Perspectives on Youth and Media

Children as Audiences, Consumers, Victims, Creators

Can Media Enhance Young Children's Development In and Through the Arts?
Perspectives, Opportunities, and Challenges

By Dr. Sue Snyder

This article will be included in an upcoming book on children and media. This is a preview for our readers.

What would you tell the producers, writers, and creators of TV's children's programs if you had their full attention? As an arts advocate who believes the arts are central to early development of thinking capacity that influences a child's ability for a lifetime, I had the opportunity for two years to share my research knowledge, experience, perspectives, advice, and suggestions with the producers, writers, and staff of Sesame Street. Their two-year focus on the arts was a response to the large body of current arts-related early childhood research. This opportunity allowed me to rethink my perspective on the arts, young children, and quality media.

At the outset, I voice skepticism at the comparative value of television viewing experience for young children over opportunities to interact more freely in the three-dimensional world of family, home, nurturing care environments, and the natural world. However, televised media is ubiquitous today in the lives of most young children, and Sesame Street (Children's Television Workshop) has long been a standard bearer for excellent and responsible children's programming. The context of this work, then, is to bring our best understandings about the arts into the creative world of those responsible for early viewing experiences. This information can also be instructive to others creating media for the child audience, parents and caretakers responsible for screening children's viewing, funders of programming initiatives, and those planning future initiatives.

Current research suggests, "in a nutshell, the evidence is persuasive that (1) our brain may be designed for music and the arts and (2) a music and arts education has positive, measurable, and lasting academic and social benefits. In fact, considerable evidence suggests a broad-based music and arts education should be required for every [child] in the country."¹ Furthermore, brain research indicates unparalleled brain growth and development from birth through age 5, with critical and optimal periods for various types of stimuli. The brain has receptive centers for auditory, visual, and kinesthetic information. Development occurs as predisposed but uncommitted neurons are stimulated by interactive experiences, and move to the appropriate receptive area, creating a larger and larger area prepared to receive and process new information. The quality of these areas and their interaction, as measured by the brain's capacity to process new information, determines the individual's capacity to learn and communicate. Optimal periods for building visual, aural, and kinesthetic receptivity areas occur before age 5.

Understanding the Messages In and Through the Arts

The arts of music, visual art, and movement are forms of the aural, visual, and kinesthetic knowledge that humans use to understand and communicate. The arts can be considered languages, each a different way of knowing. A basic understanding of the principles through which the arts enhance learning and living should be instructive regarding types of messages transmitted in and through the arts. Critical interactions such as movement/ touch, sound, words, and images can provide optimal learning windows for young children.

Music, in its broadest sense, is the language of sound, stimulating aural awareness and thinking. Word language is actually a sub-component of the language of sound. All intentional sound is music, and all language is comprised of the elements of music, (dynamics, pitch, rhythm, duration, emphasis, vocal tone color). Music also exists exclusive of words, communicating solely through rhythmic, melodic, and expressive elements.

The earliest response of a fetus to music is at about 4 1/2 months, and it is the first external stimulus response. On the other end of the spectrum, the most profound, deepest, and purist human expression is also music--that with no words. When words no longer convey the depth of emotion required, humans generate songs that combine words and musical elements, then symphonies with only non-verbal sound.

For young children, music learning and skill-building begins at birth. As the infant grows into toddler, patterns of sound are experienced and set expectations for future listening. Patterns are stored as sound categories, and wide exposure leads to greater capacity to categorize sounds.

Keeping the steady beat is a critical, early learned musical skill, linked to later reading aptitude and other organizing patterns of thought. Young children learn this skill by bouncing on knees, rocking to a lullaby, dancing in a grown-up's arms, pat-a-cake clapping games, walking with a song, marching, and doing actions to songs.

The rhythm of the words (clapping every syllable) is often introduced to children before beat-keeping skill is solidified, and once children begin reproducing rhythm, it is very difficult to go back and refine the beat. Therefore, focus on imitating rhythms is not recommended for young children. However, hearing different rhythms is very important. The now-famous Mozart Effect, in which children increased their aptitude for spatial reasoning through listening to Mozart's music, has been further studied to discover that the extracted rhythm of the melody is equally powerful to hearing the complete melody. Therefore we can assume that exposure to complex rhythms should be part of a young child's experience, even though the child is moving to the underlying steady beat.

In terms of pitch, every culture's music uses a range of tone sets that become familiar over time. Exposure to the musics of many cultures makes multiple tonal sets comfortable to the child, and accessible for future use.

