Popular culture, participation and progression in the literacy classroom

Popular culture, participation andprogression in the literacy classroomBecky Parry

Abstract

In this paper, I share an account of what happens whena teacher values children’s experiences of popularculture in a classroom activity. Drawing on a socio-cultural approach to learning, I suggest that childrenare not simply enthused when their lived cultures arevalued in the classroom but more fundamentally thatthey are motivated because they can participate in(and are not excluded from) the learning that isconstructed. Drawing on data from a recent medialiteracy research project, I aim to demonstrate thenecessity of including popular culture experiences inliteracy teaching in order to ensure that children areable to articulate and develop key conceptual under-standings. Furthermore, I suggest that interrogatorypedagogic strategies, including practical productions,are key to ensuring that children are able to makeexplicit, and then organise and develop their concep-tual understandings.

Key words: popular culture, literacy, film, progression,pedagogy

Using children’s culture

Marsh and Millard’s (2000) influential work, Literacy andPopular Culture, is underpinned by the argument thatthe ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu, 1977) of all childrenshould be recognised, to ensure that their learning experi-ences aremademeaningful. By valuing their popular cul-ture, teachers can ensure that children do not have toreject their home identities in the classroom. In doing so,connections can be made with the interests of childrenso that their literacy learning will be more motivated.Marsh and Millard further suggest that popular culturecan be used to connect children to more high-status textsand enable them to develop critical literacy skills.

In her subsequent study of a blogging project, Marsh(2009) also demonstrates that the inclusion ofchildren’s home digital literacy practices can be cen-tral to the development of a productive pedagogyunderpinned by a concern for social justice and equal-ity of opportunity in education. The productivepedagogies model was used as a critical frameworkin the Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Studyin which over 1,000 primary and secondary lessonswere observed and analysed (Lingard, 2005). The fourdimensions of productive pedagogies were

subsequently described as intellectual quality, con-nectedness, supportive classroom environments andengagement with difference. The study concludes thatwhere these four dimensions are apparent, learneragency is advocated. In her study of blogging, Marsh(2009) focuses on the aspect of connectedness andrelevance to children’s lives. Marsh suggests thatclassroom activities should “recognise children’s dig-ital habitus (Bourdieu, 1990 [1980]) and enable themto draw on the knowledge and practices they developin their engagement with new technologies in thehome” (Marsh, 2009, p. 216).

The need to connect home and school experiences inlearning is well researched (although not embedded incurriculum), particularly in the area of Early Yearsresearch (Marsh, 2004), and also in relation tolanguage (Heath, 1983) and to popular culture (Dyson,1998). Indeed, the link between popular culture andchildren’s motivation is frequently used as a rationalein literacy activities, and as Willett (2005) demonstrates,when we do explicitly invite children to draw on theirexperiences of popular culture, the classroom becomesrichly populated with the characters and narratives offilms, games and television programmes. Furthermore,as Potter (2012) eloquently illustrates, in their productionof digital texts, children actively curate their identitiesthrough a bricolage of media experiences. Importantly,in both of these examples the inclusion of popularculture enables the children to demonstrate their under-standings of narrative and media forms.

In the many examples of research focused on literacyand popular culture or home literacy practices, it isevident that it is not just the sheer pleasure of sharingpopular culture texts that increases children’s motiva-tion in literacy activities (as important as this is). Ipropose that it is also the ability to fully participatein classroom learning and demonstrate emergingconceptual understandings that heightens children’smotivation and prompts learning progression. Throughan examination of data derived from a research projectfocused on media literacy and learning progression, Iaim to explore further this proposal. The paper isinformed by the work of Vygotsky (1962) whose viewsabout the social construction of knowledge and theways inwhich children develop conceptual understand-ing provide a useful lens through which to examineexamples of classroom practice.

