“I Saw It in a Movie”: Mass Media’s Influence on Young Children’s Understanding of World Cultures

Abstract

This article describes research investigating mass media’s influence on elementary-aged children’s understanding of world cultures through the lens of serendipitous learning. The qualitative study explored the ideas children constructed about other countries, cultures, and people through their unmediated use of various media including movies, internet sites, books, video games, and television. Outcomes are primarily reported through the children’s own voices, and show they developed superficial, miseducative views through isolated, fragmented trivia and factoids that focused on surface culture, deficits, and exotica. However, the introduction to world cultures through media also encouraged interest and curiosity about other cultures in some children, with one student moving beyond initial exposure through media to extend his learning on his own. Results also suggest the children gleaned cultural information collaterally through media developed for purposes other than education, illustrating the complexity of media’s influence, and the idiosyncratic process of developing cultural cognition. These outcomes emphasize the importance of parents, other caregivers, and teachers addressing distortions in cultural understanding, and the necessity of teaching about world cultures in both formal and informal educational spaces to provide counternarratives and more complex perspectives than those generally found in mass media.