Total academic nerdery on my part, especially as I’m currently developing a new course at the university about Children’s Media, but possibly also of interest to two of you:
The Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at Saint Vincent College has announced the launch of the online Curriculum Toolkit as a new resource for college and university faculty that combines video footage from the Fred Rogers Archive with a variety of multimedia course materials. […]
The initial set of Curriculum Toolkit syllabi, collected from college and university faculty nationally, covers language development, creativity, music, and the role of play, among other relevant topics. The Curriculum Toolkit also provides a number of assignment ideas that include everything from puppet construction to assessing emotional development in children. A reference area includes research abstracts and links to other research in the field.
If nothing else, and even if you aren’t academic faculty, the videos and interviews the Center has collected here are just gold.
Scott Steinberg, an author and advocate for the video game industry, in an op-ed for CNN:
In 1993, the Senate’s hearings on video game violence gave birth to the Entertainment Software Rating Board and the industry’s current rating system: E for everyone, M for mature (17 and older) and so on. Later this year, the U.S. Supreme Court will test the constitutionality of a California law that would make it illegal to sell violent video games to minors.
But what gaming insiders find most surprising isn’t that such arguments remain topical. It’s that some 30 years after video games became a popular form of mainstream entertainment, we’re still liable to hear less about games’ positive impact on kids’ lives than sensationalistic accounts of their hidden dangers.
“Games are an amazing invention that entertain and inform in ways different than traditional media,” says Joseph Olin, president of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. “But many critics have little or any experience with them and therefore don’t understand where there could be artistic or educational value. No different than with film and TV, media sensationalism and ignorance can contribute to the fear that games are harmful to children.
Henry Jenkins questions what was so wrong about the He-Man action figure toys that his son used to play with back in the day:
I never understood the parents who feared such toys would stifle my son’s imagination because what I observed was very much the opposite - a child learning to appropriate and remix the materials of his culture. The fact that these stories were shared through mass media with other kids and that they were some vividly embodied in the action figures meant that it was easy for children to have intersubjective fantasies, to share their play stories with each other, and to pool knowledge about the particulars of this fictional realm.
Jenkins’ thoughtful reflection made me thrillingly happy, because it’s a nostalgic reminder of the way things were for me growing up – and an important statement about how the things kids love – the video games, the action figures, the mass-mediated toys, and all the stuff we adults can’t see a value in – aren’t ever necessarily bad or good, in and of themselves. Rather what matters more is what kids do with them. I’ve become so exhausted lately of hearing about how video games and media are keeping our kids indoors and depriving them of nature. The sentiment may be well-placed indeed, but it’s aggravating to see the issue simplified, and to have a category of things demonised – especially when very few people making the statement have used or played what the kids are playing with, or understand the attraction they may hold for kids.
Nature and video games and cheap plastic toys can co-habitate our children’s lives very happily together, thank you very much, and in any case it’s never for us adults to decide what’s intrinsically valuable or worthwhile. Kids can make the most out of what adults perceive as utter crap; I know I did, as did Henry Jenkins’ son, as did every generation before. I think it’s time we start showing kids just a bit more trust when it comes to what and how they play.
A great, comprehensive look from industry trade journal Publishers Weekly at just what’s going on in the children’s publishing world to get stories onto the iPad. Well worth reading, even if you don’t have an iPad. You can almost see how the industry is looking ahead to their future, and what it might mean for our children’s everyday reading experiences.
An early yet promising look at the potential experience the iPad can offer children’s stories.
The ‘Racebending’ Casting Controversy
The controversy has been brewing ever since the cast was announced for M. Night Shyamalan’s adaptation of the hit Nickelodeon show, “Avatar: The Last Airbender” – and as the movie’s release gets closer, you can likely expect to hear a lot more about the film’s purported “racebending.”
Leading the activism charge: the Racebending.com website. By way of introduction, here is timeline they provide of the series and the movie (including its casting), and following are some excerpts from a recent explanatory letter the activists sent to the President of Paramount Pictures:
Avatar: The Last Airbender featured characters of color, and the film adaptation was an opportunity for Paramount to develop leading talent from Asian American and Inuit American communities—groups the Screen Actors Guild has acknowledged as underrepresented, particularly in leading and heroic roles. Only 1.8% of lead roles in Hollywood go to actors of Asian descent and less than 1% of lead roles go to actors of Native American descent. Yet, Airbender lead casting breakdowns worded as “Wanted: Caucasian or any other ethnicity” failed to provide adequate outreach to communities of color during lead casting. And the production’s specification of “Caucasian” and the initial casting of all four leads with white actors further reinforced Paramount’s failure to extend the rare opportunity to be a lead heroic character to minority actors.
The casting of The Last Airbender exemplifies the “glass ceiling” that pervades Hollywood casting.