Copyright © 2014 UKLA. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

14 Popular culture, participation and progression in the literacy classroomLiteracy

The study

‘Developing Media Literacy: Towards a Model ofLearning Progression’ was an Economic and SocialResearch Council (ESRC)-funded research projectinstigated by David Buckingham at the University ofLondon, Institute of Education. The project ran fromJanuary 2009 until January 2012 and was the firstlarge-scale, systematic research project to explore thepractice of media education in schools. The methodo-logical approach taken included action researchwhereby schemes of activity were collaborativelyplanned by teachers and researchers and thenimplemented in each classroom. The specific aim wasto develop a model of learning progression in mediaeducation that would seek to specify what children ofdifferent ages might be expected to understand aboutmedia, and how their learning could develop over time,and in the course of a sequence of learning activities.

The data were collected during periods of classroomactivity with children in Years 2, 4, 8 and 10 and thenagain, when the same groups were in Years 3, 5, 9and 11. The research involved classroom observations,some of which were recorded on audio or video forlater analysis. Teachers and students were also askedto complete a questionnaire and were interviewed ata number of stages in the project. The data wereanalysed in a number of ways, including thematic cod-ing and narrative analysis. In this account, I report ondata derived from a week of activities that focusedon media language and narrative. During this week, Iobserved activities, made video recordings and col-lected examples of the texts the children produced.These data were analysed using comparisons withthe other school sites as a basis for identifying a seriesof themes that were then used to further select data in-cluding vignettes from classroom activities, examplesof texts and transcriptions of observations. In this arti-cle, I share data that were selected in relation to one ofthe themes emerging from our analysis, focusing onpedagogy in relation to the inclusion of popularculture in the classroom.

The participants

Prior to the start of the research, a group of focus chil-dren were identified for each research class. We askedthe teacher to suggest a purposive sample of six toeight children whose experiences would vary in termsof gender, class, ethnicity, learning dispositions and so-cial and cultural experiences. The focus children from1Year 4 class (8- and 9-year-olds) are the main focusof this paper, although other responses are referred towhere they are of particular interest.

These children attend a city primary school in the eastof England, which is one of a federation of media artsspecialist primary and secondary schools. The intake

is diverse: an above average proportion of childrenhave English as a second language; are entitled to freeschool meals; or have a Statement of special needs.

The focus children include the following:

Luke – an articulate and high-achieving boy of whiteBritish descent;Maya – an Iranian-born girl with an extensive extendedfamily and wide-ranging cultural experiences;Sadia – a girl of Pakistani decent, described by theteacher as lacking a wide-ranging vocabulary in English;Manola –who has just joined the class from Spain and islearning English very quickly;Lee – a boy of white British descent, described as notalways fully engaged in school work;Jade – a white British girl, described as achievingbelow average attainment in literacy;Joe – a white British boy, described as having severephysical, behavioural and learning difficulties.

The teacher, Caitlin, was a very experienced primaryteacher who had recent experience of senior manage-ment in similar primary schools. Caitlin explicitlydrew on a range of theories of learning in her workand was particularly keen to ensure learning wasextended. Her attitude to media and popular culturewas slightly ambiguous as she had many concernsabout children’s use of popular culture but was keento undertake media literacy learning activities andrecognised the potential value of these to the children.

The rationale for the activity

The planned activity focused on teaching media lan-guage with the aim of enabling children to further un-derstand how the many modes of texts such as films ortelevision programmes combine to suggest meaning.We aimed to offer a space in which the children coulddraw on their own experiences, making explicit theintuitive ideas they had developed as readers of textsthrough the analysis and production of new ones.Vygotsky’s (1962) distinction between spontaneousconcepts (concepts children develop through concreteengagement with everyday experience) and scientificconcepts (concepts that are abstract and systemisedand usually learned during formal schooling) is usefulto developing an understanding of the ways in whichchildren move informal understandings of media textsto more formal ones.

Vygotsky suggests that throughout their schooling,children operate with ‘potential concepts’, moving be-tween spontaneous concepts and scientific concepts.As Dixon-Krauss (1996) points out, the interaction be-tween spontaneous and scientific concepts is not fullyunderstood; however, Vygotsky proposes that a childmust use a concept before having control over it, ratherthan, for example, learning a word before being ableto use or comprehend its meaning. Dixon-Krauss

Literacy Volume 48 Number 1 April 2014 15

Copyright © 2014 UKLA

summarises this learning as a process of enabling thechild to detach the concept from their everyday experi-ence, represent the concept with a sign or word andplace it within a system of relationships.