Visual art is the language of image, stimulating visual awareness and thinking. The artist organizes media into patterns of lines, shapes, colors, textures, forms, and values. Some visual art is representational, and some non-representational.

For the young child, visual acuity grows from birth, starting with fuzzy images, then focusing on faces, edges, and eventually to understanding of depth and height. As the child begins to interact with images, first experiences might be arranging and rearranging pieces of paper, ribbons, and boxes. Placing shapes in a row vertically or horizontally grows to the creation of patterns.

The ability to use writing and drawing tools is a step toward literacy, and starts with large bilateral movements such as in finger painting. Filling paper with color to understand about top, bottom, sides, and middle; making straight and curved, thick and thin, bright and blurry lines; eventually closing the lines to make shapes, and exploring color are all steps in the process of learning to control the media of image. In three dimensions, building with containers, blocks, or other available shapes builds critical understandings.

Viewing begins with indoor and outdoor objects. Exposure to a range of art styles and media in interactive art museums and sculpture gardens builds a repertoire of ideas; this is more effective if there is interaction with the art through some hands-on and immediate activity. For example, if a Mondrian painting is viewed, play with colored strips and blocks of color will make take the experience deeper into memory. Climbing in, around, and through a sculpture will give a strong impression of the texture, lines, curves, and angles--the dimensions--of the piece. An easy way to view art images is in quality illustrated children's books.

Dance is the language of gesture and movement, stimulating kinesthetic awareness and thinking. The gestures of facial expression and body position communicate volumes of information. Creative movement is the organization of movements into patterns by varying locomotor and nonlocomotor, gesture, efforts, timing, space, directionality, and relationships; and provides visual and often aural stimuli as well. Folk dance is culturally transmitted; while ballet, tap, and modern dance are improvised or choreographed.

For young children, the expressive language of dance is first communicated through the facial expressions of those around. As the child learns to move, the range of movements is learned through imitation of those same people. As with the other arts, experience leads to imitation and exploration. Through practice, the child refines large and fine motor control to make the lines and shapes required to represent people and familiar objects. In this respect, visual art and movement overlap. Many of a young child's artistic endeavors are simply practicing motor skills or exploring possibilities, rather than "making something."

Language arts (word language) is often relegated to non-arts ways of knowing, along with mathematics and science. However, the acquisition process for language is similar to that for any other art, and speaking, listening, reading, writing, and thinking in language are all highly creative processes.

Because word language acquisition is researched more than acquisition of the arts languages, many assumptions are made about the acquisition sequence of music, image, and movement based on the sequence for word language. In addition, there are elements of each of the arts inherent in language arts development.

The infant hears and makes sounds of many languages, eventually matching those that are heard and practicing them in what is termed the "babble stage." Before imitation of words, the infant imitates the entire melodic and rhythmic contour of adult language, a clear link to music. Eventually sounds are combined into words, and the words into meaningful one-word, two-word, then complete sentences. For the young child, generating a two-word sentence to communicate an original idea is a highly creative act!

Writing begins when the child practices those straight and curved lines, and draws pictures to represent ideas. These visual art links are obvious and critical early steps.

The movement connection to language arts development is a bit less obvious, but no less powerful. Movement through space allows the eyes to learn how to track, and builds peripheral vision skills necessary to track when reading. The ability to move with the steady beat is linked to reading success, however the reason is not yet clear. Also, sequencing movement patterns appears to organize the brain in ways that are useful in language acquisition and understanding.

Drama elements, conventions, and techniques synthesize two or more of the above arts, providing opportunities through which the arts can be utilized to process information, express feelings, and communicate ideas. Drama is occurs through a variety of learned conventions and techniques.

All arts are culturally bound and transmitted. The syntax of each language must be experienced and learned before the meaning can be understood, and just as there are many word languages, there are many cultural and historical styles and genres of music, art, dance, language, and drama.

The Artistic Processes--What Artists Do

Every human has the capacity to be an artist (musician, painter, sculptor, architect, dancer, writer, storyteller, actor), and to engage in the three artistic processes: creating, performing, and responding. These capacities are "wired in" to every newborn, reminding us that the arts are biologically necessary parts of being human. If not, they would have been pruned out of the human genetic code long ago. Every child has the right to exposure and exploration through all three processes. Each process has multiple steps, and it is through these steps that learning in and through the arts occurs. The performance or artwork is the product at the end of the process, but it is crucial to understand that the process is the key to growth. Table 1 outlines the steps in the artistic processes, equally applicable to the young child and professional artist.

