Sue Howard

The Pebble in the Pond: Children's constructions of power, politics and democratic citizenship

A civics and citizenship education curriculum is currently being developed for all levels of Australian schools in an attempt to prepare young people for effective participation in the complex, evolving society of Australia in the 21st century. Clearly children should be encouraged to explore issues to do with power and politics and it is important to include factual information about the structures and processes of government in any curriculum materials. However, this paper argues that childrens lived experience as members of families, schools and the wider society provide understandings that must be taken into account if we wish them to really appreciate the principles and purposes that underpin democratic practices. This qualitative study investigates the perceptions of 27 children, between 5 and 12 years of age, in relation to their constructions of power and politics. It uses a developmental framework to understand the childrens talk and to chart the increasing complexity of their concepts.

Winning Hearts and Minds: television and the very young audience

Although we know that very young children watch television and indicate preferences for favourite programmes, very little research has been undertaken exploring the responses of such young viewers to media texts. Reasons for this are probably largely methodological — one cannot use the usual methods associated with social research with children who are in the early stages of language acquisition. In this article, the authors describe how they devised a unique technique for observing and recording the responses of 20 under two year-olds to a television text — Teletubbies. Faced with a large amount of rich textual data, they then developed a set of analytical criteria. The subsequent analysis revealed that very young childrens responses to the chosen text were very diverse and included pleasure, parasocial and cognitive responses. In addition, new insights into very young childrens attentional abilities were revealed.