Vygotksy describes ‘spontaneous concepts’ as havingtwo elements: ‘heaps’ (the child will name objectsand randomly categorise them); and ‘complexes’ (thechild will not only name objects but will also begin toattribute traits to them and discern relationshipsbetween them). These complexes are evident inchildren’s understandings of media language gainedthrough their exposure to texts. For example, theyknow from repeat experiences of the same conventionthat when a character is shown at the bottom of a stair-case and then at the top, this implies that the characterhas moved up the staircase even if the full process isnot shown. However, this knowledge often remainsan implicit understanding. It can be argued then thatchildren develop ‘complexes’ in relation to the editingand spatial organisation of film, before having anynaming vocabulary to describe them. Explicit under-standing of these elements is also rarely evident in chil-dren’s first film productions (Burn and Durran, 2006;Parry, 2013), suggesting that children are likely to con-tinue to operate at the level of ‘heaps and complexes’rather than potential concepts until they encounterformal media teaching, including production.

Although Vygotsky and his contemporaries focusedon language, there is an increasing recognition thatattention also needs to be paid to the development ofsemiotic tools, that is to say, the creative affordancesof particular modes:

“Since action is mediated by semiotic as well as materialtools, participation in the modes of discourse that organiseand interpret action not only provides the context for thelearning of language and other semiotic systems, but it alsoinducts learners into the culture’s ways of making sense ofexperience – its modes of classification, its understandingof means ends relationships, and its aesthetic and moralvalues” (Wells and Claxton, 2008, p. 4).

As previously suggested, children develop under-standing of ‘semiotic tools’ implicitly as readers ofthe moving image. For example, children recognisethat a wizard in a film might wear a cloak and carrya wand, but also that they can be shown flying,through the use of special effects or vanishing throughthe use of editing. Furthermore, certain music orsounds might indicate their mood or accompany theiractions. However, the process in which the spontan-eous concepts, acquired by watching film or television,become scientific concepts that are learned formallyrequires further research. If when watching a film, achild understands that the prominent placing of atelephone in a room implies a significant call mightbe expected, how is that conceptual understandingtransformed from an individual observation into ab-stract and systematic knowledge common to a culture?

Furthermore, because concepts in media language areculturally contingent and their meaning dynamic,learners are also asked to tolerate uncertainty, that isto say, to recognise that meanings are not fixed andthat their understanding of a concept might need tobe adjusted following further experiences. In develop-ing children’s understanding of media language learn-ing then, we needed to pay attention to this processand examine the extent to which particular sorts ofpedagogic strategies enabled this process of learning.

The activity

To explore how children’s spontaneous concepts aboutmedia language might become scientific, the Year 4children embarked on a week of activities related toscary stories. The primary school teachers had opted totake a holistic approach, rather than limiting their focusto one film or genre in particular, so experiences ofhorror, superhero and science fiction genres wereincorporated. This proved to be significant because thisinvited the children to draw on what they knew fromall forms of storytelling about what makes a story scary.

Activities were devised to enable the research team tounderstand what children could articulate about nar-rative and uses of media language and how we couldfurther progress their learning. We aimed to valuewhat children already knew about ‘scary’ stories by in-viting them to bring in DVDs, books, films and gamesthat were personal favourites, and to list the elementsof a scary story that they were familiar with. Thechildren were then encouraged to analyse a widerange of scary stories in many different forms, payingattention to specific modes. Addressing the broadquestion, “how do these texts suggest fear?”, Caitlin,the Year 4 teacher, shared a wide range of resourcessuch as the music from the film Psycho, the ‘You Tube’mash-up ‘Scary Mary’ based on Mary Poppins and ashort film about a daughter’s fears about her mother’sworsening Alzheimer’s. Detailed study was under-taken of a television clip of Batman, WatershipDown, Coraline, A Nightmare Before Christmas, a shortfilm, Lucky Dip1 and a written story. Caitlin alsoencouraged the children to analyse texts in stages; theylooked at the whole text, then looked at the differentmodes within the text (sound, music, dialogue andimage) and considered the effect of their particularcomposition and combination. The children were alsoinvited to participate in tasks using different modesof expression, again paying particular attention toone aspect or one mode (sound, music and visual) inorder to begin to make more detailed and specificobservations.