Three Artistic Processes

The Arts and Creativity

The stereotypical response to an artistic product is, "That's (You're) so creative!" Can creativity be learned? And are the arts the only vehicles for this learning or production to occur?

Sidney Parnes describes the creative process as:

Problem  -->  Incubation  -->  AHA!

The following adds a bit more detail:

Identify Problem  -->  Brainstorm  -->  Choose a strategy  -->  Solution

This process is not exclusive to the arts, and applies to creative problem solving or critical thinking in all disciplines and ways of knowing. As a simple example, an infant identifies the problem of needing attention because s/he is hungry. Brainstorming is achieved through trying out several strategies, either by accident or intent, including being quiet, kicking feet, and crying. The crying seems to elicit a helpful response, so becomes the strategy of choice. For those infants whose grownups don't respond to crying, alternate strategies are tried until one that works is hopefully found.

The arts have two advantages that suggest they are ideal paths to creative thinking. First, there are no correct answers in the arts, only multiple possibilities and high standards. Second, the process of creating in the arts elicits an emotional response that provides its own intrinsic reward. Often in the arts, the message and response are non-verbal, providing alternative and powerful routes to knowing.

Einstein reported to have dreamed his theory of relativity as an image years before he was able to concretely decipher and explain its meaning. In "Art and Physics," Leonard Schlain describes example after example of music and visual art representations preceding scientific discoveries by as many as 400 years! This type of thinking is highly valued by our society, where businesses require critical thinkers. We cannot imagine the problems facing the adults our young children will become. The best preparation we can provide is to teach them the creative problem solving process.

For young children, this creative process may begin by imitation. With exploratory repetitions come variations or improvisations, often slight, but eventually quite divergent from the original model. In the end, the result is a new creation that replaces or stands beside the imitated product. This occurs in all arts, across the languages of words, sounds, images, and gestures/movement.

To repeat, the process is where growth takes place. The performance or artwork is just the product at the end of that process. As stated before, young children often engage in the process with no product in mind. Rather, they are simply practicing and refining their skills and understandings.

The role of problem solving can also be applied to adult critiquing children's art, which becomes their model for self and peer critique. When considering how to guide discussions about "kid art," the following guidelines can help:

• Do no harm.
• Avoid judgment words, "nice," "good."
• Ask questions.
• Identify what you see or hear.
• Focus on process as well as product.
• Ask what the child thinks about her/his work.

It is through our responses to art that we help children reflect on their work, and decide what role the work has played. In a recent newspaper cartoon, a child's mom is putting a "scribble" up on the refrigerator, accompanied by great accolades. In the next frame, the child is thinking, "But it was only my first draft!"

The Arts and Cognition

The arts are all about thinking. There are understandings and skills in the arts that begin at a very early age, and may have critical periods for development. Arts understandings can also lead to non-arts understandings and skills. These links allow children to process information through many lenses, offering greater chance of understanding, and deeper insights into ideas.

For each concept or skill, there is a learning sequence that can guide planned activities. The child will:

• Experience it.
• Explore it.
• Describe in her/his own words.
• Label it (someone else does this--a parent, sibling, caretaker, teacher, or other adult).
• Practice it (Piaget says from 8-2000 times before the idea is assimilated).
• Create with it (use the concept or skill in a new way).
• Maintain it (continue to use, and apply to new ideas).

One question we might ask as we continue is, "Which of these steps are possible or desirable for media formats such as television?"

The Arts and Emotions/Personal Intelligences

In the past it was thought that the arts were about feelings, and other ways of knowing were about thinking. In Descarte's Error, Antonio Damasio outlines discoveries that have led researchers to conclude that there can be no reason without emotion. People whose emotional brain centers have been damaged cannot reason.

Emotional responses occur in a very old part of the brain, and act as a filter for processing input. Through neural synapses, the input is forwarded to many areas of the brain, including the newer frontal cortex that does complex reasoning tasks and makes decisions. In addition, arts experiences stimulate chemical changes in the brain that result in a sense of well-being. Endorphins and other chemicals are released that give pleasurable sensations when humans are engaged in the arts, either as creator, performer, or audience/viewer. These pleasurable sensations create powerful memories that lead to strong bonds, and high learning motivation.

Social research supports early and often exposure to the arts. Among critical findings that will inform both arts education and media programming are the following.

