Television and Child Literacy

Television Children

Childhood Education and Media Literacy

Media technology is a part of our everyday lives even from a very young age. This is true for many children who are entering elementary school today. These children are likely to already be familiar with such media as television and the internet, which have both recreational and educational merits as the child grows up. This early-aged familiarity is proving to be a great opportunity for educators to use the interests which are already existing in young students. By using such technology-based ways of educating such as the use of television to help develop literacy, teachers may be better able to work with a diversity of student needs. Using these technology-based media also have some risks for the development of student literacy. These relate to the formation of symbolic understanding as a result of media exposure. This is explored in greater detail later in this essay. In general, the discussion argues that television, the internet and other technology-based media used by children regularly for recreation are not only a great opportunity for educators, but should be seen as a positive way to train literacy.

The idea of individual learning needs in particular may help our focus, with research showing that one of the main effects of media to education of elementary school aged students is its ability to administer an extremely wide variety of content and ways of testing reading abilities. Therefore, the television, the computer and such interactive hybrids as webtv offer a new chance to engage each student one-on-one in a mode of instruction or testing, helping to teach literacy with a greater cultural sensitivity in our schools. Therefore, this essay finds that the use of new technologies in the classroom will help to improve the ability of teachers to deal with individual needs the come from gender, ethnicity and learning differences. (Cesarone, 1)

To this point, today, television has increasingly come to offer different kinds of programming that appeal to the educational and developmental needs of child viewers. This shows a major shift in programming over several decades, with the Morrow (2006) text giving particular insight into the evolution of such programming. Morrow shows how television as a tool has come more over time to benefit the needs of younger viewers. In his history of the early start of the famous children's show, Sesame Street, Morrow gives a useful background to the beginning of a new view on children's programming. He describes a new constructive way of using this medium where children are concerned, telling that there was a growing ageement amongst its critics that "children's television did not primarily nurture its viewers' emotional and intellectual growth. Instead, it served the needs of sponsoring advertisers . . .[and] that children, particularly the youngest viewers, did not understand the purpose of sales messages, could not evaluate their claims, and could not distinguish them from the programs." (Morrow, 121)

This was a major conflict in terms of television's social responsibility. Concerns were voiced in both sociological and educational arguments suggesting that exposure to television was negative to the intellectual and psychological development of children. The Morrow text essentially provides a discussion on the moment in history when television programming began to respond to this drawback. That is to say that researchers began to recognize with the popularity of Sesame Street that it was not the medium of television but its content that was causing it fall short of its potential to educate. Hobbs (2007) makes the argument that today, that there is a value both in content and in training young learners to differentiate between different types of content such as programming, news, sports and commercials. This, Hobbs say, is called media literacy and, as technology increasingly enters every aspect of our lives, is an important part of developing the reasoning tools needed to succeed in education, society and emotional development. (Hobbs, 4) Media literacy helps the child to understand the explicit and implied messages of content as well as the medium in question. These are skills which then become important in strategies of reading.