical Television Viewing
Skills." in Television and Behavior: Ten Years of Scientific Progress and
Implications for the Eighties, Volume II, Technical Reviews (DHHS
Publication No. ADM 82-1196), edited by D. Pearl, L. Bouthilet, and J.
Lazar. Rockville, MD: National Institute of Mental Health, 1982, 91-101.
Cottle, Thomas, J.,―On Narratives and the Sense of Self.‖ Qualitative Inquiry 8,
no. 5 (2002): 535-549. http://qix.sagepub.com/content/8/5/535.full.pdf.
Culture Club. Karma Chameleon. London: Virgin Records, 1982.
Davis, Dennis. K. and Jasinski James, ―Beyond the Culture Wars: An Agenda for
Research on Communication and Culture.‖ Journal of Communication 3
(1993): 141.
Death Cab for Cutie. Marching Band of Manhattan. Nashville: EMI, 1996.
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/deathcabforcutie/marchingbandsofmanh
attan.html.
Death Cab for Cutie. Soul Meets Body. Nashville: EMI, 1996.
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/deathcabforcutie/soulmeetsbody.h
tml
Death Cab for Cutie. Portable Television. Nashville: EMI, 2011.
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/deathcabforcutie/portabletelevision.html
Death Cab for Cutie. Codes and Keys. Nashville: EMI, 2011.
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/deathcabforcutie/codesandkeys.html,
Delany, Samuel R. The Motion of Light in Water. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004.
295
Denzin, Norman. K. Interpretive Biography. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989.
Denzin, Norman K. and Yvonne. S. Lincoln. ―Introduction: The Discipline and
Practice of Qualitative Research.‖ In The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative
Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonne S. Lincoln, 3rd ed..
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005.
Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: A.A. Knopf, 2005.
Dietz, William. H. and Steven. L. Gortmaker. ―Do We Fatten our Children at the
Television Set? Obesity and Television Viewing in Children and
Adolescents.‖ Pediatrics 75, no 5 (1985): 807-812.
Dorman, Steve. M. ―Video and Computer Games: Effect on Children and
Implications for Health Education‖. J Sch Health 67 (1997): 133–138.
Dorr, Aimee, Graves, Sherryl, B. and Erin Phelps. "Television Literacy for Young
Children" Journal of Communication, 30 no. 3 (1980): 71-83.
Duncan, Barry, Pungente, John and Shepherd, R. ―Media education in Canada‖, in
Weaving Connections: Educating for Peace, Social and Environmental
Justice, edited by T. Goldstein & D. Selby. Toronto: Sumach, 2000.
Dyer-Witherford, Nick and Zena Sharman. ―The Political Economy of Canada‘s
Video and Computer Game Industry.‖ Canadian Journal of
Communication Volume 30 (2005): 187-210. http://www.cjconline.ca/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/1575/1729.
Egan, Kieran. Educational Development. New York: Oxford University Press,
1979.
Egan, Kieran. Primary understanding. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Egan, Kieran The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding.
Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997.
Egan, Kieran. ―The Analytic and Arbitrary in Educational Research.‖ In Children‘s
Minds, Talking Rabbits & Clockwork Oranges; Essays on Education, edited
by Kieran Egan. London, Ontario: The Althouse Press, 1999.
https://www.sfu.ca/~egan/AnalyticArbitrary.html
Egan, Kieran. Getting it Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance
from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2002.
Egan, Kieran. The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground
up. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
Egan, Kieran ―Conclusion: Finishing As Spring Comes Again.‖
http://www.educ.sfu.ca/kegan/Jgardenconcl.html.
296
Eisner, Elliot. ―The Promise and Perils of Alternative Forms of Data
Representation.‖ Educational Researcher 26, no. 4 (1997): 4-10.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1176961.pdf?&acceptTC=true&jpdC
onfirm=true.
Ellis, Carolyn. ―Evocative Autoethnography: Writing Emotionally About Our
lives.‖ In Representation and the Text: Re-Framing the Narrative Voice,
edited by William G. Tierney & Yvonna S. Lincoln, 115-142. Albany, State
University of New York Press, 1997.
Ellis, Carolyn S. and Arthur Bochner. "Autoethnography, Personal Narrative,
Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject." In The Handbook of Qualitative
Research, edited by Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, 733-768.
Thousand Oaks, Ca: Sage, 2000.
