Flickr: Jessica Merz

I must confess, I’d never given much thought to the origin of sandboxes. I played in them, my kids play in them, and so I just assumed that children have been building crumbling castles and holes to China since time immemorial. After reading Jordan Shapiro’s The New Childhood: Raising Kids To Thrive in a Connected World, I now have a newfound appreciation for the history and social impact of the playground mainstay.

Originally called sand-piles, sandboxes debuted in German public parks in the 1850s as part of the kindergarten movement, and hit US shores about 40 years later. The idea of devoting a space to free and natural play was a tough sell for parents who thought of their kids as junior laborers. “It represented radical economic, social, and cultural change,” writes Shapiro. Anxious parents then didn’t see that sandbox play was a type of preparation for the industrial economy, much like parents today struggle to validate digital play. According to Shapiro, our kids are not withdrawing into their screens, but extending into the world. The grains of sand have become pixels and when kids build Minecraft castles with a friend Skyped-in from China, they’re prepping for participation in a connected global economy. Our job as parents, then, is not to prohibit, but to guide and support them on their journey.

The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World by Jordan Shapiro

If your parental screen anxieties are not completely allayed, don’t worry: the sandbox backstory is just start. Shapiro teaches humanities at Temple University, and he lectures, writes, and advises globally on an extensive array of topics. And, like our favorite professors, he is erudite, but always accessible and engaging. He curates a menagerie of pastimes and rituals that we associate with timeless family values and exposes them as products of recent technology, media, and socio-economic forces. Family dinner? An invention of the Victorians. Handwriting? Most people couldn’t write for most of history. He makes his case for the links between technology, social change, and family values by plucking from Greek philosophy, literature, video games, media theory, finger painting, word origins, developmental theories of play, fairytale scholarship, and the history of photography. The New Childhood converges a ranging network of interesting historical curiosities and psycho-social theories to advance its thesis: rather than restrain kids with outdated practices, parents are invited to adjust and meet the demands of the Digital Age.

Each chapter delves into a different facet of childhood, including playtime, bedtime stories, family life, puberty, and school. A common thread that emerges is that connected culture erodes the boundaries that have traditionally separated the public from the private, global from local, home from work, and school from play. The collapse of these divisions means that, socially and culturally, the lines are being redrawn and we are left to figure out how to best orient our kids in unfamiliar territory. New protocols, rituals, and etiquettes must be formulated to help the next generation prosper in an economic reality that promises to be substantially different from what we are used to.

But what does this mean in practical terms?

Shapiro urges that we take some of the sacred cows of family life out to pasture: “The family traditions that we take for granted exist to cultivate children into well-adjusted adults who can easily participate in a specific kind of society. These customs are neither sacred nor essential to the human experience. It’s all just fashion; and fashion changes over time.” When the historical lens widens, social customs and practices are exposed as provisional, whether it’s the way we parcel time in schools or how children play. What remains unchanged, however, is the family’s role as a secure foundation which Shapiro symbolically connects to the hearth: “The hearth is what provides us with a sense of stability. It anchors us to something greater than the individual self. It provides a thread that roots us to a shared past.”

The book advocates for parents to “coview”, or make time to share and discuss media with kids —a core practice for both media and digital literacy. “Parents need to introduce their children to digital social spaces early and with clear intention,” he writes. “Expose them to online behaviour that aligns with your values. Do it sooner rather than later. Do it when they are young and still enjoy interacting with adults. Connect them to safe communities that model mature etiquette.” Even spending time together on separate devices is a kind of parallel play that involves a subtle form of socialization.

Shapiro’s writing itself embodies the hybridization characteristic of modern life. His book is an information network that spans history and the globe, but it is also rooted in anecdotes about the intimacies of his own family life. The wellspring of his position is largely nourished by the struggles and successes he’s experienced while striving to strike a healthy approach to technology with his preteen sons. He observes that his kids’ digital consumption is characterized by impermanence, and that “kids are rarely exposed to durable symbols, artifacts, or stories.” Whatever our emerging family rituals look like, they should aim to not only cultivate appropriate values, but also to provide a centering and stable haven from which kids can venture into the virtual yonder.