• Play and free exploration are essential for growth.
• Adult attention, paired with child-directed activity is a powerful combination.
• Self-esteem, independence, and confidence increase through active arts experiences, which suggest that experiences in the arts, rather than experiences about the arts, will be most powerful.
• Interpersonal/collaborative skills are built through collaborative play with sound, gesture, image, and story. From parallel play on, the arts are a vehicle for learning positive interaction with others.

Arts and the Growing Young Child

It is through visual, aural, and kinesthetic experiences that these areas of cognition, emotion, and creative thinking develop. Visual, aural, and kinesthetic stimuli are transmitted through images (visual art), sound and words (music and word languages), and movement (dance). The synthesis of these three arts culminates in drama, which combines two or more. While the arts are the highest level of human achievement, they are also the most fundamental, and are a laboratory for higher order learning that blends the cognitive and affective, reason and feeling. For young children, understanding is developed through experiences, each of which allows the child to compare and contrast various elements, constructing patterns and expectations for future encounters.

Experiences, to be developmentally meaningful, must be interactive--hands-on, brains-on, or both.

• Children must move to develop basic neural connections related to spatial reasoning, sequential planning, and competently negotiating movement through space. As it becomes less safe for children to be outside alone, and children are often in groups that are difficult when freely roaming, there is less opportunity for free exploration of space. Yet this movement exploration is essential to normal growth. Can media provide models that can be explored while viewing is occurring? Will children later model movement they have seen during viewing?
• Children must use their voices and other sound sources to develop the sounds, rhythms, and structures of language(s). Aside from the word language acquisition sequence, children must vocalize to find and use their singing voices. 2-4 year olds create an average of 6 songs an hour during independent play, but not when viewing media. Because singing engages a different part of the brain than speaking, both types of vocal development are essential. Does viewing televised media invite vocal development through speaking, whispering, singing, and calling? If not, can this occur through different planning?
• Children must represent and build in order to understand physical and spatial relationships. The ability to control a pencil, marker, or crayon is a major developmental sequence for young children, starting with scribbles, then lines, circles, and representation of people and objects in their life. Building structures from blocks and other objects helps children process information about their physical world. Again, these critical activities do not often occur while viewing television.

Few of the crucial activities necessary for normal growth and development occur when children are viewing television. The most powerful learning experiences for the young child are both hands-on and brains-on. On one hand, repeated exposure to patterns develops categorical understandings through which new experiences can be filtered and stored. On the other hand, novelty and developmentally appropriate challenges stimulate growth more than effortless success. The child's mind is more interested in the process of solving an interesting problem than actually finding the solution. The process of "learning to learn" is instilled through encouragement at an early age through interactive exploration, modeling, and play.

In the current culture, many children grow up in arts-poor environments. Many tasks once required of young children are now done for them in one way or another. Holding her/his own bottle used to be a major accomplishment for an infant. Today, bottles come with a handle so there is no need for hands to converge on the mid-line--a skill necessary for successful reading. Imaginative toys have been replaced by those that "do it all:" make sounds, play tunes, move from place to place, and generate images. Open ended toys and tools such as paper and markers, paints, scarves, keyboards and other instruments, wooden blocks encourage creative problem solving. When the toy does the activity, the toy-maker is the learner. When the child does the activity, the child is the learner. Many children spend large numbers of hours restrained in car seats rather than out moving about on their own to travel from place to place. If movement is required, and the child is restrained, what is the resultant price to development?

The same comparison might be made with media. Regardless of socioeconomic group or cultural difference, the common culture has become increasingly media dependent for visual, aural, and kinesthetic input. The result is simply less individual output.

The arts, at their best, provide not only skill development, but also opportunities for developing those traits of persistence, patience, problem solving, and creativity that have been removed from so much of a modern child's life. Presentation of concrete activities will lead the child to model what is seen. For example, if an adult or media Muppet draws a picture of a flower or pig, the child may make a flower or pig after viewing the show. However, if the character is presented with a straight line and curved line, and manipulates the line into several shapes or images, the model becomes one of possibilities rather than finite imitations.

If engagement in the arts is essential to human growth, particularly from birth to 5, how does media fit into the picture? What opportunities exist, and what challenges face the creators of responsible programming for young children?

What constitutes meaningful arts content in the media?