Ellis, Carolyn, Adams, Tony E. and Arthur P. Bochner, "Autoethnography: An
Overview." Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social
Research 12, no. 1 (24 November 2010): 1-40. http://www.qualitativeresearch.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095.
Ellis, Carolyn. The ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel About
Autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004.
English, Fenwick.W. ―A Critical Appraisal of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot‘s
Portraiture as a Method of Educational research.‖ Educational Researcher,
29, no.7 (2000): 21-26.
Eurythmics. Here Comes the Rain Again. London/New York: RCA, 1984.
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/eurythmics/herecomestherainagain.html.
Floyd, W.D. ―An analysis of the Oral Questioning Activity in Selected Colorado
Primary Classrooms‖ PhD diss., Colorado State College, 1960.
Forbes, Carol. ―Appealing to imagination,‖ SFU News, accessed June 3, 2014,
http://www.sfu.ca/archivesfunews/sfu_news/archives_2003/sfunews01080409.htm.
Freeman, Mark. ―Data Are Everywhere: Narrative Criticism in the Literature of
Experience.‖ in Narrative Analysis: Studying the Development of
Individuals in Society, edited by Colette Daiute and Cynthia Lightfoot, 6381. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004.
Funk, Jeanne, Heidi Bechtoldt Baldacci, Tracie Pasold, and Jennifer
Baumgardner. ―Violence Exposure in Real-Life, Video Games, Television,
Movies, and the Internet: Is There Desensitization?‖ Journal of
Adolescence 27 (2004): 25.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York: Continuum, 1998.
Gall, Meredith D. ―The Use of Questions in Teaching.‖ Review of Educational
Research 40, no 5 (Dec. 1970): 707-721.
297
Gamble, Kenny and Huff, Leon. If You Don‘t Know Me by Now. (Cover by Simply
Red). London: Elektra Records, 1989.
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/simplyred/ifyoudontknowmebynow.html.
Gamson, William A., Croteau, David, Hoynes, Williams and Theordore Sasson.
―Media images and the social construction of reality.‖ Annual Review of
Sociology 18 (1992): 389,
http://cgs.illinois.edu/sites/default/files/media/GamsonEtAl_MediaImage
sandtheSocConstructionofReality.pdf.
Gerbner, George and Larry Gross, ―Living with Television: The Violence Profile‖
Journal of Communication 26 no. 2 (Spring 1976): 172-194.
Gerbner, George and Larry Gross, ―The Scary World of TV‘s Heavy Viewer‖
Psychology Today 9 no. 11 (1976): 41-45, 190.
Gerbner, George, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan, and Nancy Signorelli, ―Growing
Up with Television: The Cultivation Perspective‖. In Media Effects:
Advances in Theory and Research, edited by Jennings Bryant and Dolf
Zillmann, 17-41. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994.
Giroux, Henry and Grace Pollock, The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of
Innocence. Lantham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.
Goddard, Roger D., Megan Tschannen-Moran, and Wayne K. Hoy. ―A Multilevel
Examination of the Distribution and Effects of Teacher Trust in Students
and Parents in Urban Elementary Schools‖. The Elementary School Journal
102, no. 1 (Sept. 2001): 3-17.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1002166.pdf?&acceptTC=true&jpdC
onfirm=true.
Goodall, Bud H. L., A Need to Know: The Clandestine History of a CIA Family.
Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2006.
Greene, Maxine. Teacher as Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern
Age. New York, John Wiley. 1973.
Greene, Maxine. Releasing the Imagination; Essays on Education, the Arts, and
Social Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 1995.
Greenfield, Patricia. Mind and media: The Effects of Television, Video Games, and
Computers. Massacheusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Grider, Sylvia Ann, ―The study of children‘s folklore.‖ Western Folklore Volume
39 Number 3.(1980): 159-169. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1499798.
Grossman, Dave and Gloria DeGaetano. Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to
Action Against TV, Movie & Video Game Violence. New York: Three Rivers
Press, 2001.
298
Guns N‘ Roses. Patience. London: Geffen Records, 1988.
http://www.metrolyrics.com/patience-lyrics-guns-n-roses.html.
Haggerson N. L Jr. Expanding Curriculum Research and Understanding: A MythoPoetic Perspective. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.
Hall, Stuart. ―Encoding/Decoding." In Media Studies: A Reader (2nd ed.), edited
by Paul Morris and Sue Thornton, 51-61. Washington Square, NK:
University Press, 2000.