Despite the title, what The New Childhood really calls for is a new parent or, more precisely, new parenting. It’s a primer for the unfamiliar landscape of the connected world, and it invites us to resist our technophobic urges and to look at our life with fresh eyes, unfettered by the often irrelevant expectations of our immediate past. It not only signals an irreversible shift in family dynamics, but also lets the reader into the secret histories of everyday objects and rituals. Whether you agree with all of Shapiro’s views or not, The New Childhood is an entertaining read that will leave you a better informed parent and a more knowledgeable human being.

Paul Darvasi is an educator, writer, speaker, and game designer whose work looks at the intersection of games, culture and learning. He teaches English and media studies in Toronto, Canada and is a doctoral candidate at York University. His research explores how commercial video games can be used as texts for critical analysis by adolescents. He has designed pervasive games that include The Ward Game, based on Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Blind Protocol, a cyber warfare simulation that instructs on online security, privacy and surveillance. Paul has worked with the US Department of Education, UNESCO, foundry10, Consumers International, iThrive, and Connected Camps and has participated in several international research projects. He recently wrote a working paper for UNESCO on how commercial video games can be used for peace education and conflict resolution. Paul’s work has been featured on PBS, NPR, CBC, the Huffington Post, Polygon, Killscreen, Gamasutra, Sterne, Endgadget, Edutopia, and MindShift.

Do you use immersive media like AR or VR with students in 1st through 8th grade? Are you interested, but haven’t been able to try it out yet? Or are these technologies not for you? The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop would like to know more about teachers’ decisions whether or not and how to use immersive media with their students. Please take this survey—and share it with all the teachers you know—to help us gain a better understanding of immersive media’s role in the classroom. The survey should take about 15 minutes to complete, and respondents have a chance to win an Amazon $25 gift card!

We’re also looking for a few teachers to interview for an upcoming publication, so if you DO use immersive media with students, please complete this brief form, and we will be in touch!

Immersive Media and the Classroom Survey

Interview Recruiting: Teaching With Immersive Media

The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World by Jordan Shapiro

So many of today’s parents complain that their children spend too much time staring at “addictive screens.” According to the grownups, kids never want to do anything else and therefore, they’re losing out on the real joy of childhood. But the statistics tell a different story. On average, today’s kids get roughly the same amount of screen time as their parents did. The only difference is the kind of screen. The previous generation watched cartoons on the television. Now, kids spend most of their time on connected mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

The distinction is important because it reveals the true nature of parental anxiety. Grownups are disoriented because, at first glance, today’s screen media seems personal and private. When kids are watching YouTube videos or playing video games, it feels like the devices are pulling them away from the family and into an isolated cocoon. But also, in a paradoxical twist, the screens function like portals which deliver kids out of the house, beyond the perfect picket fence, and into a vast public dystopian virtual reality. With digital devices, children isolate themselves to interact with others. They are always alone but also very much together. Digital play detaches them from their immediate surroundings but connects them to faraway places. The relationship between public and private becomes confused. Hence, parents are also confused. They don’t know whether their kids are too detached or too exposed. All they know for sure is that traditional home-life feels out of order.

This anxiety is understandable. But remember that new technologies will always beget new routines.

Consider that images and definitions of family are always changing. The one with which we’re most familiar—with its dinners, sofas, barbecues, and summer vacations—is a unique feature of the Industrial Age. Likewise, the modern home—with its private bedrooms, sprawling kitchens, and wall-mounted flat-screen TVs—is just a tool which was designed to facilitate the routines and habits of the perfect 20th century family.

Still, there is something about home and family that is essential, that transcends the vicissitudes of time. I call it the “hearth,” a universal element of the human experience which was once represented by the Greek god, Hestia, and her Roman counterpart, Vesta. The hearth is what provides us with a sense of stability. It anchors us to something greater than the individual self. It provides a thread which roots us to a shared past.