The arts are inherent in all media. The televised message is delivered through sound, image, movement, and story, represented through the arts of music, visual art, dance, language arts, and drama. There's no escaping the fact that media literacy is about understanding in and through the arts. And because the arts are so inherently a part of the developing whole child, there may be an opportunity for the medium to become a powerful teaching and learning tool, a partner to parents and caretakers. Is meaningful media content for young children an oxymoron? Or is there a way to construct media segments that model, encourage, and insist upon creative arts construction, production, and critique? If children's development is dependent on interaction and hands-on experience, the very act of sitting and watching televised programming, as it has existed in the past, takes time away from active learning. The developmental needs of very young children can be in direct conflict with the notion of viewing television, unless programming changes.

How can media address this issue? There are limitations to the two-dimensional screen with a predetermined script, and what it can provide. Acknowledging these limitations, however, there is a body of meaningful content that can enrich children's experiences when used judiciously and not over-utilized to sedate or control children. There is no question that some programming for children is powerfully engaging, as evidenced by the active toddler suddenly riveted to the space in front of the TV screen for 30 minutes to 1 hour. What types of content are not just manipulative, but enriching? What will build the child's capacity to be curious, explore, engage others, interact, and grow? Is there any way to engage young viewers interactively, during or after viewing? And what kinds of support lead to interactive follow-up at home or from caretakers?

"Take Home" Arts-Related Messages

Television for very young children is both created and consumed as entertainment, even when delivering age appropriate content. Entertainment can help children learn, but it is not education, and should not be required to fulfill the role of developmentally appropriate learning experiences that should be provided through human interaction. Based on the above description of the arts and their potential influence on growth, learning, and development; the messages that can be delivered through television fall into different categories, including:

• Big Messages about arts and the world.
• Modeled arts skills to imitate or elaborate upon.
• Understandings in the arts, and models of responding to art.
• Understandings delivered through the arts.
• Processes of creating, problem solving, and critical thinking.
• Social/Emotional messages developed in and through the arts.
• Unintended messages such as stereotypes, inaccurate portrayals, and so on.

Televised media has specific qualities that can be advantages and disadvantages in delivering messages in, about, and/or through the arts. While there is a need for young children to be actively engaged, both physically and mentally, there is also a need for modeling. Particularly in arts-poor environments where caretakers lack arts skills, there is need to provide initial experiences that children can then try on their own. The television can provide information and models. Thus far, interaction tends to be contrived, and it is not possible to respond to the spontaneous actions of the individual viewer.

Sesame Street focused on the arts for two seasons from 2000-2002. During these 32nd and 33rd seasons, they worked to deliver many messages.

• The Big Messages that were effectively developed through these shows included:
  (adult language)
  • People make art, and I (the child) am a person who can make art.
  • All kinds of people make art.
  • There are categories into which I can put arts experiences.
  • There is a process to learning in the arts, and that process takes time and practice.
  • I can think about, talk about, and make decisions about art.
  • I can share ideas and learn from or about others through the arts.
  • I can use my imagination when making or responding to art.
  • Kid art is valid. Adult art can also be interesting.
  (child language)
  • I am an artist.
  • Everything can be explored through ears, eyes, and movement (body).
  • There are specific things I can learn in each art.
  • The stuff to make art is all around me, and often is me.
  • Process takes time, and practice makes it better.
  • The arts help express feelings.
  • The arts can be about real or imagined ideas and things.
  • Everyone has her/his own style and interests.
  • I can learn about many things through the arts.
  • Arts are to share, not to win.

Art helps communicate ideas about the world, including feelings and emotions.

