'THE OTHER TEACHERS' - HOW DO CHILDREN LEARN FROM TV AND NEW MEDIA?
Professor David Buckingham
Director of the Centre for the Study of Children
Youth and Media
Institute of Education
University of London
David:
The title of my talk is 'The Other Teachers'. This was actually Keri Facer's title, her suggestion rather than mine and when she said it to me, I thought, that's a bit naff, isn't it? But it has actually been growing on me and in some ways it strikes a chord with me. As Martin said, I work at the Institute of Education, which, as people will know, is a big graduate school of education. We've had media work going on in that setting for at least 30 years but nevertheless I think we feel in many ways quite marginal to what happens, and I often feel I have to make a case for looking at media or for teachers looking at media and for taking these other teachers seriously, so in some ways this is quite a good place to start.
Well, why media? Let me make that case. On one level I think the answer is obvious. I left some copies of my corporate propaganda on the registration desk so if you're interested in what we do, have a look at that. But in the corporate propaganda it has a kind of answer to this and it says children today spend more time watching television than they spend in school. If you add to that the time they spend with films, magazines, computer games, popular music, and the internet, it's clear that the media constitute by far their most significant leisure time pursuits.
So what we're saying here, I think, is that if what happens in school is going to be in any way relevant to what happens outside school, then it's important for schools and teachers to be addressing the media and that experience that kids are having. Let me be a bit more specific and put some figures on that. Here are some statistics which I've got from a range of different sources. So 98% of UK children watch television, on average, for 23 hours a week. 80% of kids have home computers, 70% have internet access, 80% have a games console, 55% have cable or satellite TV. Interestingly, 25% of households have a video camera. These things, with the exception of home computers and internet access, are fairly evenly distributed across social classes. 70% of teenagers have a TV in their bedroom, 50% have a VCR. What we're seeing happening in homes is not just dissemination of technology but also the privatisation of media technology so kids increasingly have privatised, if you like, non-parentally supervised access to media in the bedroom.
On the other hand, 4% of UK children attend museums, art galleries or the theatre, 46% of UK children do not read books for leisure. Children read books, on average, for 15 minutes a day, they watch TV and video for 200 minutes a day. If you then add to that that they listen to audio media for something like 75 minutes a day, CDs and radio, they use computers for 80 minutes plus a day. If you start to think about this and work it out, how could that possibly be happening and how would they ever find the time? I think one of the answers is to do with what does watching television mean. If you talk to kids, what they'll tell you is actually they do several of these things simultaneously while at the same time doing their homework.
So you have a picture here of children living a media saturated life outside school. I think there are people in education who would like to ignore all of this and pretend that somehow this doesn't happen, but if we believe that the school curriculum is going to be in just the slightest way relevant to kids' lives, then I think all of this is something that we cannot afford to be ignoring.
Obviously the focus of your conference is around ICT, or as people like me tend to |
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call them, new media. So what can we say about that? Well, I am old enough to remember the first ever computer, 380Z, arriving in the secondary school where I worked in 19 [coughs], and for quite a few years children were only ever likely to encounter computers in the context of school. But I think at least since the mid-1980s, for the last 15-20 years, kids' first encounters with computers have been more likely to occur at home than in school, in the context of leisure rather than in the context of something explicitly labelled as learning.
I think more significantly in recent years what we're seeing is a new digital divide beginning to open up, and here I mean not so much a digital divide in terms of social class and access to technology but a divide between what children are doing with computers and with new media outside school and what they're doing inside school.
So what are they doing outside school? Well, they're playing games, they're surfing fan websites, they're seeking out information on the internet about hobbies and enthusiasms, particularly media enthusiasms, they're visiting the websites for EastEnders, Britney Spears, Big Brother, Cartoon Network, the Tweenies, and so on. And perhaps above all what they're doing is using new media to communicate both with each other, with people they know, but also with people that they've never even met. What they don't seem to be doing to any significant extent is engaging in the purposeful pursuit of education. I think aside from homework, there's very little sense that that's what children are using ICT for.
Meanwhile, when you look at what they're doing in school, well, what are they doing? In most cases not very much. Few schools still seem to offer kids extended periods of access or unrestricted access to the internet, many schools employ filtering systems which notoriously turn web surfing into a kind of obstacle course, and most formal ICT classes in schools cover just the rudiments of information retrieval along with word processing and, if you're lucky, spreadsheets. Some teachers will offer kids web-based homework assignments but these are often restricted to visiting prescribed sites. So there's a significant gap really between kids' experience of new media outside school and what they're doing in school.
I think there are some good reasons actually for the limitations that schools do impose on kids' use of new media, but I think it's not surprising that research increasingly finds that many children are bored and frustrated by the use of ICT in schools. For them, from outside school, the computer is primarily a medium for commercial entertainment, for peer group culture and a lot of that is inaccessible, incomprehensible, to adults, including teachers.
Perhaps more controversially, I would say that in those encounters with new media outside school, there's actually a great deal of learning going on, not much education perhaps in that formal sense but certainly quite a lot of learning.
What I want to go on to do is just say a bit about how people who've thought about this have looked at it and I think you can find two opposing approaches, really, to thinking about this. I think some people look at what goes on in kids' media culture outside school and recoil with horror, and you have this idea of the media as teaching machines. This term comes from the American author, Henry Giroux. It's part of an argument that says on one level, yes, the media are actually teaching children an enormous amount, although by and large many of these people don't seem to like what it is that the media are teaching. The media tend to be seen here as purveyors of all sorts of bad messages; violence, sex, drugs, unhealthy foods to eat, unhealthy body images to admire, sexism, racism, prejudices of all sorts and different kinds. And the point is from this perspective, it's the media that give kids their bad ideas. The media are seen to have an enormous degree of power in imposing bad ideas on
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