This paper describes an exercise carried out with a group of media teachers at an INSET weekend held at UWIC in October 2000, based on my research into children's attitudes to television drama carried out with over 1,300 6-12 year olds in England and Wales, on behalf of the BBC in 1996-7. Given a brief to make the workshop as interactive as possible, I decided to ask the teachers to do what I had asked the children to do in the research. The results turned out to be intriguing: of which more below.

Constructions of childhood and the media

The first goal of the workshop was to set out the context of the research. Teachers were invited to consider two broad agendas: the first was contemporary academic and popular constructions of childhood, including the basic concept of childhood as a construction and not as a 'natural' category of being. The second agenda was more pragmatic and invited the teachers to consider what the BBC might want to know from the research.

The group brainstormed public concerns about childhood. These included: high-profile child crime; the feared 'adultification' of children in the form of premature sexuality; children as consumers of popular music, culture and fashion; under-class gangs of children terrorising housing estates; and children as victims of sensational forms of crime, such as paedophilic murders. As always, as the group recognised, such concerns about children and childhood were refracted through the media - both within media reports, as in sensational press accounts of child delinquency, and as effects of media, as in concerns about the impact of violent videos, or pornography on the internet.

There was not much discussion about more positive constructions of childhood - such as children as 'creative', or 'innocent', or as super-competent users of new technology (a modern re-invention of the Romantic myth of the wise child.) This could have been because the teachers in the group taught teenagers and did not have much professional contact with younger children — which suggested to me that, in secondary school media studies, children may begin to become 'objects' of study, rather than 'subjects'. My book, Television is Good for Your Kids, has been used for GCSE and A Level Media Studies, and school students sometimes write to me for help with projects on the subject of 'children and television' or 'children and violence' - but this is done as if these students were not (nor had ever been) children themselves. It may be that, by teenage-hood, 'the child' begins to be categorised as 'other'. . .

The scheduling role-playing exercise

The task I gave the teachers in the workshop was a group discussion task used in the study called 'the Scheduling Task.' Children aged between eight and twelve worked in small groups to role-play a team of 'channel controllers', selecting a mixed schedule of six or seven programmes, from a range of titles for a 'new children's channel'. These titles had been generated by four classes of children who had been asked to 'write down all the TV shows you can remember'. The most frequently mentioned titles, plus one or two others inserted by the researchers, including some ethnic choices (see Table 1) were written on cards and given to each group in a colour-coded bag. There were also some blank cards for adding programmes of their own choice, or of their own creation. The titles are listed in Table 1 below:

Table 1: List of programmes used in the Scheduling Task - 'channel controllers'
 

Welsh Programmes added: (from S4C)

Slot Meithrin - Preschool

Heno - News programme

Pobl y Cwm - Welsh soap

Superted - Pre school cartoon

Brodyr Bach - Light Entertainment

Asian Programmes added: (from BBC2)

Chanakya - Epic saga set in Ancient India

Network East - Arts and entertainment magazine

Bollywood or Bust! - Hindi film quiz
 

The task had a two-stage structure. In the whole-class first-stage, small groups of children (all mixed-ability) had to arrive at agreement through negotiation and discussion, chaired by a 'group leader' appointed by the teacher. They adopted a variety of strategies - voting, making piles of cards of different genres, taking turns for each group member to list his or her choices - and so on; no advice was given on procedure and rarely was any intervention needed from adults. The second stage was a reversal of the first: a new group made up of one representative from each group took the six or eight most frequently mentioned titles from the whole-class discussion and then had to reduce the list, one by one, because their channel 'was losing money.' This second-stage discussion was tape-recorded. In the second stage, a researcher was present as the children discussed the discarding of programmes, and probed for their reasons. Through these discussions, the relative importance of drama compared with other genres emerged, as well as many other views about how television schedules should be organised.

In the UWIC INSET workshop, a version of this task was given to the teachers. I did not tell the teachers what the outcome of the children’s discussions had been, but asked them to predict the outcome for themselves. They were asked to do this in two ways: one group was asked to take on the roles of 9-10 year olds in constructing the schedule. The other group was asked to do it as themselves, thinking about what the BBC might expect of them.

The group of adult teachers pretending to be children decided to take the opportunity permitted by the role-play to behave anarchically, rather than co-operatively, and began to generate revealing comments, which I realised I ought to write down. In general, the teachers' role-playing group drew on the familiar ‘othering’ construct of childhood as 'troublesome’. They enthusiastically interrupted each other, and did not set up procedures for democratic consensus as the children in the study had done, for example:

Teacher/child 2: We pick our favourites, as six to nine year olds.