Following an exercise to encourage the children to con-sider the meaning in relation to shot composition, thechildren were asked to produce storyboards of a selec-tion of film clips. For example, in their analysis of ANightmare Before Christmas, a clip was shown and

16 Popular culture, participation and progression in the literacy classroom


freeze-framed and discussed. The children then createdstoryboards of the sequence and were asked to pay at-tention to what was in the frame and what sort of shotwas being used andwhy. Finally, the children undertookproductions of their own scary stories in image formusing photos onMicrosoft Power Point, and two furthergroup film productions that included scripting, filming,editing and sound editing were made.

I have chosen to present five selected instancesthat demonstrate the impact of specific pedagogicstrategies on children’s conceptual understanding offilm language. These instances highlight the criticalimportance of framing of an activity, attention tomultimodality, the role of peer discussion, the choiceof text, and practical production. I propose that theseapproaches were aspects of a productive pedagogythat enabled the children to connect with, interrogateand develop their existing conceptual understand-ings of story and to begin to make these understand-ings explicit.

Framing the activity

Rather than ask the children to share what they knewabout the structure of stories in general, the childrenwere asked to focus specifically on scary stories,drawing on their experiences in any form. To framethis activity, children were asked to list the scaryelements of films and then put them in categories,thus offering some organising principles (characters,sound, music, settings, storylines, props and camerause). Children were asked to work collectively insmall groups and move beyond one specific textexample to begin to map their broader experiences.All of the groups were able to describe visible narra-tive elements such as characters, drawing extensivelyon contemporary popular children’s films and televi-sion programmes.

Lee, Luke andManola became immersed in discussingthe scary elements of Harry Potter and digressed intocopying out reviews of the books. It could besuggested that in this instance, the children were oper-ating at the level of what Vygotsky (1962) describes as‘heaps’, the first stage in the development of ‘sponta-neous concepts’, and were not yet able to movebeyond specific examples towards abstract generalisa-tions. Further scaffolding involved the teacher inasking a specific set of questions that challenged themto identify elements of the Harry Potter storiesaccording to the criteria they had been given and thento widen their focus from one text to many so that theybegan to make generalisations.

As children became confident with these genericelements, they continued to use them to generateideas. For example, they suggested ‘invisibility cloak’and then also wrote down ‘magic cape’. Once theyprogressed to the category of settings, they listed

generalised settings such as ‘old castle’, ‘graveyard’and ‘old windy street’. Furthermore, once they beganto generate characters, they subdivided them intomonsters (goblins, vampires and zombies) andhelpers and civilians. The children in this group wereable to respond to the task because they were able todraw on their expertise and affinity with the HarryPotter texts. However, this progression had relied onthe teacher providing further scaffolding.

Although it was not explicitly articulated by theteacher, it was clear that her aim was to enable thechildren to grasp the notion of abstractions. Thisdemanded a pedagogic stance by the teacher thatWells (2007) describes as ‘interrogatory’. That is tosay, the children’s ideas were expressed, organisedand questioned to the extent that they were able toprogress from specific examples to begin to make ab-stract generalisations on the basis of their observationsacross a range of familiar and new textual experiences.

Sadia, Maya and Jade independently understood theidea of looking for abstracted elements rather thanadhering to one example. They produced a complexset of notes and illustrations, which were systematicapplications of their generalised theories. In their listof props, they explained the narrative function of theobjects: “Ring to give you powers”. By contrast withthe boys, this group appeared to be operating with‘complexes’ that the teacher attributed to Maya’sextensive cultural experiences and her providingscaffolding to her peers.

