Literacy Goes Beyond Print
Good morning. I want to start by saying I am thrilled that KCET is taking on the topic of early childhood education for adults. I think it's hugely important. I'm also thrilled, as a longtime PBS person who's done work with a lot of different stations, that you've been able to convene the group that is here to work in coalition on this. That in and of itself is a tremendous accomplishment.

	“Most Americans get most of their information about the world from image-based communication sources now.”

I'm wearing two hats for the little piece that I'm going to do this morning. One is my hat from the Alliance for a Media Literate America, which I can summarize very quickly. Every time you say the word “literacy,” please think beyond print. Most Americans get most of their information about the world from image-based communication sources now. As we go increasingly digital, that will become more true. Print, image and sound are merging. Even our phones have pictures now. It makes zero sense to train kids to only read a piece of the communication that they're going to get. Just training kids to be print-literate isn't enough in the world that they're growing up in today.

Television That Teaches
What I really want to concentrate on in the next ten minutes is how television actually teaches. If we're talking about teaching, not just during early childhood but also doing it via the television, we need to understand a little bit about how it is that television actually teaches, how people take away information from it. There are literally thousands of studies that have been done on various aspects of media, research on how people relate to the screen.

How we relate to the screen depends on four factors: How much, What's on, Who we are, and Why we are watching.

For those of you, who are not developmental psychologists, let me give you my quick summary of how this happens. People's relationship with the screen and what they get from it depends on the interaction of four factors. I think we can summarize nearly every piece of research that's out there in one of these four factors. The first is how much time they're spending in front of the screen. The second is what's on when they're watching. The third is who they are, what they're bringing with them while they're watching. And fourth, is why they're watching, why they're sitting there in front of the screen -- the intention. Gavriel Solomon's research referred to earlier would apply here.

It's always the interaction of those four factors. Unlike researchers, who look at only one of those factors so that they can eliminate the influences of the others – in real life, it never works that way. It's always all four and the interplay of all four. Each one will have an impact on program design and what people take away. I'm primarily going to talk about the adult audience here and adults getting the message, although much of this will apply to kids as well.

How Much TV
The first is how much. The power of media comes from its ability to repeat. And television as a communications medium has an ability to repeat unlike any other communications medium we have.

If you go home tonight and you watch three hours of primetime commercial television, how many individual commercial messages will you see? The average is right around a hundred. Now assume for a second, three hours is average for the American viewer. So you're talking about a hundred repetitions every single day. Assume that all of those had the same message for a moment. In an average week, a message would be repeated seven hundred times, without you changing your behavior at all. That, as educators know, is tremendous to have an impact like that. The power of TV comes from its ability to repeat.

“The power of media comes from its ability to repeat. And television as a communications medium has an ability to repeat unlike any other communications medium we have.”

Now, when you're translating that into actually making a production, I would underscore what Dorothy said about this not meaning repeat the exact same thing every single time. For instance, one of the programs for kids that uses repetition best is “Between the Lions.” In five minutes of “Between the Lions,” you can easily get thirty different examples of how to sound out whatever letter or letter combination they're dealing with on the show, all in different ways. It doesn't get boring at all in the context they do it. The ability to repeat over and over again is a tremendous asset.

It also means for adult learners that the kind of instructional television where each show has a concept and where you never go back to that concept once it's been introduced - doesn't work. It makes no lasting impact in terms of what people tend to take away from the screen. Nor can you take a concept and put it into your show when it is counter to everything else that's out there in the media and expect that it will have an impact. You can put eating carrots all you want in this show, but if everything else that everyone is seeing is counter to that, you're not likely to see an outcome that will change people's behavior just by their watching this show. That's the “how much” piece.

What TV
What people are watching obviously makes a difference. I will say in regards to production, there are a couple things to be aware of. First, what people take away from the screen is in the pictures, not in the words. If you want to watch a master of this, pay close attention to the Bush Administration and George Bush - they're taking a page out of Ronald Reagan's book. This has been widely written about. This is not my political commentary. Michael Deaver has talked candidly about what he did. They believe in this very, very strongly, and implement it very, very well.

	“It's not just kids that need to be shown and not just told.”

The message is in the visuals. For young kids, it even means in terms of concepts. One of my favorite episodes is a “Dragon Tales” episode called “The Fury is Out,” where they take the concept of anger, which is a tough one to demonstrate to kids, and they make it into a character. The character grows when the kid gets madder, and it shrinks when they're able to calm themselves. That's a visual representation of this complex concept. That's important for adults as well. It's not just kids that need to be shown and not just told. Every important concept that you want an adult to take away from the screen needs to be in the visuals some place. It can't just be explained.

One of the neat things that video can do in terms of content is that it very nicely integrates affective and cognitive parts of the brain. It stimulates. For instance, using music, which tends to be processed by affective parts of your brain, as opposed to just the talking, which uses the cognitive parts, can make a strong combination. You have a very powerful tool there to have lasting impact. But understanding doesn't come automatically.

“One of the neat things that video can do in terms of content is that it very nicely integrates affective and cognitive parts of the brain. It stimulates.”