• Models of concepts and skills were delivered in the arts (music, visual art, movement/dance, and drama/language arts) through creating, performing, and responding.
  • In Music, introduction of concepts such as style and context, world cultures, steady beat, and rhythm are supported by specific research that links them to development of the brain, ability to read and spatially reason, and openness to cultural differences.
  • In Visual Art, exploration of line, shape, color, texture, form, value, and composition open doors to visual literacy in the child's environment and exploration after viewing.
  • In Movement, segments focused on efforts, non-locomotor movements, locomotor movements, facing and relationships, patterns, and formations.
• Basic Skills and a Social/Emotional Curriculum were delivered through the arts. Understandings about basic skills included categories of objects and ideas, number and letter recognition, concept building, and patterning. A social/emotional curriculum was approached both by exploring the social conventions appropriate when making and sharing art, and how art can be used as a social and emotional outlet. Social/emotional messages delivered through the arts include:
  • Cooperation and working together is helpful and feels good.
  • I am proud of what I can do.
  • Independence is a good thing.
  • I am part of a family and community.
• Elaborating on Social/Emotional messages, live and Muppet characters created, performed, and responded to music, visual art, dance, and drama. A new character, Baby Bear, provided a model of the young artist. In Elmo's World, the arts were used to communicate about many early childhood social and emotional issues such as working together, or having a new baby. Elmo explored the child's perspective on drawing, dancing, and singing. Characters explored the frustration and eventual success of the creative process, and child art was represented with respect. Adult figures modeled appropriate, non-judgmental language through which artistic growth is supported. Characters also used the arts as ways of expressing joy, sadness, pride and other emotions.
• The Process of Learning How to Learn was repeated multiple times in different situations. Many shows focused on the child's perspective that the learning process is at least equal, if not more important, than the product. This message can transfer to lifelong learning in every discipline or endeavor, and allows the individual to enjoy the journey as well as the destination.
• Unintended messages are always a concern in children's media. The care with which Sesame Street is created, and their extensive review process, leads to a well-balanced presentation of culture, gender, and personality differences. Therefore the inaccuracies that occurred during the arts-based season were not earth shattering. In an effort to continue to improve, however, the following unintended messages occurred.
  • Inaccurate information such as blowing over a bottle and eliciting more than one pitch, could lead to disappointing expectations. Inaccurate or poor playing of instruments (whacking a triangle or drum instead of playing it with control) was presented as a source of humor, or because the writers thought this was normal for kids. By setting this expectation, it gives permission to the viewer for inappropriate and destructive behavior.
  • In an effort to engage the viewer by showing children who were not perfect, there were examples of very poor singing; unimaginative, stunted movement; and stereotypical drawing. Young children in arts-rich environments usually sing well, move with a variety of efforts and expressive qualities, and use art media expressively and with imagination. Again, while children should be natural, providing poor models will set inappropriately low expectations for viewers.
  • The Muppets were so much better at the arts than the children on the show that they sometimes provided a stronger model, but an unattainable level of achievement. On the other hand, the Muppets have physical limitations that sometimes led to inaccurate concepts of how music, visual art, and dance are produced.
  • The quick pacing required to hold viewer attention sometimes led to the impression that the arts can be created in very short time frames, and this expectation can lead to a young child's additional expectation that the first draft is the final product.
  • The language that was used in evaluating art was often judgmental ("good," "bad," "excellent") as opposed to informative or information seeking. One result of indirect praise is that this becomes the reward for some children, leading to a goal of adult pleasing rather than risk-taking, growing, and learning.

Each of the above-mentioned issues affords an opportunity for discovery and expansion of ideas. All in all, the first arts-based season of Sesame Street was very clever, thoughtful, and informative regarding the arts. Choices were made that would allow children and their grownups to try out the activities at a later time. Occasionally, children were invited to participate with the TV characters, although these segments were less successful than the expository ones.

Choices were also made about what was not possible within the medium, at least in the creative imagination of the writers and producers. To their credit, these individuals allowed the show to afford the best of what is possible, created new and interesting formats where possible, and did not try to accomplish the impossible at the risk of eroding the positive, successful aspects of the show format.

Opportunities to Build on Current Success

Sesame Street's bold initiative in focusing on the arts for two entire seasons opened the door to others who might desire a model. Their successes and challenges can be instructive to others moving forward with the arts and media for young children. What opportunities do they and other future creators have to enhance current practice? What challenges might they address? What should consumers of media for young children be looking and asking for?

• Provide Accuracy and Developmental Appropriateness

  There are essential arts concepts and skills for the young child to grow and develop. These should be determined at the outset of planning so the most important can be built in over time. In the arts, accurate portrayal of artistic tools, toys, and processes should be screened with professional, early childhood, arts educators. Parameters can be set for developmental appropriateness in all the arts, including:

  • Steady beat activities (a critical pre-reading skill).
  • Vocal range of songs (a 6th for those songs sung by children).
  • Appropriate vocal tone color, including lighter and heavier registrations as stylistically appropriate, and speaking, singing, whispering, and calling voices.
  • Developing a range of contrasting non-locomotor and locomotor movements including the Laban efforts and different ways to travel through space. Skipping can be modeled in preparation for this important developmental step.
  • Bilateral movement, and playing instruments that have a large striking surface, are appropriate for young children.
  • Hand clapping games and alternating hands as modeling for the future.
  • Finger paints and large, easy to hold writing utensils. Some adaptive utensils for differently able children would be helpful models.
  • Construction with blocks and/or found objects.
  