Hamill, Pete. ―Crack and the Box.‖ Esquire Magazine, Vol. 113, no.5, (1990):
Harris, Christie. ―Mouse Woman and the Senee-nee-iq.‖ In The Mouse Woman
Trilogy: 30th Anniversary Edition, edited by Christie Harris, 63-64.
Vancouver, BC: Raincoast Books, 2007.
Hart, Andrew. Teaching the Media; International Perspectives (New York:
Hasebe-Ludt, Erika, Chambers, E. Cynthia, Leggo, D. Carleton and Oberg,
Antoinette "Embracing the World, with All our Relations: Métissage as an
Artful Braiding." In Being with a/r/tography, edited by S. Springay, R.
Irwin, C. Leggo, & P. Gouzuasis, 58-67. Rotterdam/Taipei: Sense
Publishers, 2008.
Hasebe-Ludt, Erika, Chambers, Cynthia M. and Leggo, Carl eds., Life Writing and
Literary Métissage as an Ethos of Our Times. New York: Peter Lang, 2009.
Hawkes, Terrance. Structuralism and Semiotics. Berkely: University of California,
1977.
Hebdige, Dick. Subcultures; the Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979.
Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. A. Hofstadter, Trans.). Toronto:
Harper & Row, 1975, 160.
Henson, Jim. It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider. New York,
Hyperion, 2005.
Herrmann, Andrew F. ―My Father's Ghost: Interrogating Family Photos.‖ Journal
of Loss and Trauma 10, no. 4 (2005): 337- 346.
Hilton, Peter. ―Autobiography and Poetry.‖ In Pedagogies of the Imagination:
Mythopoetric Curriculum in Educational Practice, edited by Timothy
Leonard & Peter Willis, 107-124. Springer, 2008.
Huesmann, L. Rowell Eron, Leonard D., Klein, Rosemary, Brice, Patrick, Fischer,
Paulette "Mitigating the Imitation of Aggressive Behaviors by Changing
Children‘s Attitudes about Media Violence." Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 44 (1983): 899-910.
Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
299
Irving, Lori M. and Neumark-Sztainer, Dianne. ―Integrating the Prevention of
Eating Disorders and Obesity: Feasbile or Futile?‖ Preventative Medicine,
Volume 34 (2002): 299-309.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091743501909971.
Johnston Block, Moira. ―My Mother and Mouse Woman,‖ in Christie Harris, The
Mouse Woman Trilogy: 30th Anniversary Edition. Vancouver, BC: Raincoast
Books, 2007.
Jolly, Margaretta. Encyclopedia of life writing: autobiographical and biographical
forms. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001.
Jordan, Nané and Erika Hasebe-Ludt. ―Dwelling in/on the Drive: Life Writing in a
Mixed and Mixing Commons.‖ Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 28, no. 1
(2012): 281-297.
http://journal.jctonline.org/index.php/jct/article/view/200/pdf_1.
Judo Info Online Dojo, ―Japanese Judo Terms.‖ http://judoinfo.com/terms.htm.
(accessed May 22nd, 2014).
Kadar, Marlene, Warley, Linda, Perreault, Jeanne and Susanna Egan. Tracing the
Autobiographical. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2005.
Katzmarzyk, Peter T. ―The Canadian Obesity Epidemic: an historical
perspective.‖ Obesity Research 10, no. 7 (2002): 666-674.
DOI:10.1038/oby.2002.90.
Kellner, Douglas. ―The Frankfurt School and British Cultural Studies: The Missed
Articulation.‖ Illuminations: The Critical Theory Website. May 21, 2014.
http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell16.htm.
Kellner, Douglas. ―Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture,
accessed April 27, 2014,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/SAGEcs.htm.
Killen, Joel. D., Telch, Michael. J., Robinson, Thomas. N., Maccoby, Nathan.,
Taylor, C.Barr., and Farquhar, W. John. ―Cardiovascular disease risk
reduction for tenth graders.‖ Journal of the American Medical Association,
260 (1988): 1728–1733.
Kline, Stephen. Out of the Garden: Toys and Children‘s Culture in the Age of TV
Marketing. New York/London: Verso, 1993.
