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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Roundtable Abstract: Raising 21st century kids means contending with a generation consumed by screens, just as being a media scholar means consistently reacclimatizing to changing media forms, technologies, and delivery systems. Doing both means a constant negotiation of work and home. This workshop explores the complex dance of work-life balance as it relates to children, gender, media literacy, and media consumption at a time when the pandemic has only compounded the ways academic parents negotiate kids’ mediated lives, as digital devices became primary sources for kids’ entertainment, human connections, and learned socialization. How do we survive this and make good humans?
“Knowledge We Cannot Use” – Kyra Hunting
The week of my son’s second birthday our state began to go into COVID-19 lockdown. For weeks he’d ask “swim class?”, pulling trunks from his dresser, only to be disappointed; until a new question replaced it “can I watch tv?” As a scholar focused on children’s media I often taught about the potential and limitation of “screen-time” but as screens became a much more central part of my son’s life; what I knew and what I did moved further apart. For this panel, I will explore the limitations of how knowledge can be used as both a scholar and as a parent. On the one hand, I found myself in conflict between what I taught, what I did at home and parenting guilt. On the other, I was submerged in a kind of unusable experiment. Observing my child’s dramatic increase in screen time during a period characterized by rapid development gave me insight into how his screen use was building and shaping his imagination and storytelling abilities. Contrary to some effects studies claiming that screens limit imagination, I instead observed a growing ability to tell stories that built on his screen experiences. This kind of accidental ethnography produced unusable knowledge of a different sort. Instead of just having scholarly knowledge I couldn’t operationalize in my day to day parenting, I also had new insight on my field that escaped the bounds of “evidence”. At the nexus of theory, practice and motherhood I explore how COVID-19 reframed my understanding of knowledge.
"Superpowers and Kryptonite: Pandemic Parenting, Media, and the Challenges of Neuro-divergence" - Kelly Kessler
2020 brought a string of seemingly unanswerable questions. How do I teach with nine-year-old twins doing third grade in the next room? Did I really bruise my tailbone from excessive Zoom meetings? And more significantly, “How do we negotiate this flood of online interaction and neuro-divergent twins?” This was a whirlwind. For neuro-divergent kids who struggle with emotion-regulation, social interactions, and “reading the room,” the pandemic brought special challenges. I know my kids’ anxiety and ADHD fostered a hypermediated emotional rollercoaster. Non-stop mediation resulted in both workarounds and increased pitfalls related to their everyday struggles. Shuttered away from anxiety-producing “real” people, our daughter temporarily shed her social anxiety and became her best authoritative and self-possessed self when powering through Roblox obbies and leading boys through her newest Piggy “hack.” (But she also Googled angel dust, so there’s that.) Her ADHD twin found an unexpected sweet spot within virtual learning, stealthily teaching himself to write code while listening to science class; his teacher was none the wiser and he thrived academically. (But the awkward rhythm of video-chat-accompanied gaming made him cry a lot, to the dismay of his butch bros.) As we tiptoe into a new phase, we now try to wrap our heads around the fissures between what we teach, what professionals tell us to do, and what we’ve watched in our own kids. As parents first and scholars second, what do we want to keep from this traumatizing experience and what undesirable pitfalls might those choices create?
"Rethinking Media Literacy as a Pandemic Parent" - Jonathan Nichols-Pethick
Experiencing lock-down with teenagers whose only regular interactions with other kids took place online, accelerated a crisis in my thinking: what to do when the philosophical grounding of your intellectual training and work comes into contact with the realities of parenting in a media saturated world? How do you balance your deep understanding of the complexities and pleasures of media consumption with concerns that your kids’ time on Tik Tok or any number of Discord servers may be leaving them vulnerable to bad actors and questionable content, some of which they themselves are creating?