  

• Emphasize Experience and Exploration in the Arts

  Young children will have a lifetime to refine their skills and understandings. A plethora of intentionally different experiences will provide them with broad categories through which to understand new experience. Exploration will lead to an understanding of the learning process itself--learning how to learn. Rather than focusing on development of a few sophisticated skills, the opportunity to experience diverse events and activities will yield more flexibility, understanding, and skill in the future.

• Invite Imagination

  Children naturally cross from imaginative image to real, blurring the lines that adults so clearly know. This ability to imagine is the childlike quality that creative adults have managed to sustain. These adults are our society's inventors, entrepreneurs, and artists. They move ideas forward, invent new ideas, and solve old problems with new solutions.

  The childlike quality of imagination is in danger of being eradicated as there is increasing downward pressure for testing, particularly in the linear and measurable aspects of reading and math. For imagination to flourish, children must be free to do a child's work, and "a child's work is play." The value of unstructured playtime where children set their own agendas, goals, and tasks cannot be overemphasized. If there is any criteria for parents and caretakers to focus on, it is this one first.

  Adults can engage in imaginative play, but should carefully take the lead from the child(ren), and suspend judgment so no idea is right or wrong, unless there is a serious moral or ethical issue. This requires engaged adults who are thinking in the moment, and participating in the play world.

  Imagination is also built when possibilities for using raw materials are presented, rather than easily imitated, closed ended activities. Rearranging a group of tones several ways is more desirable than just playing a set pattern of tones to create "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."

• Value the Process over the Product

  The product, as stated earlier, is simply the end result of a process. It is during the processes of creating, performing, and responding that learning and growth take place. The most appropriate feedback for children regarding their creation is either to describe what is seen or heard, or to ask the child to describe what they have done, and then ask if s/he likes it. Praise can build self-esteem, but often leads to "praise junkies" who never learn to self assess and critique work. Often children create for their own personal challenge, rather than to generate masterworks for audience consumption. By inviting discussion of facts and feelings, the process of communication can be developed along with the artistic processes.

• Present Proactive, Multifaceted, Arts-Competent Models of Children and Adults

  Children can be modeled as creators, performers, and responders to the arts. They should also model the creative process. Adults can be models of turning negative situations into positive ones. They can help solve problems by posing questions that help in decision-making. They can describe and label ideas, skills, and objects. And they can model descriptive language when evaluating kid or adult art, using both facts and feelings.

  The arts provide many opportunities for critical thinking and creative problem solving. Creating art is problem solving at its best. Performing art requires skill and attention. And responding to art requires critical thinking, analysis, comparison, and personal judgment.

• Both Integrate and Isolate the Arts

  Integrated arts experiences combine sound, image, and movement. There is an excellent example in Sesame Street's Season 22 of a Picasso painting that comes to life, with music added to enhance the movement. Media is perfect for this type of stimulus.

  Isolated arts experiences would extend the above experience by presenting it as a unified whole first, then at different times present just the image, sound, and/or movement. Finally, it would be shown as an integrated whole again. This requires the courage to have a blank screen when focusing just on the sound, or a blank sound track when focusing on the image.

  The above suggested activity can be done without presenting the whole experience at the beginning, just presenting the building blocks starting with one, and adding another on each presentation. A lovely example can be found in a sequence of patterned images and sounds in the jungle, added one at a time to increase the complexity step by step. This sequence will help children sustain memory and interest more than a few minutes, and provide a model of coming back to refine something again and again.

  Another interpretation of integrating the arts is using the arts to illustrate ideas in a different area such as language, math, science, or social/emotional curriculum. This could occur through using art objects, such as brass instruments, to illustrate combinations of the number 4, or using arts processes to illustrate a concept, such as color blocks working together to create a larger whole group structure.

  The Sesame Street writers and creative team are at their best when imagining these links, and should be an impressive model of what is possible that enables children to think across disciplines or categories.