Kline, Stephen. ―Toys as Media: The Role of Toy Design, Promotional TV and
Mother‘s Reinforcement in the Young Males (3-6) Acquisition of Pro-social
Play Scripts for Rescue Hero Action Toys.‖ Paper presented at the ITRA
Conference, Halmstadt, Sweden, June 18, 1999. http://www.sfu.ca/medialab/risk/docs/media-lab/toys_as_media_kline.pdf.
300
Kline, Stephen & Kym Stewart. ―Family Life and Media Violence: A Qualitative
Study of Canadian Mothers Raising Young Boys (3-6).‖ in Children and
Media: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Beavan den Bergh and Jan
van den Bulck. Leuven: Garant, 2000.
Kline, Stephen and Jackie Botterill. ―Media Use Audit for BC Teens: Key
Findings.‖ Media Analysis Laboratory, May 2001. May 22, 2014,
http://www.sfu.ca/media-lab/research/mediasat/secondschool.pdf.
Kline, Stephen, Media Consumption as a Health and Safety Risk Factor: North
Vancouver Media Risk Reduction Intervention (Burnaby: Simon Fraser
University, Media Analysis Lab, 2003): 11-12; accessed May 22, 2014,
http://www.sfu.ca/media-lab/risk/docs/kline_media_risk_reduction5.doc.
Kline, Stephen and Kym Stewart. ―The Culture of Violence and the Politics of
Hope: Community Mobilization around Media Risks.‖ Journal of the
Institute for the Humanities III (Spring, 2004): 5.
Kline, Stephen, ―Countering Children‘s Sedentary Lifestyles: An Evaluative Study
of a Media-Risk Education Approach.‖ Childhood: A Global Journal of
Child Research 12 no. 2 (2005): 239-258.
Kline, Stephen, Stewart, Kymberley and Murphy, David. ―Media Literacy in the
Risk Society: Toward a Risk Reduction Strategy.‖ Canadian Journal of
Education 29 no. 1 (2006): 131-153.
Kline, Stephen. Simon Fraser University Media Analysis Lab, , Media
Consumption as a Health and Safety Risk Factor, full report, May 22,
2014, http://www.sfu.ca/media-lab/risk/new/about.html.
Kline, Stephen. ―Is it Time to Rethink Media Effects?‖ Media Analysis Laboratory.
May 22, 2014, http://www.sfu.ca/media-lab/risk/docs/medialab/panicfin.doc.
Kline, Stephen, ―Moral Panics and Video Games.‖ in Childhood, A Collection of
Papers from the Sociology, Culture and History Conference, Department of
Child and Youth Culture, Odense University, Denmark (2000), accessed
June 5, 2014,
http://www.sfu.ca/medialab/research/mediaed/Moral%20Panics%20Video
%20Games.pdf.
Kulik, Chen-Lin C. and James A. Kulik, ―Effectiveness of Computer-Based
Instruction: An Updated Analysis.‖ Human Behavior 7 (1991): 75-94.
Kunkel, Dale, ―Effects of Television Violence on Children.‖ statement to the US
Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation (June 26,
2007), accessed June 16, 2014.
https://www.apa.org/about/gr/pi/advocacy/2008/kunkel-tv.aspx.
Lamott, Anne. Bird by bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York:
Anchor, 1994.
301
Large, Martin, Who‘s Bringing Them Up? Television and Child Development.
Gloucester: Author, for the TV Action Group, 1980.
Leavis, Raymond, F. and Thompson, Denys. Culture and the Environment: The
Training of Critical Awareness. London: Chatto & Windus, 1933.
Lemish, Dafna. ―Spice Girls‘ Talk: A Case Study in the Development of Gendered
Identity.‖ in Millennium Girls: Today‘s Girls Around the World, edited by
Sherrie A. Inness (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998): 145-167.
Levin, Robert A. and Hines, Laurie Moses. ―Educational Television, Fred Rogers,
and the History of Education.‖ History of Education Quarterly 43, no. 2
(Summer 2003): 262-275. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3218313.
Lionnet, Francoise. Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender and Self-Portraiture.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,1989.
Lipson, Michael. Stairway of Surprise; six steps to a creative life. US:
Anthroposophic Press, 2002.
Lisosky, Joanne M. ―For All Kids' Sakes: Comparing Children's Television PolicyMaking in Australia, Canada and the United States.‖ Media Culture Society
23 (2001): 821-842. 10.1177/016344301023006008.
Livingstone, Sonia and Moira Bovill. Young people, new media: report of the
research project Children Young People and the Changing Media
Environment. Department of Media and Communications, London School
of Economics and Political Science, London, UK. 1999.