Many argue that this is why media literacy is so important. But what do we really mean when we talk about media literacy: discourses of access, analysis, evaluation, creation, or participation? In media literacy terms, creation and participation often emerge as positive end-points of a learning process that begins with access, analysis, and evaluation. But should we move creation and participation closer to the front of the equation, prioritizing and interactively interrogating how kids’ interactions on social media platforms foreground the fluidity of identity and the processes of representation in both healthy and dangerous ways. If, as Stuart Hall argues, representation is NOT the re-presentation of something out there, but rather part of an ongoing (and never complete) constitution of that thing or person in discourse, should we worry less about the exponential growth of platforms and content and focus more on how our kids interactively and productively navigate identity and representations across platforms?
“Please, Let the Algorithms Help Us”: Searching for High Quality Science Apps for Young Children Pre- & Post- COVID - Kathleen A. Paciga & Elizabeth Davis-Berg
The response six months before the pandemic would’ve been very different than today’s. Pre-pandemic we’d have said “we need to provide kids with excellent content and solid conversations about it” to make good humans. Today we say, “please, let the algorithms help us.”
In the time before COVID, we researched quality science apps for children 5-7 years, examined the content, and tested the apps with children. Drawing on curated lists of apps and the top apps in the stores, we found 154 to review. Many were no longer available, or had content that was scientifically inaccurate or poorly sourced.
Thirty-seven available apps contained marine science content. We selected one of the four highly-rated apps, Coral Reef, to test with girl scouts. We found that the kids liked the apps, learned new science words and concepts, and played the app outside of the lesson. Yet Coral Reef lost its appeal, and quickly, when COVID hit. It lacked a social dimension, and new content was not coming into the identified Coral Reef, or the other apps in our sample regularly (features that keeps kids interested).
We knew content mattered. We knew we wanted our children to pursue their interests in science, but the approach pre-pandemic was labor-intensive from a parenting perspective—research, test, co-view/co-create/co-play. Letting the algorithm help is more passive parenting, but the interest-driven content in trusted content providers such as Epic! Digital Library, Netflix, or even a carefully maintained YouTube (gasp!) algorithm send acceptable content our way with relatively little frontloading work for the parent. The work now comes in form of teaching kids about algorithms and digital safety.
"Learning About Learning: A Mom Remote Teaches, A Son Remote Learns" - Sharon M. Ross
The various headlines said it all: “The Virus Moved Female Faculty to the Brink,” “Remote Learning Takes a Toll on Students’ Mental Health,” “Make Soda Bread and Create Something Called a Pod.” (OK, I made up that last one.)
My son was in 6th grade when COVID flipped over his learning and my teaching. In the before times a primary challenge for me was seeking balance with his use of media. For myself, a primary challenge had been work-life balance. Across 7th grade, “work-life balance” and “screen time” lost all meaning. I watched as my son struggled to create boundaries around media and screens while my own students did the same. He watched as I struggled to connect with my students across zoom and teach them about media while they were immersed in it. Together we did what so many women in academia are urged to never do--fuse work, school, and family. My son became a part of my teaching, “visiting” classes, starring in video lectures. He helped me prepare lessons and we discussed what his teachers were dealing with. We also discussed the ways in which teaching and learning and living and media use intersect—and the ways in which “Mom’s job” seeks to erase those connections for women especially. Through the erasure of boundaries that really never existed, we were able to examine feminist and anti-racist issues that impact not just teaching or learning, but living.
"Ambiguous Pleasures and Anxieties: Parenting, Bonding, and Cross-Generational Binge-Watching During the Pandemic" - Avi Santo
I have twins. One identifies as a girl, the other as non-binary. They are mixed-race African American and Jewish-Caucasian. They just turned eleven. When the pandemic forced schools to close, they were two-thirds of the way through grade 4. They spent nearly all of grade 5 at home attending a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous classes and watching A LOT of YouTube and TV. This year, they returned in-person to begin middle-school. As a media scholar who studies children’s media and material culture, I have long held the position that media is not harmful to children unless unsupervised or used disproportionately as compensation for other activities. Media can be a parenting tool for helping kids expand their curiosity, knowledge, critical and forensic skills. These past 18 months have challenged those beliefs as unsupervised screen time expanded exponentially. Yet, the pandemic also created opportunities to bond with my kids over television and to consider how TV could serve as a productive if problematic resource for discussing cultural attitudes, competencies, and values pre-and-post-COVID, particularly about performing and policing gender and race. In this roundtable, I discuss the ambiguous pleasures and anxieties I felt over binge watching Buffy, Angel, Doctor Who and iZombie with my children during the pandemic as bonding experience, conversation starter, and as sanctioned indoctrination into the excesses of cult TV fandom and consumer culture. A question I wrestle with: Would it have been any different if not for the Pandemic?
