**9. Why study "movie-learning" and what are the challenges?**

There has been very little scholarly consideration of the concept that understanding a movie requires some effort, apart from Branigan's 1992 footnote (quoted above). Bryant and Anderson's edited collection of studies, drawn largely from developmental psychologists' work in the 1970s and 1980s, did address "the act of television viewing itself" ([54], p xiii) before the expansion of the domestic VCR market (in the UK) and cable (in the US) radically changed the nature of most children's access to this medium, by enabling re-viewing at will. An important feature of this book is a determination to oppose the then dominant idea among developmental psychologists that visual attention in young viewers "is primarily reactive and controlled by the television set," and to make the radical counter-argument that "visual attention is actively under the control of the viewer, and is in the service of the viewer's efforts to understand the television program" ([55], p. 1). One implication of this argument is that television has distinctive features that need to be understood, so several of the chapters address questions about the specificities of televisual codes and conventions. For example, Meringoff et al. are interested in "the distinctive cognitive consequences for children of their experience with television and other story-bearing media" (p. 151) and recognise the relevance of classical film theory to their research questions, although without any speculation about the age at which dissolves and jump cuts are understood:

Descriptions of the specific ways that editing techniques are used to suggest associations between shots and to imply transitions in time and space have aroused our curiosity about children's ability to 'read' across film and television story lines. For instance, dissolves and jump cuts imply the passage of time only to those audience members who understand the meaning of those conventions. ([56], p. 157)

But, like most of the book's contributors, their investigation involved older children (in their case 6–7-year-olds and 10–11-year-olds). Huston and Wright ask (again, of older cohorts of children), "What's attractive about television? How does the child learn the codes of television and become increasingly sophisticated in understanding its content?" [57]. But they admit that "…one interpretation of our failure to find large developmental differences might be that we have not sampled children early enough to locate the critical period for familiarisation with television" (p. 43).

The contributors to Bryant and Anderson [54] recognised the need to study younger children but clearly did not want to tackle the methodological challenges of trying to elicit evidence about awareness of movie codes and conventions from children who would be too young to articulate them. They were less conscious of the further limitations imposed on their inquiries by their very schematic accounts of what the "codes of television" are, as well as by their commitment to experimental methods, their cognitivist approach and their reliance on "age and stage" models of child development.

When I was in the Education Department at the British Film Institute (1979– 2007), where we worked with children, teachers, and policymakers to try and establish learning about movies within the UK's mainstream primary school curricula, teachers constantly told us about their amazement at children's responses to the materials and approaches we were offering. They were often sceptical about the movies we provided for them to show (non-mainstream short movies, not necessarily made for children but appropriate for them) and the approaches we suggested, such as getting children to listen to a soundtrack and discuss what they expected to see on the screen, and asking them to think about what features of a movie had generated their response (e.g. laughter, suspense, sadness). But in follow-up discussions they reported their pupils' unexpected levels of knowledge and understanding when discussing movies, and the transformative effect on children of being allowed to talk about a medium they loved. One teacher wrote about her experience as follows:

I used one of the short films with my literacy set. I found the children motivated, engaged and exceedingly attentive right from the beginning. Their descriptive, inference and predictive skills were extended and they found that they were better at this than they thought because this form of media was familiar to them. The biggest difference was in the participation and quality of work from the boys who were usually not easily enthused by literacy. By the end of two weeks the children had extended their vocabulary and were able to write for a variety of purposes and in different styles with greater confidence. ([58], p. 27)

Even teachers in nursery schools (3- and 4-year-olds) had similar responses, for example:

When I was told that we were going to have to introduce visual literacy and do filming with nursery children, my heart sank and I thought, "oh no, another initiative'. I was dreading it. I thought I really have got to the end of my career and I can't do this anymore. But when I tried the Baboon film [https://vimeo. com/58445945] with my children for the first time and used the method of play, pause, talk to the children, get them to predict, play all the way through I couldn't believe haw enthralled the children were and how interested. There was no dialogue but they were glued … and it just took off from there. [quoted in [59], p. 82].