Longfellow Robinson, Sandra. ―Childhood; can it be preserved? An interview
with Neil Postman.‖ Childhood Education, 61 no. 5 (May 1985): 338.
Lowe, Kymberley ―Effects of Electronic Media on the Lives of Children and Their
Society.‖ Paper for Educational Foundations 310, University of Alberta,
1993.
Luba. Let It Go. Capitol-EMI of Canada, 1984. http://www.metrolyrics.com/letit-go-lyrics-luba.html.
Lusted, David. ―Why Pedagogy: An Introduction to This Issue,‖ Screen 27 (5)
(1986): 2-16.
Madonna. Express Yourself. Burbank, CA: Sire/Warner Brothers, 1989.
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/madonna/expressyourself.html.
Mander, Jerry, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. New York:
William Morrow, 1977.
Masterman, Len, Teaching the Media. London: Comedia, 1985.
Masterman, Len ―A Reply to David Buckingham,‖ Screen 27 (5) (1986): 96-103.
302
Masterman, Len, Media Education in 1990‘s Europe: A Teacher‘s Guide.
Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1994.
Mayes, Clifford, The Teacher as Shaman, Journal of Curriculum Studies 37, no. 3,
(2005): 329-348.
Mcintosh, Peggy. ―White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.‖ Peace and
Freedom (July/August 1989): 10-12.
McLuhan, Eric ―Marshall McLuhan‘s Theory of Communication.‖ Global Media
Journal 1 (2008): 25-43.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extension of Man. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1964.
McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage; An Inventory
of Effects. San Francisco: HardWired, 1996 original publication, 1967.
McLuhan Marshall, and Frank Zingrone, Essential McLuhan (Toronto: House of
Anansi, 1995.
Minnow, Newton and LaMay, Craig. Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children,
Television, and the First Amendment. New York: First Hill and Wang, 1995.
Moore, Shaun. Media and everyday life in modern society. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2000.
Moyer, John. R. An Exploratory Study of Questioning in the Instructional
Processes in Selected Elementary Schools (Doctoral) dissertation, Columbia
University, 1966.
Muehling, Darrel D., Carlson, Les and Russell N. Laczniak. ―Parental Perceptions
of Toy-based Programs: An Exploratory Analysis.‖ Journal of Public Policy
& Marketing 11, no. 1. 1992.
www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/stable/30000026.
Nathanson, Amy. I., ―The Unintended Effects of Parental Mediation of Television
on Adolescents.‖ Media Psychology, 4 (2002): 207–230.
Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Knopf, 1995.
Neill, Monty. ―Computers, Thinking and Schools in the New World Economic
Order.‖ In Resisting the Virtual Life, edited by James Brook and Iain Boal,
181-194. San Francisco: City Lights, 2000.
Nielsen, Thomas. Rudolf Steiner's Pedagogy of Imagination: A Phenomenological
Case Study. New York: Peter Lang, 2002.
Nielsen, Thomas W. ―Towards a Pedagogy of Imagination: A Phenomenological
Case Study of Holistic Education.‖ Ethnography and Education, 1 no. 2
(2006): 247-264.
303
Nightingale, Virginia. ―Media ethnography and the disappearance of
communication theory.‖ Media International Australia, no. 145
(November 2012): 94-102.
North Vancouver Waldorf School Parent‘s Handbook, accessed June 17, 2012,
http://www.vws.ca/wpcontent/uploads/2012/05/Parent-Handbook.pdf.
Oliver, David. Education, Modernity, and Fractured Meaning: Toward a Process
Theory of Teaching and Learning. New York: State University of New York
Press, 1989.
Opie, Iona and Opie Peter. The Lore and Language and of School Children.
Glasgow: Oxford University Press, 1959.
Orr, David. Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern
World. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992.
Palmer, Parker J., and Arthur Zajonc, with Megan Scribner. The Heart of Higher
Education; a call to renewal, Transforming the Academy through Collegial
Conversations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010.
Piaget, Jean. ―Children's Philosophies.‖' In Handbook of Child Psychology, edited
by C. Murchison. (377-391) Worcester, Mass.: Clark University Press, 1931.
Pinar, William. F., and Madeleine. R. Grumet. Toward a Poor Curriculum.
Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1976.
Pinar, William F. What Is Curriculum Theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 2004.
