In 1968, a year before Sesame Street went on the air,  the fledgling Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) staff—including Joan Ganz Cooney, Robert Davidson, David Connell, Dr. Edward Palmer, Barbara Frengal, Samuel Gibbon, Anne Bower, James McConnell, and John Stone—conducted a seminar covering five key topic areas that Joan Ganz Cooney had identified in her extensive report to the Carnegie Corporation in 1966, The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Television.

The seminars brought together leading experts in the fields of early childhood education, television, children’s book authors and illustrators, as well as noted psychologists and psychiatrists. The purpose of these seminars was to “generate ideas for the production staff to develop into 130 hours of children viewing” (Report of Seminar II, Language and Reading). 

Many of the participants and advisors saw an opportunity to utilize this new experiment in television to fill some of the evident and harmful gaps in early childhood education across the country. Dr. Chester Pierce, a psychologist and professor who was a national advisor for CTW and who would become the founding president of the Black Psychiatrists of America in 1969, also saw an opportunity to provide widespread, radical therapeutic treatment for Black children.

Dr. Pierce believed television—and Sesame Street in particular—could play a strong role not just in entertaining children, but in countering the racist messaging that was so pervasive during the 1960s. Black children absorbed countless microaggressions (a condition and term that he first identified and coined) via media representation. By presenting an integrated, harmonious community to “challenge the marginalization of African-Americans that children routinely saw on television and elsewhere in society,” Pierce felt Sesame Street could offer a “vision of an integrated society where everyone was a friend and treated with respect.”

In The Smithsonian, Bryan Greene writes that Dr. Pierce helped design what he called the show’s “hidden curriculum” of helping young Black children develop a stronger sense of self-worth through positive Black role models. By presenting an integrated, harmonious community to “challenge the marginalization of African-Americans that children routinely saw on television and elsewhere in society.”

From my own personal, imperfect perspective, the appearance of Jesse Jackson reciting the poem “I Am Somebody” (episode 402 of Season 3) by Reverend William Holmes Borders, Sr., quite perfectly sums up Dr. Pierce’s “hidden curriculum” that “seeks to bolster the Black and minority child’s self-respect and to portray the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural world into which both majority and minority child are growing.”

And while the special guests throughout Sesame Street’s production—including the likes of Odetta Holmes, Mahalia Jackson, Herbie Hancock, Nina Simone, James Earl Jones,  Whoopi Goldberg, The Harlem Globetrotters, and Lena Horne to name just a few—illuminate the dedication to Dr. Pierce’s vision by highlighting the diverse talents of so many remarkable men and women of color, the foundation is built on the positive representation of everyday role models consisting of both women and men of color as business owners, as mothers and fathers, as husbands and wives, as community members, as lasting friends, and as, well, the people in your neighborhood.

 

 

Conrad Lochner is the Senior Manager of Archive and Collections at Sesame Workshop.  A graduate of Pratt Institutes School of Information Science, he has specialized in building and managing archival resources in the non-profit sector and is committed to bringing to light the often-hidden collections of these organizations. His favorite Sesame Street character is Grover and would like to one day work at The Fix-It Shop.

 

 

The following post is part of a series springing from the Cooney Center’s joint initiative with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences. This is a project aimed at exploring the role of public media in the lives of young people by taking stock of the current landscape and imagining a future that public media can build alongside teens and tweens. With that in mind, we are inviting public media practitioners who are already experimenting and exploring with young audiences to reflect on their experiences and share their perspectives. We hope these posts will spark conversation, provide direction and resources, and raise up examples of the innovative work that public media stations across the country are creating to engage the next generation. 

 

In 2016, our Education Department at PBS Wisconsin was in a period of reinvention. We decided that we wanted to go beyond creating high-quality classroom media for young people by supporting and empowering young people to create their own media as well. 

The goals seemed straightforward enough: 1) Support youth as they create media, 2) Use PBS Wisconsin platforms to share youth media, 3) Celebrate youth media. But what form should that take? Would we serve students directly, or work on providing resources to teachers? Would we run workshops in schools, or train educators to be better media instructors in their communities? As a relatively small team, we had to think hard about how resources could be matched with needs in a way that was novel, sustainable, and scalable.

Listen and Learn

Starting out, we wanted to create all our own video production resources and tutorials. But we quickly realized that PBS Newshour Student Reporting Labs (SRL) already had award-winning resources—much like the ones we were imagining—that were already free for educators and students. Want a video on capturing b-roll? On lighting? SRL has that!