When we were casting, I was like, “I don’t care who walks through my door, whoever is best for the part. I’m going to figure it out like a chessgame.” Ideally we separate the nations ethnically — ideally. I didn’t know how or what it was going to be. And it was so fluid. For example if you found a great brother, [but] he didn’t go with my favorite Katara, then we couldn’t use him. Theoretical things like that. There was an Ang that we really loved, but he was like 5’10.” There’s all kinds of issues that come to the table physically. And I had a board of all the people that I was considering, the seven or eight. There was, at one time, a Chinese Sokka and Katara, and they were over here. One of them was a better actor than the other, and so I was gathering my pros and cons.
I was without an agenda, and just letting it come to the table. Noah is a photo double from the cartoon. He is spot on. I didn’t know their backgrounds, and to me Noah had a slightly mixed quality to him. So I cast the Airbenders as all mixed-race. So when you see the monks, they are all mixed. And it kind of goes with the nomadic culture and the idea that over the years, all nationalities came together.
Whatever you may say about the process, it’s clear just by his answers that Shyamalan’s had a well-thought-out rationale for how he casted the film. The film news site UGO.com seemed to pick up on this as well, saying essentially as much in their “primer” to understanding the controversy:
Racebending.com argues that Katara and Sokka are clearly of Inuit heritage, and Aang, who can certainly pass for “mixed race” by his physical appearance, is nevertheless a clear depiction of Asian culture.
Shyamalan argues that his film is the most culturally diverse tent-pole ever made, and that his casting decisions were based on a) finding the best performers and b) maneuvering appropriate races to the different “nations” on the Airbender mythos. […]
What makes this controversy so fascinating is that it isn’t, if you’ll forgive the expression, a clear expression of black and white. Avatar: The Last Airbender, created by two Caucasians, was a show that borrowed heavily from all sorts of world cultures and philosophies. M. Night Shyamalan is one of the most successful directors of color working in Hollywood. There is dismay that the only characters of color in The Last Airbender are villains, but should the film continue through the full story arc we’ll meet other heroes of other races (and some of our original baddies will be redeemed.)
What’s clear is that the characters of Aang, Katara and Sokka mean a lot to a lot of people. Heck, they mean a lot to me and I am not a member of an underrepresented minority in film. To many, The Last Airbender is a missed opportunity, to others, despite protestations to the contrary, it is a simple business decision on how to cast for a multimillion dollar movie.
Obviously it’s a touchy subject to some, and you can bet there will be opinions flying about it. Me? I have none (or at least none that I’m sharing). I’m a huge fan of the cartoon series, but also respect the process filmmakers have to go through to get things on screen. And yes, I’m sure there’s an ideal out there that all involved with the film would have loved. But as Jordan Hoffman, of UGO, noted: there’s nothing black and white about any of this.
A final, tangentially related bit: Media guru Henry Jenkins has an excellent look at how fan Lorraine Sammy came to become a fan activist and help run Racebender.com.
Ars Technica takes a look back at the creation of one of the most revolutionary digital devices in the past half century, and offers up six reasons why the Game Boy is still #1:
Twenty years ago this week, Nintendo released the Game Boy, its first handheld video game console. Excited Japanese customers snatched up the innovative monochrome handheld by the thousands, which retailed for 12,500 yen (about $94 at 1989 rates) at launch – a small price to pay for what seemed to be an NES in your pocket.
Happy birthday, Game Boy. I can’t believe I had to go a whole three years of my life without you.
The Washington Post reports on a newly-published research study on video game addiction from Iowa State:
In what is described as the first nationally representative study in the United States on the subject, researcher Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University found that 8.5 percent of American youths ages 8 to 18 who play video games show multiple signs of behavioral addiction.
The study purports that these youth’s “game addiction” negatively impacts other areas of their lives – such as their performance in school, willingness to do chores, and so on. Other items to note: Boys are four times more likely than girls to be pathologically addicted to video games; kids with addiction lie about the time spent playing, and sometimes steal games or money to play more; and finally – and perhaps here’s the key – the research couldn’t say whether kids play video games because they perform poorly in school (and thus seek out an area where they can establish a feeling of mastery), or whether they perform poorly in school because of playing video games.
It seems like a fairly valid, well-researched study, but here’s my question: if 8.5% of American youth are addicted to video games, what is the percentage of adults in America who are also? I’d wager the number is just as high, if not higher for adults. So why divorce kids from the broader social problem? And, given theampleresearch which testifies to the benefits that equally accompany video game play for children, are major news outlets such as The Washington Post just fueling more skepticism and fear toward video games by focusing on research studies like this, instead of acknowledging that video games can have a great value for people of all ages when viewed individually and with a more nuanced lens?
There was at least clear voice in the Post’s article speaking on the study, though, who sought to connect the issue with the broader social realities around American children:
“I think kids use this just the way kids watch television, the way kids now use their cellphones,” said Michael Brody, chairman of the media committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. “They do it to relieve their anxiety and depression. It’s all a matter of balance.”
