Constructions of knowledge and childhood: Addressing current affairs with children with a focus on parents’ practices and children’s news media

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which current affairs related to diversity and difference, nationally and globally, are represented to Australian children in children’s digital news media and through family discussions. The discussion is based on qualitative research that explores parents’ views and practices in addressing news media and diversity and difference issues with their children. In addition, this project includes a discursive analysis of stories found in Behind The News ( BTN), the primary digital news media source for Australian children, aged 8–13 years, from 2015–2018. The news stories are related to three significant topics: the marriage equality debate, refugees and terrorism. Within feminist post-structuralist, post-developmentalist and critical theorist frameworks, a focus is given to examining the dominant discourses that prevail in the stories, which provide insight into how childhood and children’s access to certain types of knowledge is viewed and regulated through media and family practices. Drawing on thematic and Foucaultian discursive analyses, the pilot study findings demonstrate that children’s news media is closely scrutinised and regulated, with major news stories framed within dominant discourses of childhood innocence, as well as the agenda and particular interests of the producers of children’s new media. These topics, which have dominated news in recent years, are frequently considered by some adults as inappropriate or difficult topics to discuss with children.

“People play it down and tell me it can’t kill people, but I know people are dying each day”. Children’s health literacy relating to a global pandemic (COVID-19); an international cross sectional study

“…Within many Western societies, children are perceived as vulnerable and innocent and are therefore often only allowed access to certain types of knowledge; their access to information is censored [21]. Although health education initiatives should embody children's right to be 'heard and listened to' as acknowledged by the UNCRC [22], evidence has shown how such initiatives can often be framed by adult agendas and concerns [19] and not acknowledge children as social actors [23].…”

Desafíos de la movilidad electrónica en entornos escolares de la educación infantil

“…Sin embargo, estos mismos medios pueden convertirse en herramientas poderosas para los escenarios escolares cuando los maestros y las maestras los utilizan para sumergir a su alumnado en la vida misma, haciendo de ellos sujetos menos localistas y más cosmopolitas. Al conocer las situaciones de otros niños y niñas en el mundo, pueden ir generándose en ellos y ellas procesos de concienciación que les impulse a actuar de forma crítica, cuestionar autoridades, situaciones, prejuicios y, en general, acontecimientos de todo tipo (Robinson et al, 2019), trascendiendo posiciones coloniales (de Sousa Santos y Meneses, 2014) anuladoras de identidades infantiles, como ese colonialismo de mercado que nos azota a grandes y pequeños, al que hay que plantar cara usando las TIC.…”