Cradle to the Classroom: Media Scholars Raising Media Saturated Kids During the Pandemic
Roundtable Abstract: Raising 21st century kids means contending with a generation consumed by screens, just as being a media scholar means consistently reacclimatizing to changing media forms, technologies, and delivery systems. Doing both means a constant negotiation of work and home. This workshop explores the complex dance of work-life balance as it relates to children, gender, media literacy, and media consumption at a time when the pandemic has only compounded the ways academic parents negotiate kids’ mediated lives, as digital devices became primary sources for kids’ entertainment, human connections, and learned socialization. How do we survive this and make good humans?
“Knowledge We Cannot Use” – Kyra Hunting
The week of my son’s second birthday our state began to go into COVID-19 lockdown. For weeks he’d ask “swim class?”, pulling trunks from his dresser, only to be disappointed; until a new question replaced it “can I watch tv?” As a scholar focused on children’s media I often taught about the potential and limitation of “screen-time” but as screens became a much more central part of my son’s life; what I knew and what I did moved further apart. For this panel, I will explore the limitations of how knowledge can be used as both a scholar and as a parent. On the one hand, I found myself in conflict between what I taught, what I did at home and parenting guilt. On the other, I was submerged in a kind of unusable experiment. Observing my child’s dramatic increase in screen time during a period characterized by rapid development gave me insight into how his screen use was building and shaping his imagination and storytelling abilities. Contrary to some effects studies claiming that screens limit imagination, I instead observed a growing ability to tell stories that built on his screen experiences. This kind of accidental ethnography produced unusable knowledge of a different sort. Instead of just having scholarly knowledge I couldn’t operationalize in my day to day parenting, I also had new insight on my field that escaped the bounds of “evidence”. At the nexus of theory, practice and motherhood I explore how COVID-19 reframed my understanding of knowledge.
"Superpowers and Kryptonite: Pandemic Parenting, Media, and the Challenges of Neuro-divergence" - Kelly Kessler
2020 brought a string of seemingly unanswerable questions. How do I teach with nine-year-old twins doing third grade in the next room? Did I really bruise my tailbone from excessive Zoom meetings? And more significantly, “How do we negotiate this flood of online interaction and neuro-divergent twins?” This was a whirlwind. For neuro-divergent kids who struggle with emotion-regulation, social interactions, and “reading the room,” the pandemic brought special challenges. I know my kids’ anxiety and ADHD fostered a hypermediated emotional rollercoaster. Non-stop mediation resulted in both workarounds and increased pitfalls related to their everyday struggles. Shuttered away from anxiety-producing “real” people, our daughter temporarily shed her social anxiety and became her best authoritative and self-possessed self when powering through Roblox obbies and leading boys through her newest Piggy “hack.” (But she also Googled angel dust, so there’s that.) Her ADHD twin found an unexpected sweet spot within virtual learning, stealthily teaching himself to write code while listening to science class; his teacher was none the wiser and he thrived academically. (But the awkward rhythm of video-chat-accompanied gaming made him cry a lot, to the dismay of his butch bros.) As we tiptoe into a new phase, we now try to wrap our heads around the fissures between what we teach, what professionals tell us to do, and what we’ve watched in our own kids. As parents first and scholars second, what do we want to keep from this traumatizing experience and what undesirable pitfalls might those choices create?
