For the past year, I have been working as a pre-K educator at a public community school. Working with four- and five- year-old children has been an enlightening experience. It has been a lesson in patience, a test of endurance, and a reminder of all the love and affirmation kids offer. As I teach my class the foundations of literacy, I have frequently been reflecting on media literacy. I have been thinking about how I presume my children interact with media.
From cries that they “love ads” to side-eyed glances at newspapers- from silly cat videos to widely celebrated children’s books, my class most certainly interacts with diverse media.
Nevertheless, one medium in particular entrances them, pacifying them like a lullaby before nap time— screens.
Two instances where screens mesmerized my class stand out.
The first anecdote took place in the lunchroom, a cold, sanitized place. When energetic kids fill its echoey walls, the lunchroom quickly can reach a loud crescendo. In this particular moment, a teacher, hoping to quiet the noisy students, rolled out a large screen and began to play video compilations of cute animals.
It worked.
As adorable kittens and dopy puppies appeared on the screen, an impure silence, occasionally interrupted by gasps, settled into the lunchroom. The kids quieted down as the screen drew their attention.
And yet, it worked almost too well.
When lunch was over, so many of the children in my class had failed to actually eat their lunches. They had been so consumed by the screen, they forgot to consume their food.
The second anecdote has a different setting: the library media center. My class visits the library once a week for a brief fifteen minutes. This day, the librarian chose to read a book to my students near a fake fireplace. Nestled in between rows of computers, the fireplace seemed an inviting space to listen to a story.
However, as the librarian read the engaging tale, many of my students did not seem to hear a word. Instead, they stared at the computer screens surrounding them. Enchanted by the second graders around them playing on the computers, my class was simply disinterested in the book in front of them.
A year ago, I wrote a capstone paper about immersion and passive spectatorship in visual media where I looked to the precedent set by film to evaluate immersive media like virtual reality. My paper heavily relied on a foundation of critical theory and philosophy to engage with the abstract sensation we so often experience in consuming media.
As I think back to my class on those days in the lunchroom and library, the image of my students entranced by the screens is reminiscent of a passage from the German film theorist Siegfried Kracauer.
In his book Theory of Film, Kracauer evaluates films’ influence on spectators. He writes that films “lull the mind,” explaining that “the moviegoer is much in the position of a hypnotized person. Spellbound by the luminous rectangle before his eyes– which resembles the glittering object in the hand of the hypnotist– he cannot help succumbing to the suggestions that invade the blank of his mind.”
My kids, sitting in the lunchroom and library with unwavering stares and mouths agape, illustrated the hypnotized person Kracauer describes.
Surely, the screen had entranced my class.
Regardless, I hesitate to name their blank faces as passive spectatorship. I also hesitate to attribute their mesmerization to solely the screen. I hesitate because I have seen these very faces when they listen to a thrilling story, look at a detailed book, or watch an absorbing performance.
And I hesitate to condemn these screens because video has also served as a useful, edifying tool in my classroom. Videos have demonstrated new social-emotional skills to them; Videos have helped to teach them new sounds. They have shown my class the intricacies of global cultures that I myself could not emulate.
When my students stare at the screen, they are practicing visual literacy. They are deciphering what is before them and they are negotiating meaning. In their own capacity, my students are decoding meaning.
Ultimately, I am wary of the trance of the screen and its lull on the minds of my students. However, the lull of the screen is also a testament to the importance of storytelling and visual literacy. These stories, whether books, videos, or performances, have introduced my students to the foundations of literacy, language, and more broadly education.
Visual literacy and media literacy- confronting the “lull” of the screen, engaging with its content, and decoding it- like reading and writing, are just a couple more of the many skills my students have to learn.
