Young children’s engagement with television and related media in the digital age

This thesis is one output of a White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership (WRDTP) Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) studentship, devised by The Universities of Sheffield and Leeds in partnership with CBeebies. Taking a sociomaterial approach (Barad, 2003) to digital literacies in early childhood, this thesis focuses on United Kingdom (UK) preschool children’s intra-actions and social practices (Wohlwend, 2009) with television and related media (TV&RM) at home. It examines how both well-established and new verbal and non-verbal intra-actions constitute children’s unique social practices. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (1977), this thesis asks how social class is implicated in these practices. These inquiries are addressed empirically using a mixed-methods approach. The results of a UK-wide survey of 1,200 parents of preschool children and ethnographic case studies with 6 families in Sheffield, UK are presented.
Several original contributions to empirical, theoretical and methodological knowledge are made in this thesis. Firstly, in their everyday engagements with TV&RM, preschool children amalgamate fragments of media texts with other material and/or immaterial things to constitute synthesised texts (‘synthesised practices’). Secondly, preschool children and their families share habitus in relation to TV&RM (’family media habitus’). Thirdly, preschool children have relationships with narrative media texts without ever having engaged directly with them, via proxies including physical artifacts and social contact (‘proxy media engagement’). Fourthly, family members engage with preschool children’s TV&RM interests in ways which extend their learning in relation to literacies. Middle-class families use their children’s TV&RM interests as the basis for engaging children in school-like literacies learning (‘media practice schoolification’). Working-class families tend to extend their children’s TV&RM interests in terms of operational, critical and cultural digital literacies and embodied literacies. Methodologically, the thesis develops a framework for ‘Sociomaterial Nexus Analysis’ and ‘nexus mapping’.