Abstract
Taking issue with Bergala's dismissal of students' prior learning, disdain for popular culture and implicit preference for film education as a secondary school subject, this paper argues for the importance of studying children's earliest encounters with both films and television (summarized as 'movies'). The research described here was based on the hypothesis that a learning process must be under way in these encounters, enabling children to follow much of the multimodal complexity of mainstream feature films by the time they are 3 years old. A longitudinal, ethnographic study of the researcher's twin grandchildren between the ages of 22 and 31 months used video to capture phenomena such as focused attention, repeat viewing, emotional responses, utterances and gestures. Analysis, using embodied cognition as well as sociocultural approaches, revealed the extent to which 2-year-olds are starting to follow, enjoy and reflect upon movies well before they can understand the words in their songs and picture books. The findings have implications not only for film education with older students, but also for early years research, and for the production of movies aimed at this age group.
Highlights
As an educator, I am interested in learners’ biographies
In the research that I shall describe in this paper, I sought to identify features of the very early stages of children’s film education by studying 2-year-olds’ engagements with moving images
Others who have studied children and movies have noted some of the same phenomena that I have observed: intense attention, emotional responses, co-viewing with family members, decided preferences and dedicated re-viewing
Summary
I am interested in learners’ biographies. All learners – even newborns – bring prior experiences to the learning processes on which they embark. Bergala’s project is firmly ensconced in the classic French and Eastern European tradition of ‘a true induction to cinema’, aiming to instil a love for cinema as an art form, completely distinct from television, which he sees as merely the bearer of ‘communication and ideology’, dismissing the idea that film and television have any common ground (ibid.) From this perspective, film education would inevitably become a specialist subject, probably only in secondary schools: fine as far as it goes, but extraordinarily limited in relation to organizations such as the BFI or the UCL Institute of Education, both of which have a much wider remit for education about moving-image media. In the course of my research, I have become interested in the evolved, instinctive behaviours that have important roles in learners’ social, cultural and intellectual development, and that are evident in 2-year-olds
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