So instead, we focused our effort on learning and implementing their resources, and building a relationship with the talented producers at SRL. We listened, we asked questions, and we learned from their years of experience working with students and teachers.

The partnership between our department and the established SRL initiative was a real opportunity for us. It felt like public media at its best: member stations working together to leverage each other’s work and experience in service to local communities. And that’s what we wanted to do: be additive to what SRL was offering with attention to the unique needs in Wisconsin. 

In an effort to better understand the needs of Wisconsin teachers, we spoke to 13 educators about SRL and spent the next school year traveling to each of their classrooms, offering workshops, and listening to teachers and students to support a community of practice around youth media.

Find Partners and Build on Station Assets

Once we had enough evidence from our year of listening to Wisconsin teachers about what we might add to SRL, we started to offer different threads of station support, including preparing for a unique summer immersion program. Our station is positioned within the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and we found a powerful partner for these efforts in the UW-Madison School of Education. Dr. Rich Halverson and Dr. Erica Halverson helped us lay the groundwork to expand our support to teachers and students by co-creating the concepts with us and connecting us with several doctoral students. Those doctoral students worked with PBS Wisconsin Education producers to support teachers, offer workshops in schools, offer feedback to students about their work, and help us extend the reach of our growing community. We called our partnership with the UW-Madison School of Education “Click Youth Media”. 

As Click grew, we also began to involve staff throughout the PBS Wisconsin station. One of our most popular offerings was our field trips where teachers could bring their digital journalism classes on a full-day tour of the station. Students met producers, animators, set designers, and journalists, and learned about potential careers in media. They went behind the scenes of live recordings and got to sit on working television sets. 

Our colleagues appreciated having the Education department coordinate the logistics, freeing them to arrive and share their passion and their work. And they loved the passion and excitement of the students and appreciated the opportunity to meet with an audience from across the state in a way that was new and inspiring.

By partnering, drawing on national programmatic expertise from SRL, and inspiring our local station professionals to lend their time, our Education department was able to amplify our efforts and reach an ever-larger community.

Find Your Niche 

In 2018 we expanded this model when we brought over 40 youth and their teachers to Madison for a one-day immersive video production experience, the Click Youth Media Festival. We had story prompts, mini-workshops on b-roll lighting, and interview tips; we had mentors who would accompany students around campus to get interviews; we had computers set up for editing; we even had a theater ready for a celebratory viewing of student work. 

When it was over, we sat, exhausted and wondering: how in the world could we scale this?

Afterward, we heard from teachers that while they had a rewarding experience, they wished they felt more confident in their own video production skills so they could have helped their students to do even more, and so they would be able to support video production in their own classrooms. 

This reflection changed everything. 

The next summer, inspired by this comment and the train-the-trainer model, we launched the Click Teacher Summer Camp. We realized that instead of directly training 30 or so students each summer, that we could expand the learning by magnitudes if we trained 30 or so teachers, and those teachers went back to their classrooms and trained 30 or so students each year. If done sustainably, year after year, we would soon have a whole community dedicated to youth media making!

 

Our immersive, three-day video production experience included guidance from our SRL colleagues and purposeful workshops where PBS Wisconsin staff shared their expertise with teachers without being overburdened to create slideshows or handouts. Importantly, we also focused on networking between teachers as part of an effort to build a year-round community of youth media educators in Wisconsin. As one attendee put it, “I have never attended a [professional development] session that was so built around relationships…You did a phenomenal job modeling the strategies that you presented to us and I plan on taking those with me back to my school.  The mentoring by PBS Wisconsin and SRL staff was key in the success of this… THANK YOU!  THANK YOU!  THANK YOU!”

With this model, we feel that we’ve found our niche. For us, empowering youth voice means supporting teachers. 

 

Where do we go from here? 

Plans for the second in-person Click Teacher Summer Camp in the summer of 2020 were scuttled by the pandemic. During the summer of 2021, we will embark on a new adventure, offering a Virtual Click Teacher Summer Camp. There are many unknowns about the virtual model, but if it’s successful, Click would have an even greater reach, helping to bring quality media education to young people all across the state.