In their suggested plot scenarios, this group linkedcharacters with plot functions: “Some ghosts mightdie. Some ghosts might lose their powers”. Theyshowed understanding of an underlying narrativearc: “They go to a place, they come into danger, theyhave to survive the danger”. In a further example, theyoffered a range of possible sounds that reflected theirexperiences of moving image distinctly: “Screamingsounds. Doors creaking. Lightning. Loud bang. Footsounds. Owls”. When they considered music, they re-lated their observations to key events: “Loud musicand then it stops like someone’s running and suddenlysomething happened to them. Long notes of music andthen a bump in the end. Boo!”

The teacher’s framing referring to sound, and the in-clusion of media texts, enabled the children to considerthe role of sound in creating meaning. Although thegirls did not initially refer to any camera shots in theirlists, the inclusion of the category ‘camera shots’encouraged them to visualise examples and then ima-gine specific examples that they expressed as “cameramoving where the girl went”. (This activity was priorto any teaching of film language.) By framing the activ-ity so that the children’s attention was directed to thedistinct multimodal elements of scary stories in differentforms, their opportunities to share their existing ‘reper-toires of narrative’ (Robinson, 1997) were extended.



Attention to multimodality

In the subsequent analysis activity, the children wereinvited to pay attention to the type of shots used in thefilm A Nightmare Before Christmas. The children clearlynoticed different aspects of the clip, reflecting on theirown emotional responses. They selected different shotsas being significant. Some children were clearly betterat describing exactly what they saw in drawings ratherthan in words (see Figure 1). By contrast, Luke andManola invested time in using descriptive languagerather than describing the shots: “this mysterious scare-crow twisting its body”.

The boys were reluctant to move to a drawing modeand applied their own rules of writing “to use descrip-tive words” to this task, as they did to others. In theuse of language, we can begin to see the boys’ readingof the character of the scarecrow, but not their under-standing of shot composition. This resistance perhapsindicated this pair’s preference for written expressionand that they needed greater support to undertakedrawn accounts. The use of a drawn mode of expres-sion in this activity shifted the hierarchy of learnersin the classroom and enabled some children to morefully articulate their understandings.

In the next analysis activity, the class was explicitlytaught the names of some fairly simple shots (mediumshot, close up and long shot). This enthused even thosefor whom drawing was a challenge and led to muchmore accurate observations of shots. Where childrendid not have the vocabulary to hand, they attemptedto describe shots, imagining and sometimes actingout where the camera was. Manola and Luke referredto a “closing up and turning up camera”, which is aninventive description of a zoom where there is alsospiralling animation. Lee and Jade imagined thecamera-person to help them conceptualise the shot:“Camera man walks forward, gates open, see castle”.Having a metalanguage to describe camera use helpedthe children to be more precise in their observations;

however, at this point, they had not gained enoughspecialised vocabulary to articulate their understand-ing fully. Even so, the focus on camera shots did enablethe children to embody and imagine the action of thecamera and attempt to understand film compositionexplicitly. At this point, it would have been productiveto provide a more complex vocabulary in terms of filmlanguage (point of view shots) to enable the children toexpress the full extent of their understanding in theirwritten descriptions.

The role of peer discussion

The children watched a clip of a TV animated versionof Batman as a set of individual sequences, makingup a whole clip. Thus, their attention was drawn, notonly to individual shot choices but also to cameramovement within a shot, and sound. The childrenwere then given a set of 12 stills from the clip insequence in the form of a storyboard and asked towrite notes addressing the questions: “What’s in theframe?”, “What’s the camera doing?” and “Whatsound can you hear?” The teacher prompted the chil-dren to connect their observations to their interpreta-tions by asking them to say why some choices hadbeen made. This was an interesting extension of theprevious storyboarding activity because although theywere not drawing, they were being asked to look at im-ages closely. Many of the children initially wrote ordrew descriptively, that is to say, without attributingmeaning, but again with encouragement they couldtake this much further. For example, Joe noticed andpointed out a character walking backwards:

Researcher: “What does that mean?”Joe: “You walk backwards because you want to keep

what is in front of you, in your line of sight”.