The characteristic teacher response to experiences such as this is excitement about the potential they seem to offer for getting children to be more enthusiastic about the prescribed curriculum. But the first teacher quoted above also comes close to what I see as a more important insight when she says "they found that they were better at this than they thought because this form of media was familiar to them". What she and others who expressed similar excitement could not quite bring themselves to say was that the children they had been teaching were a lot more knowledgeable and confident than they had assumed – a confession most teachers understandably do not like to make. Few researchers have investigated the relationship between traditional literacy and movie knowledge, but the results can be illuminating. Comparing the work of two groups of primary school children, one of whom studied a novel in the traditional way, and the other who also made their own animated version of the novel, David Parker found that in the written work of the moving image class – in contrast to the work of the other class –

…we find a device used constantly in moving image media to predicate [sic] an audience towards a particular character and thereby create empathy. It is the use of point-of-view - seeing something through the eyes of another. What is interesting about these examples is not merely that a cinematic stance seems to be taken in terms of the written output, though that is certainly interesting in itself, but that in a piece of writing which aimed to establish the feelings or state of mind of a character, the class which was in the process of producing

an animation understood that by spatially re-positioning the reader inside the character you could access feelings without necessarily describing them [60].

This observation indicates the potential value of exploring two cultural forms side by side, as a way of deepening understanding of both. It is an immensely important part of children's learning to develop an understanding of how narratives work and of how to make judgements about whether a visual or verbal representation is "real" or "true". Early movie-watching provides a thorough apprenticeship in both.

In Section 4 I discussed the challenges of trying to study toddlers' viewing behaviour and trying to identify evidence of learning to understand the medium, suggesting that the only really effective way of doing this is through "longitudinal, ethnographically- styled and if possible home-based research models". The findings from such studies could potentially challenge the dominant paradigms that prioritise digital media as the object of study and the potential risks of "exposure", but a larger evidence base is needed. Although visiting researchers can and do attempt to do this – the EU Kids Online study is a good example of how this can form the basis of large-scale studies (https://www2.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/ research/research-projects/eu-kids-online) – identifying significant aspects of toddlers' viewing behaviour at the level of minute detail that I have described in this chapter is both essential if we are to understand pre-verbal learning and impossible unless done by researchers based in the home, who know the children well and are able to respond to toddlers' spontaneous decisions to pay attention. The essential tool for such research is the use of video, given the need to capture minute changes in toddlers' expressions, postures and gestures.

There is plenty of scholarly discussion about the ethics as well as the practicalities and value of using video as a research tool for studying very young children (e.g. [61–65]), almost all of which deals with video use by visiting scholars. These issues could potentially change in studies designed to involve family members in data-gathering: the "video diary" approach. If my arguments in this chapter are seen as persuasive, then one obvious next step could be to design a larger-scale study that co-opted a cohort of parents prepared to commit to a video diary project, gathering evidence of their toddlers' movie-learning.

## **10. Conclusion**

In this chapter I have set out the case for a paradigm shift in the study of children and media, on the basis that research in this field so far has largely avoided the study of children younger than 3, has failed to address the cultural dimensions and specificities of children's media experiences, and has over-prioritised the risks of media consumption. I have backed up this case with examples of how close observation of toddlers' behaviour as they watch moving-image media (referred to here as "movies") indicates that they are involved in highly intense learning processes. My accounts of these exemplify the value of an embodied cognition approach in interpreting toddlers' engagements with movies. With reference to nursery and primary school teachers' discoveries of their pupils' unexpectedly sophisticated approaches to movies, I argue that early movie-learning may be a significant contributor to children's later learning. I have not minimised the considerable methodological and ethical challenges that would face any other scholars who wanted to undertake similar research, but I do argue for the value of longitudinal, ethnographicallystyled studies, if possible by family members, as a way of exploring this perspective further.

*Mind and Matter - Challenges and Opportunities in Cognitive Semiotics and Aesthetics*