If the rooms in our houses are like the pulpits and pews on which we perform Industrial Age rituals that honor the hearth, then the family portraits, heirlooms and cherished objects that we display on our mantels are just emblems and talismans—symbolic artifacts which remind us of family’s importance. These are not the things which constitute family values, but rather the tools and totems we use to communicate and experience a sense of grounded-ness. That means grownups need to quit demanding allegiance to old-school idols—the obsolete technologies of family values. Recognize instead, that it’s not family or home-life that needs to be preserved, but rather our connection the primordial hearth.

In a world where everything is always revolutionary, innovative, and reinvented, it feels like there’s little tethering us to the long thread of history. Your kids seem to be connected to everything except the past. That’s because they need a new image of home, something that signifies permanence and durability. So, teach them about antiquity. Use digital tools to share family stories, to celebrate your heritage. It doesn’t even have to be related to your own ancestral origins; any engagement which emphasizes the value of history is better than the current cultural obsession with freshness and novelty.

In my family, we talk a lot about the ancient Greek world—I’ve been reading my kids the mythology and teaching them about Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle from the time they were very little. We played Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey together as soon as it was released. First, the game inspired us to reminisce about reading the Percy Jackson books aloud. Then, it provoked dinner time conversations about Athenian democracy and the Spartan influence on Stoic philosophy. This is the history with which I’m most familiar, so it’s an easy choice for me. Other parents might focus on something else. It doesn’t matter; whatever works for you is fine. You can even strengthen the hearth through legacy entertainment. When three generations enjoy Star Wars games and movies together you may not be building a foundation that reaches back into the annals of history, but you are still setting small tent stakes in the ground.

Excerpted from THE NEW CHILDHOOD Copyright © 2019 by Jordan Shapiro. Used with permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York.  All rights reserved.

Before the Future of Childhood: Immersive Media and Child Development salon took place in November 2018, we invited experts to share their visions about the ways VR and AR might impact childhood 10 years from now. Lisa Castaneda, Co-Founder and CEO of foundry10, shares an optimistic view of VR’s potential to shape learning experiences in the future.

Credit: lyncconf.com

Foundry10 is a research organization working across many domains, and we have been studying VR and students for several years. Today, students see tremendous potential in VR. In our studies they talk about classrooms of the future where learning is enhanced, where the stylized images of UX interfaces they see in movies today, are everyday experiences. As an educator working with teachers, I believe in the next 10 years we will be able to truly capitalize on these immersive technologies for education if we think carefully now.

A temptation in educational technology is to take new tools and use them in familiar ways, adapting old ideas to new machinery. I am hopeful that in a decade, we will think more broadly. “Incorporating advanced technology” into the curriculum will not be AR “textbooks” or traditional quizzes adjusted for VR. Instead, education may reflect a nuanced understanding of how virtual spaces can restructure spatial learning, enable shifts in perspective, refine skills in simulations, and allow an array of learning interactions that aren’t possible now. If we are thoughtful about objectives and content integration, we can engage in ways we could not without those tools, such as being able to witness famous battles and see events first-hand, from multiple perspectives.

The changes are already beginning, and we are seeing them in courses like high school foreign language. In one foundry10 study, we have foreign language teachers using virtual tasks like walking through a city or solving a virtual scenario as the assessment, asking students to use their language skills in real time rather than on paper. Ideally, in the future, we will better understand how developmental stages intersect with the virtual world on psychological and cognitive levels so we can design simulations and experiences where cognitive load is decreased, and learners can better assimilate information. This would allow seamless integration of tools into lessons such that they extend our ideas about abstract mathematical concepts, the minutia of chemistry, complexities of language, and richness of humanities in ways that resonate and are genuine for learners. Rather than going into VR and coming out to do a traditional assessment, the virtual experience itself will be the assessment.

Virtual tools, even today, offer a variety of creative devices that enable students to make amazing things. Designing from their imaginations, they can exploit the strengths of those technologies to build, arrange and rearrange in ways that facilitate an iterative process. Our data show that having students create their own content, as artists or engineers, is something they long to do but often don’t quite have the means or interfaces to engage in the ways they believe could one day exist. As designs continue to improve, these creation tools will allow extensions of learning and the chance to prototype easily without breaking learning flow. Educators will continue to develop their own skills—at their own levels and pace— so that they can co-design and craft immersive experiences with students that are meaningful, for both the individual and classroom.