Using ‘I’ and also enacting this movement as he talked,Joe based his suggestion on his extensive experiencesof playing video games. Through group talk and

Figure 1: A storyboard from the opening of A Nightmare Before Christmas. Caption 1, Close up shot of a little light. Caption 2,Another close up shot of the light and two leaves circling around the light. Caption 3, A close up of the pumpkin scarecrow



paying attention to one mode, Joe was able to use hisexperiences of scary texts to make an observation thatwas somewhere between an everyday spontaneousconceptual understanding and an abstract and concreteunderstanding of a character’s point of view and howthis relates to audience expectations. Perhaps this is anexample of what Vygotky terms a potential concept.This led to a further conversation with others, includingJade, about a film, Blackwater (certificate 15), that thechildren had watched at home: “One girl was braveshe went forwards not backwards and she’s the onewho didn’t get killed” (Jade).

Thus, the discussion between Joe and his peersprompted their consideration of audience expectationof characters’ movement and the point of viewconstructed by the camera in scary films.

The Batman storyboard activity enabled the childrento spend time playing back and paying attention tothe individual clips, which were available to them onlaptops and on the interactive white board. Where theydid not have an extensive film language vocabulary,the children in Jade’s group still attempted to describecomplex camera movement: “Aeriel shot moved fastly;The camera was going up, following the torch”. Theteacher insisted that the children linked their observa-tions about what they saw and heard to considerationsof meaning. This prompted Jade to notice the affectivequalities of the music: “the music feels likes somethingis going to happen”.

On the basis of these examples, it is possible to proposethat being descriptive, for example, spotting or identi-fying a close up, is an initial stage in the process oflearning to analyse film. However, this process wasmade richer where meaning-making and responsewere also central. The persistence of the question ‘butwhy?’ did not always result in the children being ableto articulate specific answers, but it reinforced thenotion of an ‘author’ of the text with intentions in rela-tion to the audience. The opportunity to undertakemeaningful analysis in small peer groups enabled thechildren to draw on their existing knowledge of filmproductively and in the case of Joe, shifted his positionin the learning hierarchy, positioning him as havingexpertise which could enrich the learning of his peers.

The choice of text

Burn and Durran (2006) observe that children tend todraw most of their storyboard shots in mid-shot, reas-oning that young children are often not consciouslyaware of the ‘grammar’ of film. In earlier work, I dem-onstrate that there are some semiotic affordances offilm that are quickly apparent to children, such as thechoice of costume or music (Parry, 2013). However,equally, there are some elements that are more elusive,such as temporal organisation. Significantly, by thefourth activity (the analysis of the BFI short animated

film Lucky Dip), the children’s storyboard drawingsreflected careful observation of the shots chosen bythe film-maker. The children were clearly also selectingthe shots to draw on the basis of effect on the audience.These depictions exceeded those observed by Burnand Durran (2006), reflecting understanding of morecomplex shot choices and more complex meaning. Iwould suggest that the previous tasks, in which thechildren had paid attention to separate modes or unitsof meaning, lay useful foundations for this activity.However, alongside framing, multimodal analysisand peer discussion, the text itself clearly alsosupported their ideas, enabling the children not onlyto carry on the storyline in terms of devising plotsbut also to imagine what these would look like in thestyle and animated form of the original film.

This activity, storyboarding a scene from a film andthen storyboarding a new scene, clearly provided thechildren with the opportunity to use a concept in orderto develop control over it. The children first attemptedto represent the combination of signs in the film (a littlegirl, a rabbit, a pier and point of view shots), and thenthey represented and recombined this set of signs,exploring their potential meaning further. As Wells andClaxton argue, our toolkit of meaning-making is notonly print based but is also semiotic, that is to say,concerned with images, moving images and design aswell as modes:

“It is particularly by learning to use these semiotic toolsin discourse with others that humans appropriate the cul-ture’s dominant way of thinking, reasoning and valuing.And in making them their own and in bringing them tobear on new problems and new situations, they maytransform them in ways that add to and potentiallyimprove the culture’s shared toolkit of meaning-makingresources” (Wells and Claxton, 2008, p. 4).