Teacher/child 3: I'm pretending to be my nine year old daughter.

Teacher/child 1: Wouldn't there be a rebellious streak?

Teacher/child 4: It's not supposed to be balanced - we're only nine.

Here, by contrast, is how an actual group of 8-11 year olds from an inner-city primary school in a deprived area of London, discussed which programmes to discard and which to keep.

Boy 2: But they do, I was thinking about The X Files, because there are a lot of things here for older people like secondary, but if little kids watch it they will take ideas from it.

Girl 1: I was thinking about getting rid of Top of the Pops, because the little babies, like, watch it and get nightmares from it. I reckon it is quite scary for little kids.

Boy 2: OK so do you think we should lose it ?

Boy 1: Well hold on, what about EastEnders?

Boy 3: No, no my mum likes that. I like that, I like that.

Boy 2: EastEnders is already on BBC1 anyway.

What characterised the children's responses - and to be fair to the teachers, the children had more time to plan their schedules and to discuss their choices - was an overwhelming sense of social responsibility: the need to recognise the tastes and rights of different groups in the audience, and the need to protect 'little kids' from 'violence' and 'swearing' and other presumed harmful effects. The full accounts and discussion of the implications of the scheduling task outcomes are described at more length in 'Dear BBC' (and also in Davies and Machin, 2000b). However, from Middlesbrough to Exeter to Cardiff to Essex, the tone of the children's discussions in these scheduling tasks could unanimously be characterised as 'Reithian' - socially and morally, even sternly, responsible. This was so despite our best efforts to steer them into more commercially-minded modes of decision-making (for instance by insisting that the second stage of the task was about saving money) so that they could give the BBC the desired insights into consumer tastes and gratifications.

The teacher workshop group's assumptions about how children as schedulers would behave were the opposite of what the child role-players had enacted in the study. We briefly discussed why this should be in the workshop: the teachers were surprised when I showed them some of the data the study had produced from the children and expressed scepticism that this was typical of all the responses in the research. The construct of the child as ‘troublesome’ appears difficult to dislodge and when children appear to be ‘sensible’ and responsible, most adults to whom I have shown this data (not just the teachers in the workshop) have wanted to throw doubt on it, suggesting (quite rightly) that the school situation was different from the playground or the children’s own homes. This could be argued against much research with children, as well as what children write and produce in their own schoolwork. Should children’s views be seen as less valid when they are produced in an institutional context? In what contexts can children’s views be seen as authentic and how can we access these views as researchers and educators without interfering with their authenticity? These are important research questions.

The discrepancy between the children's construction of 'child-as-scheduler' and the teachers' construction of 'child-as-scheduler' was unexpected and led me to rethink what was going on. Obviously, both groups were role-playing: both were taking on characteristics, or 'discursive positions' which they do not usually adopt. However, the way in which people construct roles about other groups does reveal what they think are — or ought to be - the characteristics of those other groups: the children thought that the appropriate way to act as 'channel schedulers' was to consider the needs of different audience groups, and to be protective of vulnerable sections. The teachers thought that the appropriate way to act as 'children-acting-as-schedulers' was simply to act as children, and to act as children pursuing their own personal gratifications as consumers, rather than as potential regulators.

Obviously I can't do this exercise again. I've given away how the child scheduler would be expected to act, and teachers who read this site will now know it. But that is the lesson: the research suggested a different 'construction' of childhood which could be used to generate more complex models of the ways in which children relate to media, and how children conceptualise other children — including the role of ‘the child as regulator’. These models could help us to construct improved media education programmes at every level. Although none of the children in the schools we visited in the study had formal media education, their teachers were extremely interested in the outcomes of the tasks, and several of them asked permission to use the tasks in their future teaching. We visited 17 schools altogether and in all of them the actual participation in the research exercise was seen as educationally valuable by the teachers - an added bonus for the research team.

See Davies, M. M. (2001) 'Dear BBC': Children, Television Storytelling and the Public Sphere, Cambridge: CUP for a full account of the research and the issues raised by it.

Grateful acknowledgements to the members of the team - Kate O'Malley, Beth Corbett and David Machin, all Research staff at the London College of Printing during the time of the study.
 
REFERENCES

Davies, M. M. (2001) 'Dear BBC': Children, Television Storytelling and the Public Sphere, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Davies, M. M. (1989) Television is Good for Your Kids , London: Hilary Shipman

Davies, M. M. & Machin, D. ( 2000b)’’It helps people make their decisions’: dating games, public service broadcasting and the negotiation of identity in middle childhood’, Childhood, 7 (2), pp 173-191