 

Jessie Nixon is an Education Engagement Specialist at PBS Wisconsin Education focused on 3rd- through 12th-grade content. She supports connections among educators in Wisconsin with a strong emphasis on youth video production and media literacy. Before working at PBS Wisconsin, Jessie taught high school English and college-level composition and education courses. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D in Curriculum and Instruction specializing in Digital Media.

 

Megan Monday serves as the Executive Producer at PBS Wisconsin Education. Megan works with a team of producers who make classroom media for Wisconsin teachers and learners, and she supports the youth media initiatives at the station. 

With children growing up in ever-changing conditions in the digital age, digital parenting becomes more crucial than ever before. The predominant focus for parents, policy-makers, and researchers has long been on minimizing the risk of harm. Yet the swift transition to children’s online learning during lockdown caught many off guard. Children from disadvantaged families struggle to get online due to a lack of device or internet connectivity. Safety issues such as online child pornography are also in the spotlight.

In this article, originally published on www.parenting.digital, Dongmiao Zhang and Sonia Livingstone discuss the difficulties of digital parenting and how to close the digital divide by supporting less-educated parents and those from lower socio-economic status households.

 

This reflects the reality of digital parenting today. For a long time, parents have been receiving fundamentally contradictory advice on limiting screen time yet optimizing their child’s online opportunities. Uncertainties about the digital future further add to parents’ anxieties. We know very little about how parents embrace technologies, get connected, and help their children maximize digital opportunities while staying safe. What is the art of being a parent in a digital present? How should they approach the inherently innovative yet potentially disruptive practice of online learning? There are no easy answers to such questions.

It should come as no surprise that parents navigate through today’s digital transition in different ways. Online privacy remains a top concern for many parents. They face a difficult balance between checking on their children online and encouraging their independence. Although parents generally agree that their child is ready to use the internet independently when turning 13, parents of teens think 13 is too early. With varied levels of digital skills, parents also engage in a range of enabling and restrictive strategies. Our previous research shows an unsurprising yet deeply problematic digital divide: parents with higher socioeconomic status and level of education provide more forms of online support to their children.

These research findings offer robust evidence on parents’ hopes and fears about technology and how it might shape their children’s future. There has been much literature around limiting screen time, yet still our understanding of how parents positively support their child’s e-learning remains limited. We ask here: which parents are more likely to take steps to support their child’s e-learning? What factors make a difference? How does parental mediation of e-learning compare with parental mediation of online risk?

To answer these questions, we summarise the findings of our new report, the fifth in a series from our nationally representative survey of 2,032 UK parents of children aged 0-17 conducted in late 2017 before the current pandemic. We found that:

• Support for e-learning is distributed unevenly across children, depending on their family background. Educated parents and those of higher social economic status report undertaking more internet-related activities designed to support the e-learning of their child.
• However, parental digital skills and attitudes also matter. Parents with better digital skills and more positive views about technology and the benefits it can bring their child also do more to support their child’s e-learning.
• The research found an interesting link between online opportunities and risks. Parents who do more to support their child’s e-learning worry more about online risks, but they also tend to do less risk mediation.
• In addition, the characteristics of the child matter. Younger children and those who use more devices receive more support. There is no observed difference for girls and boys, neither does the child’s frequency of internet use matter.

The findings highlight the tricky choices that parents face between supporting the opportunities or managing the risks of the digital age. Parents may decide to engage in e-learning support as they deem the benefits outweigh the risks. Mediation of online risks may also be a burden, or disincentive for some, as surely parents would like to support e-learning without having to take on more risk management. Whether there can be better advice and support offered to them, or whether the way forward lies more in stronger internet regulation or in overcoming problematic service design to meets the needs of children and families, remains a live matter for debate.

Our research suggests that closing the digital divide may require more than just offering devices and connectivity for those at risk of being left behind. Much more could be done by targeting guidance and resources to less-educated parents and those from lower socio-economic status households. It could also be effective to develop interventions that seek to build digital skills, especially among less-privileged parents. There’s also scope for social campaigns and policy interventions to shape parental attitudes towards technology, encouraging parents to offer more digital support for their child. Schools have a role to play here, but they too are struggling with the sudden shift to online education.

As we argue in Parenting for a Digital Future, parents are often more willing to play their role than society gives them credit for. But they are also often in need of more guidance and encouragement than society provides.

For more detail and discussion, read the full report.

 

First published at www.parenting.digital, this post gives the views of the authors and does not represent the position of the LSE Parenting for a Digital Future blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.