This activity demonstrated the children’s ability tomake a set of semiotic resources their own and recom-bine them to transform meaning. For example, thechildren drew complex shots that demonstrated moresophisticated understanding than they were able toarticulate in their writing. The terms they used todescribe the shots remained basic: they describedlong shots and close up shots, but they drew pointof view shots, low angle and over the shoulder shots(see Figure 2).

The shots drawn from behind the characters (adoptingtheir point of view, seeing what the characters see) areevident in the original film, but here, the children haveadapted them (see Figures 3 and 4). They haverecognised that this shot shows both the characterand their object of desire and also a degree ofpoignancy in terms of distance. They then used thisstructure but substituted different elements.

All the storyboards previously mentioned were drawnby children for whom English is an additional



language. This drawn mode enabled the children to ar-ticulate their rich understandings of narrative and theirteacher to value them. Barrs (2000) describes the wayin which children use aspects of the style and form oftexts to help them in their story writing. Equally, here,the children were drawing on the particular semioticaffordances of the film text. In this case, the childrenmoved from being the audience to being the maker oftext and by doing so used the text as a scaffold of ideas.

Practical production

Following the analysis activities, the children under-took creative work, including the production of a shortfilm entitled ‘Who’s at the door?’, a trailer, their ownscary short film, and promotion materials. Interest-ingly, in the children’s initial productions, they aban-doned to a large extent the media language they hadbeen exploring, reverting to simple shots and needingconsiderable support to recognise the way in whichthe filming process enabled them to film one sequenceand then stop before filming a second. Furthermore,such was the excitement generated by film-makingthat the children became immersed in socio-dramaticplay, at times even forgetting that they were film-making.This first experience of film-making is commonly anopportunity simply to learn some technical skills, so itwas difficult to judge the extent to which the childrencould draw on their emerging understanding of filmlanguage in this context.

In the children’s second productions, the camera workbecame more purposeful and reflected more of theemerging confidence in using the semiotic tools gainedfrom undertaking the storyboard activities. The chil-dren also took the decision to include visual represen-tations of their ‘monsters’, something which they wereencouraged by the staff to avoid in their first attempton the basis that the monster that the audience hasto imagine is more scary than one they can see. Greatattention was paid to the costume of the monster, thesetting, the positioning of the goodies in relation tothe baddies and the bodily gestures of the characters.Although some of the decisions did not entirely translatein their films, their intention could be observed in theirprocess of production. Interestingly, the children werestill in a socio-dramatic play mode when they createdtheir settings, using available items from school: forexample, chairs were put together to create a bed. Thisdid not seem to concern the children at all but in theirfinal films, these props worked less well for the viewer.This became noticeable to the children when theywatched their films with an audience and began to seetheir texts from the audience’s perspective.

In terms of scary elements, the children filmed foot-steps, doors opening and screaming characters in closeup. They also began to want to attempt shots thatexceeded their technical knowledge: for example, Lee’sgroup wanted to know how to create the illusion of a

Figure 3: The rabbit is depicted here desiring the big wheeland freedom

Figure 2: Maya’s storyboard image based on the film LuckyDip

Figure 4: Sadia’s little girl desires the rabbit and friendship



ghost walking through a door. This group was expli-citly articulating an idea they had seen and wanted torecreate. By contrast, Sadia, Maya and Jade intuitivelyused an effective tilt shot, moving from a low to highangle revealing the ‘monster’ looking down at the vic-tim’s body through a glass door panel. In the sharingand reflecting activity, the girls could not rememberhow they came to decide on this shot. However, whenthey were editing and watching back with peers, theyrecognised how effective it was. The process ofreflecting on their choices led the teacher to point outthe type of shot they had used, linking it to the workon Batman they had undertaken. After this dialogue,the girls could more explicitly discuss why their audi-ence had ‘most liked’ that shot and why it was particu-larly dramatic.