Pink Floyd. Run Like Hell. New York: Columbia Records, 1980.
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/pinkfloyd/runlikehell.html.
Pink Floyd. Comfortably Numb. London: Harvest, 1980.
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/pinkfloyd/comfortablynumb.html.
Postman, Neil and Weingartner, Charles. Teaching as a Subversive Activity. New
York: Delacorte Press, 1969.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show
Business. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985.
Postman, Neil The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Rainsberry, Fred B. A history of children‘s television English Canada, 1952-1986.
Metuchen, N.J: Scarecrow Press, 1988.
Reed-Danahay, Deborhah. Auto/ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social.
Oxford: Berg, 1997.
304
Roberts, Donald, Peter Christenson, Wendy A. Gipson, Linda and Marvin E.
Goldberg. "Developing Discriminating Consumers." Journal of
Communication, 30 no. 3 (1980): 94-105.
Robinson, Thomas N. ―Reducing Children's Television Viewing to Prevent
Obesity; A Randomized Controlled Trial.‖ Journal of American Medical
Association, 282, no. 16 (1999): 1561-1567.
Robinson, Thomas N., Wilde, Navracruz, Lisa. C., Haydel, Katherine. F. and
Varady, Ann. ―Effects of Reducing Children's Television and Video Game
Use on Aggressive Behavior: A Randomized Controlled Trial.‖ Archives of
Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 155, no. 1 (2001): 18.
Robinson, Thomas N. and Dina L. G., Borzekowski ―Effects of the SMART
Classroom Curriculum to Reduce Child and Family Screen Time.‖ Journal
of Communication, 56, no. 1 (2006): 1-26.
Rosen, Early. Educational Television, Canada. Toronto: Burns and MacEachern,
1967.
Salazr-Sutil, Nicholas. ―Carnival Post-Phenomenology: Mind the Hump.‖
Anthropology Matters Journal 10, no. 2, (2008): 1-11.
http://www.anthropologymatters.com/index.php/anth_matters/article/vi
ew/34/61.
Schor, Juliet B. Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer
Culture. New York: Scribner, 2004.
Schreiber, Emilia J. ―Teachers' Question-Asking Techniques in Social Studies.‖
Doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa, 1967.
Schrum, Lynne ―Education and commercialization: Raising awareness and
making wise decisions.‖ Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher
Education 2, no. 2, (2001): 170-177.
Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.
Sherry, John. L. ―Media Effects and the Nature/Nurture Debate: A Historical
Overview and Directions for Future Research.‖ Media Psychology 6, no. 1
(2009): 83-109. https://www.msu.edu/~jsherry/Site/NatureNurture.pdf.
Silverstein, Shel. ―Jimmy Jet and His TV Set,‖ Where the Sidewalk Ends. New
York: Harper & Row, 1974.
Singer, Jerome R. The Child‘s World of Make-Believe: Experimental Studies in
Imaginative Play. New York: Academic Press, 1973.
Singer, Dorothy G., Zuckerman, M. Diana, and Singer L. Jerome, "Helping
Elementary School Children Learn about TV." Journal of Communication,
30 no. 3 (1980): 84–93.
305
Singer, Jerome L. and Singer, G. Dorothy, Television, Imagination, and
Aggression: a study of Preschools. New Jersey: LEA Publishing, 1981.
Singer, Jerome L. ―Imaginative play and Adaptive Development.‖ in Toys, Play
and Child Development, edited by Goldstein, J. Cambridge: University of
Cambridge, 1994.
Singer, Dorothy G. and Singer L. Jerome. Imagination and Play in the Electronic
Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Singer, Dorothy G. and Singer L. Jerome Handbook of Children and the Media.
Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2012.
Smith, Geoffrey D. Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth; Globalization,
Empire and the Crises of Pedagogy. Rotterdam/Taipei: Sense Publishers,
2006.
Smith, Tony. ―British Columbia to Limit Sale of Violent Video Games.‖ The
Register (20 March 2001), accessed May 22, 2014,
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/03/20/british_columbia_to_limit_sale
/.
Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. USA; Penguin book,2005.
Spice Girls. Wannabe. London: Virgin Records, 1996.
http://www.justsomelyrics.com/222021/spice-girls-wannabee-lyrics.html.
Spice Girls. 2 Become 1. London: Virgin Records, 1996.
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/spicegirls/2become1.html.
Steiner, Rudolph. How to Know Higher Worlds. New York: Anthroposophic
Press, 1994.