"Rethinking Media Literacy as a Pandemic Parent" - Jonathan Nichols-Pethick
Experiencing lock-down with teenagers whose only regular interactions with other kids took place online, accelerated a crisis in my thinking: what to do when the philosophical grounding of your intellectual training and work comes into contact with the realities of parenting in a media saturated world? How do you balance your deep understanding of the complexities and pleasures of media consumption with concerns that your kids’ time on Tik Tok or any number of Discord servers may be leaving them vulnerable to bad actors and questionable content, some of which they themselves are creating?
Many argue that this is why media literacy is so important. But what do we really mean when we talk about media literacy: discourses of access, analysis, evaluation, creation, or participation? In media literacy terms, creation and participation often emerge as positive end-points of a learning process that begins with access, analysis, and evaluation. But should we move creation and participation closer to the front of the equation, prioritizing and interactively interrogating how kids’ interactions on social media platforms foreground the fluidity of identity and the processes of representation in both healthy and dangerous ways. If, as Stuart Hall argues, representation is NOT the re-presentation of something out there, but rather part of an ongoing (and never complete) constitution of that thing or person in discourse, should we worry less about the exponential growth of platforms and content and focus more on how our kids interactively and productively navigate identity and representations across platforms?
“Please, Let the Algorithms Help Us”: Searching for High Quality Science Apps for Young Children Pre- & Post- COVID - Kathleen A. Paciga & Elizabeth Davis-Berg
The response six months before the pandemic would’ve been very different than today’s. Pre-pandemic we’d have said “we need to provide kids with excellent content and solid conversations about it” to make good humans. Today we say, “please, let the algorithms help us.”
In the time before COVID, we researched quality science apps for children 5-7 years, examined the content, and tested the apps with children. Drawing on curated lists of apps and the top apps in the stores, we found 154 to review. Many were no longer available, or had content that was scientifically inaccurate or poorly sourced.
Thirty-seven available apps contained marine science content. We selected one of the four highly-rated apps, Coral Reef, to test with girl scouts. We found that the kids liked the apps, learned new science words and concepts, and played the app outside of the lesson. Yet Coral Reef lost its appeal, and quickly, when COVID hit. It lacked a social dimension, and new content was not coming into the identified Coral Reef, or the other apps in our sample regularly (features that keeps kids interested).
We knew content mattered. We knew we wanted our children to pursue their interests in science, but the approach pre-pandemic was labor-intensive from a parenting perspective—research, test, co-view/co-create/co-play. Letting the algorithm help is more passive parenting, but the interest-driven content in trusted content providers such as Epic! Digital Library, Netflix, or even a carefully maintained YouTube (gasp!) algorithm send acceptable content our way with relatively little frontloading work for the parent. The work now comes in form of teaching kids about algorithms and digital safety.
"Learning About Learning: A Mom Remote Teaches, A Son Remote Learns" - Sharon M. Ross
The various headlines said it all: “The Virus Moved Female Faculty to the Brink,” “Remote Learning Takes a Toll on Students’ Mental Health,” “Make Soda Bread and Create Something Called a Pod.” (OK, I made up that last one.)
My son was in 6th grade when COVID flipped over his learning and my teaching. In the before times a primary challenge for me was seeking balance with his use of media. For myself, a primary challenge had been work-life balance. Across 7th grade, “work-life balance” and “screen time” lost all meaning. I watched as my son struggled to create boundaries around media and screens while my own students did the same. He watched as I struggled to connect with my students across zoom and teach them about media while they were immersed in it. Together we did what so many women in academia are urged to never do--fuse work, school, and family. My son became a part of my teaching, “visiting” classes, starring in video lectures. He helped me prepare lessons and we discussed what his teachers were dealing with. We also discussed the ways in which teaching and learning and living and media use intersect—and the ways in which “Mom’s job” seeks to erase those connections for women especially. Through the erasure of boundaries that really never existed, we were able to examine feminist and anti-racist issues that impact not just teaching or learning, but living.
