Abstract
Abstract How do parents and carers approach the task of bringing up their children in the digital age? What is their vision of their children’s future and that of the wider society? Most importantly, how are parental expectations, and expectations of parents, designed into learning opportunities for children, if at all? In this article, our focus is on how children gain media literacy in a range of non-formal sites including after school clubs, digital media learning courses, makerspaces and, of course, the home.
Highlights
Each site gains particular significance through its relation – imagined and practical – with school, the site of formal learning with and through digital technologies
As advocates of open literacy argue (Hartley, this volume), the school often implements the most instrumental version of media literacy, insofar as it is taught at all (Polizzi and Taylor, 2019), not least because of the normative pressures set by government education policy (Selwyn, 2014)
As the first author observed at the end of The Class, an ethnographic study of a year in the life of a class of thirteen year olds, “It perplexed us that neither the school nor the families could imagine what goes on outside their immediate gaze, leaving young people to move from home to school and back each day without the adults responsible for their opportunities really seeing how their lives do or could better fit together” (Livingstone and Sefton-Green, 2016, p. 253)
Summary
For educators and policy-makers, the popular (and expert) narrative of parental ‘deficit’ has two dimensions. One mother – a childminder with four children living on a low income – explained to us how she invested a disproportionate amount of time and money into ensuring her children gained experience with digital technology at home, saying “I do encourage them [with technology], because this is their future” Proportionate to their sometimes extremely limited resources, we found parents from all backgrounds going to great lengths to resource and support children’s digital media activities at home or enrichment activities outside the home in an effort to ‘keep up’ or ‘catch up’. “technology is growing, yes, so they have to learn how to [use it].” But at the same time she worried that the girls would come across inappropriate content and, echoing ‘expert’ advice ( she could not source it to its origin with the American Academy of Pediatrics; Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2018), she added that “in the news I heard the [scientist] say more than two hours... it’s not good sense.”
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