I do training all over the country, explaining to adults the child development theory behind some of the shows that they've been watching for years. Light bulbs go off in their head. “I never understood that before. I never saw that - oh yeah, of course, I get that now.” But they don't get it before we've started. My favorite one to do is “Teletubbies,” because no adults seem to get that -- for instance, explaining that everything on “Teletubbies” is designed to be a game, which it is. All of a sudden, adults will go, “Oh yeah, there's time to predict the outcome.” It isn't automatic. Just because you put it on the screen, even as a kid's program, does not mean that adults who are watching, even well-educated developmental psychologists who are watching, will necessarily understand all of the child development behind a particular scene.

The last thing I want to say about the “what” piece is that video does not do everything well. One of the things that it tends not to do very well is introduce the core content of what you want. It can only spark interest. In terms of the lasting impact of core content, it doesn't do that well. That's going to be a challenge for what we want to do here.

Who Watches TV
The third piece is the “who” piece. Every one interprets what they see through the lens of their own experience. Audiences negotiate meaning. If you're reading stuff in the field, that is the phrase that you'll find. But I want to step back for a minute for this group and explain at least one reason why that is. And it has to do with what's up here on the slide.

When you're looking at something through visuals, visuals have a language. It's learned. Obviously if we're born as sighted people, there's a lot of visual information we take in that we can make sense of, that nobody ever has to teach us. It's unlike print, where you have to learn to decipher a coded system. But there's clearly a bunch of visual information that we learn. And there's a language for it. The language is you take an image, you put it in a particular context, and we learn a message. What I want to do is just go through a quick exercise.

	Can you tell what this is? Visual information requires context to convey messages.

Can you tell me what this is? Call out some possibilities. A ball. A circle. The sun. A full moon. It is yellow. Why can't we automatically all agree on what this is? Because we don't have the context. If I add these lines, most of us will recognize this as a traffic light, right? We can take yellow in the context of traffic lights, and the message is…Caution. And that's clearly learned.

Now if we change that and we put that same thing and we take that same color yellow and we put it in a different context, lollipops, for example, what's the message?

If you're a three-year-old and you're looking at lollipops, knowing the flavor of that lollipop is pretty important information. But it doesn't stop there because what happens, if I change the context again, and now the context is M&M's – if I take yellow in the context of M&M's, the flavor is … chocolate. In other words, color in the context of M&M's is irrelevant, right? It's not salient information. Our brains are not just using the language that we have learned – we're also learning when to pay attention to what, because we can't pay attention to everything. That means we all have a pre-existing language in our heads.

You have visual language in your head, everyone else has existing language in their heads – the challenge is, the language isn't always the same. If we go back to that traffic light example, the way traffic lights work is that we end up with shared meaning. We all agree that yellow in the center of a traffic light means caution. If we didn't, if some of us thought it meant stop or go, that would cause big problems. So we have to have shared meaning in the context. What happens when we're looking at media is sometimes we think we have shared context, and we don't. So everyone interprets what they're seeing through the lens of their own experience. It's really, really critical.

And let me point out two very quick things related to the preceding considerations. One is that modeling is never automatic. Thousands of parents watched Fred Rogers for years - it doesn't mean that they picked up on the kind of language that he used with kids. On the other hand, we know that when caregivers were intentionally trained with “Mister Rogers Neighborhood,” to use it, they did begin to pick up the style of his language. People don't model what you put on the screen just because you put it on the screen; there has to be something else there, some reason that they’re doing that.

Also people assess credibility. We give different credibility to different kinds of things. All of us do that with all kinds of sources of information.

The second thing that I want to emphasize is that when it comes to core value issues, media never overrides your own core values, unless your core values are missing. Kids don't take their core values, for instance, from media unless they're not getting core value messages at home. Adults too have core values. Media is not likely to override them if it contradicts those core values. Parenting issues are core value issues. What a person already believes about the appropriate way they should treat children is not likely to be counteracted by anything they see in media, because people don’t give media that kind of credibility.

Why Watch TV
This is what I've been working off of. The last piece is the “why,” your intention for viewing also matters. This is the biggest challenge for what you're talking about doing. People choose how much attention they're going to pay to the screen. What they take away from it depends on how tuned in they are. That's not only true for kids. It's also true for adults. Adults spend most of their viewing time not very tuned in to the screen. They're not trying to learn things. So if you're talking about a program that’s on the air and that's coming into their homes, what's going to change so that they become focused?

If you do a dual program, where in fact they’re supposed to be watching with their kids, a responsible grown-up in that situation pays attention to the kid, not takes away content from the screen. You don't want them to do anything else. Putting both kid and adult content together in a show is going to be a real challenge with what we know about how media works.

The last thing I will say is that for people to take away content at all from the screen, follow-up is critical. If you hear it, even if you take it in, if you have no opportunity to apply it and practice it, it tends to go away very quickly. Follow-up is not just an adjunct to what we're talking about here. It has to be a central point of what we're doing.

Dr. Faith Rogow
June 13, 2003
KCEd Expert's Convening