"Ambiguous Pleasures and Anxieties: Parenting, Bonding, and Cross-Generational Binge-Watching During the Pandemic" - Avi Santo
I have twins. One identifies as a girl, the other as non-binary. They are mixed-race African American and Jewish-Caucasian. They just turned eleven. When the pandemic forced schools to close, they were two-thirds of the way through grade 4. They spent nearly all of grade 5 at home attending a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous classes and watching A LOT of YouTube and TV. This year, they returned in-person to begin middle-school. As a media scholar who studies children’s media and material culture, I have long held the position that media is not harmful to children unless unsupervised or used disproportionately as compensation for other activities. Media can be a parenting tool for helping kids expand their curiosity, knowledge, critical and forensic skills. These past 18 months have challenged those beliefs as unsupervised screen time expanded exponentially. Yet, the pandemic also created opportunities to bond with my kids over television and to consider how TV could serve as a productive if problematic resource for discussing cultural attitudes, competencies, and values pre-and-post-COVID, particularly about performing and policing gender and race. In this roundtable, I discuss the ambiguous pleasures and anxieties I felt over binge watching Buffy, Angel, Doctor Who and iZombie with my children during the pandemic as bonding experience, conversation starter, and as sanctioned indoctrination into the excesses of cult TV fandom and consumer culture. A question I wrestle with: Would it have been any different if not for the Pandemic?
Bio
Dr. Elizabeth Davis-Berg is a Professor of Biology in the Science and Mathematics department and the Faculty Fellow for the Columbia Core at Columbia College Chicago. She is the Past-President of the American Microscopical Society. Beth researches biodiversity, snails, and innovative technology use in the classroom. She has published on using Pokémon Go to teach ecology and is currently researching how girls use science apps to learn.
Kyra Hunting is an Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on children’s entertainment media, gender, the industry and fandom. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of publications including Journal of Popular Communication, Feminist Media Studies, and Critical Studies in Media Communication as well as anthologies including Children’s Toys and Culture and Children and Media Worldwide in a Time of Pandemic.
Kelly Kessler is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at DePaul University. She is the author of Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical: Music, Masculinity and Mayhem (Palgrave, 2010) and Broadway in the Box: Television's Lasting Love Affair with the Musical (Oxford, 2020). Her scholarship can also be found in works such as Studies in Musical Theatre, The Journal of E-Media Studies, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Television and New Media. Kessler comes to studies of media literacy via the intersection of her media studies background, a past certification in secondary education, and parenting twins.
Kathleen A. Paciga is an Associate Professor of Education in the department of Humanities, History, and Social Sciences at Columbia College Chicago. Katie’s work examines the ways in which media, in all of its diverse forms, are integrated into children’s literate lives as well as the ways in which these affect the ways children learn and grown ups teach. Contact: kpaciga@colum.edu or @kpaciga
Jonathan Nichols-Pethick is a professor of media studies in the Department of Communication and Theatre at DePauw University. He serves as the Director of the Media Fellows program. His research interests include media history, media institutions, and media literacy initiatives. Nichols-Pethick is the author of TV Cops: The Contemporary American Television Police Drama (Routledge 2012) as well as several essays on contemporary television.
Dr. Sharon Marie Ross is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Television Arts at Columbia College Chicago; she teaches critical media studies and is the author of Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet and co-editor of Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom. Dr. Ross has a BA in Psychology from Cleveland State University, a Master's degree in Women's Studies from Ohio State University, and a PhD in Radio-TV-Film from the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently writing a book about teens in 1980s and early 1990s TV.
Avi Santo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication & Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Selling the Silver Bullet: The Lone Ranger and Transmedia Brand Licensing (University of Texas Press, 2015) and the co-editor of Making Media Work: Cultures of Management in the Entertainment Industries (NTU Press, 2014). His resarch focuses on the extension of media franchises into children's lives through licensing and branded merchandise. He is father to Estelle and Hedy, who just turned eleven.