Becky Parry

• Bachelor of Arts
• The University of Sheffield

It was a keynote presentation by Professor Keri Facer at the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA) international conference and subsequent article in Literacy that sparked the discussions which inspired the focus of this special issue. In July 2021, with a mix of end of term exhaustion and intellectual exhilaration, we gathered online to inter...

This paper provides a speculative, conceptual and literature-based review of the relationship between disability and new technologies with a specific focus on inclusive education for disabled people. The first section critically explores disability and new technologies in a time of Industry 4.0. We lay out some concerns that we have, especially in...

This article utilises the term ‘digital authoring’ in order to explore the ways in which children create multi-modal, digital media texts. Drawing on the notion of ‘emergent literacy’ we share vignettes from different pedagogical and research contexts where children use media to tell stories in different forms with different technologies. These acc...

While it is commonplace to argue that technology integration in educational contexts should be pedagogically appropriate, in some contexts, the notion of “appropriate” integration can be slippery. This is the case in the context of educational theatre, which builds on the experience of “liveness” and of being together in a shared space. In this art...

This think-piece (published in the Journal of Media Literacy) shares emerging ideas about media education, which the authors permit themselves to explore despite the current ‘strangulation’ of media studies in England. By ‘carrying on regardless’ we refer to an aspiration we have to continue to develop our pedagogical and theoretical approaches to...

Existing research on the use of technology in participatory theatre in education has paid little attention to the moment-to-moment unfolding that characterises the liveliness at the heart of such practice. In this conceptual article, we show how a sociomaterialist perspective can illuminate the contingent co-emergence of people, things and technolo...

After the emergence of a distinct sociology of childhood, methodological approaches to research with children have been particularly concerned to work ethically and meaningfully with them. In this volume, Elizabeth Wood (Chapter 9) takes us beyond this consideration of ethics, challenging some of the rhetoric about the use of visual media to empowe...

This paper challenges the reductive notion of children as ‘efferent'11. A term used by Rosenblatt (1938) to critique the teaching of reading which involved students in ‘taking away’ a particular meaning.View all notes readers who learn to decode written language in order to ‘take away’ knowledge. This anachronistic idea has become entrenched in cur...

In this paper, I share an account of what happens when a teacher values children's experiences of popular culture in a classroom activity. Drawing on a socio-cultural approach to learning, I suggest that children are not simply enthused when their lived cultures are valued in the classroom but more fundamentally that they are motivated because they...

Children, Film and Literacy explores the role of film in children's lives. The films children engage in provide them with imaginative spaces in which they create, play and perform familiar and unfamiliar, fantasy and everyday narratives and this narrative play is closely connected to identity, literacy and textual practices. Family is key to the en...

In the early stages of my fieldwork, I arrived at my research school at playtime, to meet the class teacher. I walked past the nursery children out in the playground. ‘You’re Darth Sidius! You’re Darth Sidius!’ said one boy to another who was lying on the ground with his arms raised into a triangle, holding his imaginary light sabre in an accurate...

Children are resourceful in their attempts to draw on their repertoires of narrative in their storytelling but very often in school this storytelling process is constrained in particular ways by the strong emphasis on writing. Furthermore, current practices relating to the teaching of writing in schools such as direct modelling (Barrs, 2001) can fu...

When devising an approach to my fieldwork, my main concern was to work ethically and meaningfully with children to explore the questions outlined in my literature review. Hart (1992) observes that in research, children are commonly subjects of formal, language-orientated methods: Unfortunately most social science research with children is still of...

As he speaks Connor starts to look very animated. He’s seeing a story. His eyes become bright and focused on the opening credits that he’s imagining. His skill as a storyteller is exhibited in the slightly reverent, hushed tone he uses as he describes an opening title sequence. The idea sounds rather like the opening scene of Four Weddings and a Fu...

We use narratives to formulate our identities and to share our culture. When we learn to read we do not only learn how to decode alphabetic text, we also learn stories and storytelling. Narrative, therefore, is a cultural aspect of literacy. Narratives are not only experienced through language, they are ubiquitous in other forms such as film, telev...

The nature of this study was a small scale, qualitative research project which drew on the experiences of six children in one school, in a large city in the UK. It was never my intention to produce research which attempted to generalise about the particular experiences of these children to make inferences about the wider population. As Cohen, Manio...

Narrative is ubiquitous and takes many forms, from written and oral language to still and moving images. Barthes (1975) observes that in every culture narrative is ever present: Like life itself, it is there, international, transhistorical, transcultural. (Barthes, 1975, p. 1) As Barthes describes, the earliest philosophers, including Aristotle, tu...

Children’s films are currently hugely successful commercially and well received critically; many, many films for children are made each year (although less so in the UK). In the past families watched the first broadcast of films at Christmas such as The Wizard of Oz, (Fleming, 1939). According to research published by the now-abolished UK Film Coun...

Spencer (1998) argues that children learn to read texts from the texts they read. Hilton (1996) develops this argument in relation to media texts, proposing that media ‘texts themselves could thus “teach” the learner to unlock further ones’ (Hilton, 1996, p. 8). Robinson’s (1997) notion of a repertoire of narrative experiences extends this idea fur...

Animation is a significant form in children's lives. Animated films and television programs make up a substantial part of their experience of narratives and as such are an important resource in their talk and play. Making space in schools for this aspect of children's repertoires of narrative, even in the context of animated film production, can be...

A key tenet of Media Studies 2.0 (Gauntlett, 2007) is the claim that the traditional conceptual framework for the subject is redundant, outmoded and unable to offer sufficient explanatory power to account for shifts in digital media practices. This paper presents data from a recent media literacy research project which suggests that the conceptual...

This article draws on data from research with six ten-year-old children investigating the role of film and media in developing understandings of narrative. I present an account of one of the children, Connor (his chosen pseudonym), whose experiences represent a telling case of the dissonance found between children's knowledge and experience of narr...

In an increasingly digital world, media education is an essential part of good teaching, not just as a tool to teach the more traditional aspects of the curriculum, but in its own right as an essential part of literacy. This book is relevant to all teachers working in primary schools, and will be particularly helpful for literacy coordinators.

This article presents the findings of a small-scale research project which aimed to enable young people to reflect on their childhood responses to the popular films, ‘Shrek’ and ‘Shrek 2’. During the project the participants develop new readings of the films in the light of their own recent experiences both of life and of other texts. The research...

Purpose This paper aims to examine what elements in online environments promote engagement, learning and repeated visits for children aged 6‐12 years. Design/methodology/approach An in‐depth textual analysis, exploring components such as navigation, construction of site, character choice and development, style of text, types of questioning, animat...

Animation is a significant form in children’s lives. Animated films and television programs make up a substantial part of their experience of narratives and as such are an important resource in their talk and play. Making space in schools for this aspect of children’s repertoires of narrative, even in the context of animated film production, can be...

Media literacy education projects and initiatives have tended to focus on teenagers and to be informed either by social or moral concerns or by a body of theory which has evolved primarily in the academy. Three recent research initiatives to which we have all contributed – Reframing Literacy (RL), Persistence of Vision (POV), and Developing Media L...