• Broaden Cultural Representation

  As our society (and therefore audience) grows increasingly diverse, media can play a role in either helping or hindering children in tolerating diversity, and celebrating similarities and differences. Cultural differences occur within arts, across arts, and across cultures. Media can represent:

  • Multiple styles within arts, such as:
    • Musical speech pieces, vocal ensembles, instrumental ensembles, popular and classical genres, and historical periods.
    • Visual art media such as watercolors, acrylics, pencil drawings, sculpture, architecture, historical periods, pop and classical styles.
    • Modern and classical dance, tap, ballet, ballroom, creative dance, movement with props and lights, dance of different periods.
  • Exploring one style across arts, such as several arts of one culture that focus on a central theme or common element.
  • Varied examples of arts from each culture, to provide a broader representation of the variety within the culture. For example: African music is not one thing. It is many, many styles, and these are expanded through the fusion with other cultures inside and outside Africa. Exposure to only drumming may lead the viewer to think that there is no vocal music in Africa, or any pitched string instruments, and so on. In the same vein, American folk art is not one thing, but encompasses whittling, painting, quilting, beading, and so on.
  
  

• Avoid Stereotypes

  By avoiding stereotypes, providing breadth, and using authentic materials of the culture, the arts can provide culture's common ground for building understanding and celebrating the range of diversity that makes the world and interesting place. Children tend to like what they know and have experienced, so broad cultural exposure is one of the many challenges being made to media as they move forward.

  Another stereotype that is inadvertently occurring is that the excellence of Muppet performances sometimes trivializes the real children. The representation of puppets and real children should be considered carefully for which is most able to provide the appropriate model. Children in media presentations need to be "everyday kids," but should come from arts-rich environments so they sing in tune, possess a range of movements, and can draw at a developmentally appropriate level using different media. While this is a fine line, providing models that are skilled does not translate into presenting only "gifted and talented" children. There is a middle ground.

  The children's responses to questions should be beyond the stereotypical, and their relationship with one another and the Muppets can be as friends rather than being in parallel universes on the same screen. In Sesame Street, the Muppets often direct children to do something, but the children rarely are provided leadership roles.

  Additional stereotypes include cliché drawings such as the sun as a circle in the top corner of a picture, the ubiquitous red flower with green leaves, and the rainbow. Silly "kid babble-dancing" that does not match the music, and singing out of tune can be added to the child/art stereotypes to be avoided.

• Plan Interactive Participation

  Interactive participation can be hands-on, brains-on, or both. The hands-on interaction has been the hardest to effectively execute through television.

  The most obvious and easiest format is to provide models during a show that can later be tried by children, or caretakers and children together. Accompanying magazines or on-line sites with concrete suggestions in clear language and images provide additional help. Addition of open-ended tools or toys such as scarves, blocks, and so on will provide children and caretakers with ideas for play times.

  The greater challenge is finding appropriate ways to afford interaction during the viewing time. Movement can be encouraged during the show, and focus group testing of this type of invitation was well received by children who readily participated in positive and productive ways. Active, hands-on participation is hard to plan, and often, good intentions lead to weak segments. More and different imaginative thinking is necessary to improving this element of engagement.

  Another way to encourage interaction is to invite the viewer to make decisions, choices, or judgments about what they hear, see, or feel. An example is to have the child viewer decide whether one or another instrument playing a melody would be most appropriate in a certain setting, or whether a character should choose one or another painting to put on the bedroom wall. The characters analyzing the problem could suspend their decision-making, discussing both facts and feelings about both.

  Providing caretakers and children with models of this type of discussion also might engage viewers in brains-on activity, inviting the viewer to tell, "What do YOU think about this choice? What would YOU do if it were your room?"

  The challenge to include meaningful interaction that engages the child, particularly through movement, singing, and tracing (drawing) in the air, can be explored and implemented far more than has been done thus far. It is crucial for brain development, and for optimal use of the child's time while viewing.

A Goal of Imagination and Creativity

The characteristics of imagination and creativity, and problem solving models, have been discussed above. Children's media writers are highly imaginative and creative individuals, and they use their creativity to develop engaging shows. Sesame Street's writers are, perhaps, the cream of the creative crop. Any adult who has watched the show has found cleverness at every turn.

However, adult cleverness does not necessarily translate into children developing imaginative thoughts and behaviors. While the program designers demonstrate continual use of fluency, flexibility, elaboration, and originality, how can the program segments be designed so the viewers develop and use these same characteristics of creative people?

Is there a way to guide viewers through the creative problem solving process from problem, to brainstorming, to incubation, and finally AHA? If we provide opportunities for viewers to engage in this process through the arts of sound, image, and gesture/movement along with the characters on the show, will the viewers then become the creative problem solvers society requires as they become the adults of tomorrow?

Our culture and society is dependent on the evolution of media programming to address the issues highlighted in this chapter.