Conclusion

The data from this action research project stronglysuggest that children have rich repertoires of under-standing of media language and narrative that theycan, if given the appropriate space and encourage-ment, apply to new texts and their own text produc-tions. There is thus a strong connection betweenconceptual understanding and cultural experience. AsWells (2007) argues, immersion, that is to say readingof texts, does not in itself facilitate this process, andthere is an important role for teachers to create spacesin which children can draw on their cultural experi-ences to formulate the systematic generalisationswhich lead to further conceptual understandings.

In terms of implications for pedagogy, there are someuseful lessons to be learned. The primary teacher’sdecision to focus on scary stories across a range ofmedia forms was a key decision which ensured thatno one media form was privileged and that childrencould draw holistically on their experiences of popularculture texts in many forms. This enabled the childrento relate to tasks such as organising their existingknowledge into given categories. As the data alsodemonstrate, a recursive and staged attention to themeanings suggested by different modes was especiallyeffective in enabling children to be precise about filmlanguage. This was further augmented by the use ofprobing questions that prompted the children to payattention to meaning and effect. Far from blandlyvaluing the children’s ideas on the basis of popularculture, the teacher took an interrogatory role, whichpushed the children to consider meaning and intentiondirectly. By asking “Why? What does it mean? Whyhas the film-maker chosen this shot or sound?”, thechildren were not simply observing film language butmore importantly, drawing on their personal responsesto consider the range of possible meanings of a text.

The multimodal approach adopted, which focusedattention on the meaning created in the differentmodes, also extended the development of children’s

understandings into an organisational structure: theelements texts are composed of, their separate mean-ing and their combined meaning. This appeared tomake visible some of the more elusive aspects of mov-ing image texts, especially where the children weregiven opportunities for extensive repeat viewingsand also where they were invited to express ordevelop their ideas in a range of forms (spoken, written,drawn and film production). These pedagogic strategiesenabled children with diverse experiences of text toenter into a shared dialogue with some very productiveresults.

The activities promoted inclusion and valued the chil-dren’s cultural capital with greater equity than a focuson print texts alone might allow. In the week of focus-ing on film, Joe was able to participate and was moti-vated to do so, not because he particularly enjoyedscary films (games were his passion) but because hehad knowledge that could contribute to the dialogue.Usually, Joe’s talk was deemed inappropriate, but here,it was of great significance to one group’s emergingunderstandings of point of view and distance in film-making. Joe was therefore motivated because he hadsomething relevant to say, and he was intellectuallychallenged by his emerging understanding of a set ofsemiotic tools (gestures and shot composition). Whatis more, his understanding also prompted others topay attention to the particular set of signs he hadhighlighted. In this group, the hierarchy of learnersshifted from the perception of Joe as difficult to workwith and off-task to someone with expertise. Hisexpertise was taken seriously because it allowed theothers in the group to connect with their own viewingexperiences. In articulating what he observed, he madeexplicit an understanding he could then potentially usein another context.

The idea that children have assets (Robinson andMackey, 2006), funds of knowledge (Gonzalez et al.,2005) or narrative repertoires (Robinson, 1997) is notnew. However, it is important to fully understand theimplications of ensuring that connecting with theseexperiences is not merely a cosmetic case of usingpopular culture to persuade children to engage withliteracy. It is fundamental that children can draw ontheir existing experiences emerging from their livedcultures, in order to progress to the development of‘scientific’ concepts in their formal learning. The criti-cal role of pedagogy and popular culture in thisprocess is evident. When we consider how centralchildren’s existing understandings are to progression,it becomes a pedagogic imperative to enable them toconnect with and interrogate their experiences ofpopular culture and use a range of semiotic modes intheir analysis and production of texts.

Note1. From the BFI resource ‘Starting stories: short films for five

to eleven year olds’.



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CONTACT THE AUTHORBecky Parry, School of Education, The Universityof Leeds, Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK.e-mail: [email protected]



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Popular culture, participation and progression in the literacy classroom