Steiner, Rudolf. ―Lecture One: August 21, 1919.‖ Practical Advice to Teachers.
Herndon, VA: SteinerBooks, 2000.
Stevens, Romiett. ―The Question as a Measure of Efficiency in Instruction: A
critical Study of Classroom Practice.‖ Teachers College Contributions to
Education, no. 48. 1912.
Stewart, Kymberley R. ―Informatization of a Nation: A Case Study of South
Korea‘s Computer Gaming and PC-Bang Culture.‖ MA thesis, Simon Fraser
University. Ann Arbor: ProQuest/UMI, 2004. (Publication No. MR03635),
2004.
Stewart, Kymberley R. ―Does Media Sense Make Sense in Today‘s Media
Saturated World?‖ paper for Education 911, Simon Fraser University, Fall
2006.
306
Taras, Howard. L., Sallis, James. F., Patterson, Thomas. L., Nader, Philip R. and
Nelson, Julie A. ―Television‘s Influence on Children‘s Diet and Physical
Activity‖. Developmental Behavioral Pediatrics 10 (1989): 176 –180.
Til‘ Tuesday. Voices Carry. New York: Epic Records, 1985.
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/tiltuesday/voicescarry.html.
The Tragically Hip. Courage (for Hugh McLennan. London: MCA, 1992.
http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Courage-lyrics-TragicallyHip/64CC816F84A3D49948256C870021C362.
Thompson, Denys, ―Advertising God.‖ Scrutiny 1 no. 3 (December, 1932).
Thompson Twins. Hold Me Now. London: Arista Records, 1983.
http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/theweddingsinger/holdmenow.htm.
Tolkien, John. R. R. Tree and Leaf, London: Allen & Unwin, 1964.
Trueit, Donna. ―Play Which is More than Play,‖ Complicity: An International
Journal of Complexity and Education 3, no.1 (2006): 97-104.
U.S. Public Health Service Risk Communication: working with individuals and
communities to weigh the odds. Prevention Report (U.S. Public Health
Service, February/March 1995), accessed June 9, 2014,
http://odphp.osophs.dhhs.gov/pubs/prevrpt/archives/95fm1.htm.
Usher, Robin. and Edwards, Richard. Postmodernism and Education. London:
Routledge, 1996.
Van Houten, Coenraad. Awakening the Will; Principles and Processes in Adult
Learning. London: Temple Lodge, 1995.
Van Manen, Max. Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action
Sensitive Pedagogy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990.
Villani, Susan. ―Impact of Media on Children and Adolescents: A 10-Year Review
of the Research.‖ Journal of the American Academy of Child and
Adolescent Psychiatry 10, no. 4 (2001): 392–401.
http://www.lionlamb.org/research_articles/01C392.pdf.
Vygotsky, Lev. ―Play and Its Role in the Mental Development of the Child,‖
Psychology and Marxism Internet Archive. No. 6. Translated Catherine
Mulholland; (1966).
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1933/play.htm
Wagoner, David. Collected Poems 1956-1976. Bloomington, IL: Indiana
University Press, 1976.
Weinberg, Steve. ―Biography, the Bastard Child of Academe.‖ The Chronicle
Review, May, 9 2008. http://chronicle.com/article/Biography-the-BastardChild/9467.
307
Whyte, David. ―Everything is Waiting for You.‖ May 31, 2014.
http://www.davidwhyte.com/english_everything.html.
Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Collins,
1974.
Williams, MacBeth Tannis. The Impact of Television: A Natural Experiment in
Three Communities. Waltham, MA: Academic Press, 1986.
Williamson, Judith ―How Does Girl Number 20 Understand Ideology?‖ Screen
Education 40 (Autumn/Winter 1981): 80-87.
Wilson, Barbara J. ―Media Violence and Aggression in Youth.‖ In The Handbook
of Children, Media and Development, edited by Sandra L. Clavert and
Barbara J. Wilson, 237-267. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2010.
Winn, Marie. The Plug-In Drug; Television, Computers and Family Life. New York:
Penguin Books, 2002.
Zuckerman, Mary Ellen. A History of Popular Women‘s Magazines in the United
States, 1792-1995. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Zuss, Mark. ―Strategies of representation: Autobiographical Metissage and
Critical Pragmatism.‖ Educational Theory 47, no. 2 (1997): 163-180.
308