Animation and Action Texts in Children’s Play and Filmmaking

• In Event: Beyond Words: Action and Animation in Young Children’s Reading, Writing, and Playing

Abstract

“Children’s early media experiences are an important part of their introduction to cultures: the shared ways of thinking and telling that bind us together…[these experiences also reveal] what the children value and what they are good at.” (Bazalgette, 2010, p. 7).Modern childhoods are awash in media toy franchises (e.g., Disney Princesses, Batman, Dora the Explorer, Toy Story 3); however children most often engage in listening, viewing, reading, or playing with media products that adults have designed for them. This research examines play and film-making in preschool classrooms where children produce their own multimedia: What do young children’s use of animation in action texts reveal about their understanding of media and collaborative meaning-making in the context of peer cultures?

This study combines sociolinguistic (Scollon, 2001) theories of practice (Bourdieu, 1977) and mediation (Vygotsky, 1935/1978) with a strength orientation to children’s media production (Buckingham, 2003) to appreciate the playful, inventive, and collaborative nature of action texts. Research in media and literacy studies (deBlock & Buckingham, 2010; Author 3 & Lewis, 2010) suggest productive K-12 curricula helps children critically view as well as create media texts and acknowledges the considerable knowledge about media that children bring from their experiences as fans and viewers.

Four teachers and approximately 50 3- to 5-year-old children participated in the study. Ethnographic methods were used to gather data in two preschool classrooms during twice a week visit for one semester; data sources included videotapes of play and film-making activities and photographs of teachers’ charts and scripts as well as children’s drawings and films. Critical multimodal analysis (Norris, 2004; Scollon, 2001; Author3, 2011) filtered activity to identify key understandings about the modes of animation and to track peer mediation that enabled collaborative and cohesive meanings in fluid play and action texts.
Children’s expertise in action-based play texts is rooted in an orientation to meaning that follows conventions of time-based texts (film, television, video games, virtual worlds) of popular media and animation, rather than conventions of page-based texts (books, newspapers, web pages, posters) of schooling. In this view, children’s focus is not on mastering technology but on meaning created through multimodal interaction: juxtaposition of subjects within a shot, transitions between shots, interactions of soundtracks and sound effects, etc. Children need opportunities for exploration of film technologies, peer mediation that helps children use media for their own purposes, and access to tools that mean differently than page-based formats.

Because most media production education has targeted older children and youth, one of the challenges in this work is to find tools and, importantly, instructional goals that fit the abilities and strengths of young children. Buttons and screens on camera must be large enough on equipment that is small enough for preschoolers’ fingers. Similarly, a child-produced film must be short enough and fluid enough to match young children’s concepts of storytelling. With these strengths in mind, early literacy education expands beyond words and pencils to include Toy Story 3 play sets or Dora dolls, tripods, smartphones, video cameras, and laptops.

Author

• Karen E. Wohlwend, Indiana University - Bloomington