Ten years from now, teachers will also have a much stronger sense of how and when to utilize these tools. They will have data and information about how and when immersive technologies are most effective. Content will be more plentiful across a range of subject areas enabling teachers to think fluidly about how to achieve genuine integration of the content into the classroom.

To make these ideas reality, we must think critically about the role of XR within educational settings today. We need to objectively assess the strengths and challenges that these technologies bring. Instead of just hoping and assuming the tools will help learners, we, as educators, need to gather data, utilize student and teacher feedback, and actively work with developers to take what we know about learning and what they know about virtual spaces to truly enhance education.

Lisa Castaneda, M.Ed., is a co-founder and the CEO of foundry10, a philanthropic educational research organization, which was created to expand the ways in which people think about learning. Through applied and experimental studies done in collaboration with educators, researchers, and community organizations, our work bridges the gap between research and practice, and provides direct, actionable change in the communities in which we work and beyond.

Happy New Year! We hope that you have enjoyed a wonderful holiday season with loved ones, and that you are as rested and ready to take on new opportunities and challenges in 2019 as we are!

As we begin the new year, we wanted to take some time to reflect on 2018. The Cooney Center team would like to to thank all of you—the producers, researchers, policymakers, educators, technologists, parents—who are guiding today’s children as they grow into tomorrow’s smarter, stronger, and kinder adults. We are grateful for your support and the many ways that you have encouraged and engaged with us over the past year, and look forward to even more exciting opportunities ahead.

You may have noticed that our founding director Michael Levine has taken a new position at Sesame Workshop as Chief Knowledge Officer last spring. Lori Takeuchi has stepped in as Acting Director and has deftly led the Cooney Center through this time of transition. In 2019, you will see us aligning even more closely with our colleagues at Sesame Workshop and engaging in even more ambitious projects.

Crossing the Boundaries by Kevin Levay, PhD, Andrew Volmert, PhD, and Nat Kendal Taylor, PhD

Throughout 2018, we continued to develop momentum for our Families Learning Across Boundaries Project (FamLAB), a multi-institutional partnership that includes researchers at Stanford University, UC Irvine, the FrameWorks Institute, and PBS Kids. Generously funded by the Oath Foundation, Bezos Family Foundation, and Heising-Simons Foundation, FamLAB aims to create an ecosystem that encourages young children’s learning across settings. We conducted two national surveys, and look forward to sharing our findings with you in 2019. We also awarded four Spark Grants to some amazing cross-sectoral teams across the country that are doing innovative work in their communities. The FrameWorks Institute published Crossing the Boundaries, which maps gaps between the ways experts see informal opportunities for STEM learning versus the general public. These findings will be especially helpful for organizations looking to overcome some barriers in public thinking.

Digital Play for Global Citizens by Jordan Shapiro, PhD

In the spring, we published Digital Play for Global Citizens, written by Jordan Shapiro. Co-presented with Asia Society’s Center for Global Education, this guide is full of resources and suggestions for parents and educators who want to encourage students to learn more about the many ways in which the world is connected.

Over the summer, we launched the Integrating Technology in Early Literacy (InTEL) 2018 toolkit with our partners at New America. The project features an interactive map of 40 early learning and family engagement organizations around the country. The toolkit also offers resources for community leaders, early childhood educators, media mentors, and researchers and funders.

In November, we gathered a group of children’s media producers, software and hardware developers, researchers, and children’s health experts for the first event in our Future of Childhood series, Immersive Media and Child Development. This gathering was designed and co-hosted with partners at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination and Dubit to think about young children and the state of immersive media—present and future. We will share key takeaways from this event in the coming months, but we have already heard from attendees that key partnerships have been sparked from this event!

Participants at The Future of Childhood: Immersive Media and Child Development salon in November 2018

And all the while, we’ve been busy writing, planning, and scheming for an even more productive year ahead. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for the newsletter to stay tuned to what’s sure to be an exciting 2019!