Chapter 12
Science, Social Studies, and More: The Knowledge Readers Need
One recent day in California, a six-year-old boy named Brandon was hanging out at home, watching one of Disney's Ice Age movies, when he saw a scene that captivated him. On the screen were the lovable animations of Ice Age's prehistoric beasts, loping along the barren, icy terrain. Brandon turned to his father: “Papi, at that time, what was it like? There weren't any buses?” Smiling, his father, José Rubén, saw this as a teachable moment. He went to his computer, pulled up YouTube, and searched for videos that would show his son more about what life was like during that time.
“We watched videos where it is shown and everything,” the father said as he recounted this scene for Amber Levinson, a Stanford researcher whose work informed a recent report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. Brandon and José Rubén's interests led them from one history video to another, and soon the two of them were watching a documentary about dinosaurs and other species.
What does watching Disney movies and a dinosaur documentary have to do with reading and literacy? So much more than you might think. Here was a moment in which Brandon was engaged in building his knowledge base, getting an introduction to concepts and ideas that not only gave him a little more understanding of the Ice Age, but also helped him put the Ice Age into context of other periods in history and start to gain a framework for thinking about how time passes and how change happens. He was hooked in enough to start to reflect upon and then store new information for recall sometime in the future when he may be asked to talk about, read about, or write about—be literate about—how life has changed on Planet Earth.
What's more, Brandon was also getting a lesson in media literacy and digital literacy too. Though his father may not have even realized it, he was modeling what it looks like to use digital information to gain a deeper sense of the world. He recognized the importance of Brandon's question and rewarded it by spending time helping him find answers. He showed what it looks like to search for information online and make distinctions between fiction (a movie) and non-fiction (a documentary).
When most people talk about the troubling state of children's reading in the United States, the untapped power of these kinds of learning moments are not likely on their minds. Instead they may think our country's problems are simply a function of whether children ever learned how to decode words on a page or read sentences with fluency. But the root of the problem may be in children's abilities to comprehend and make sense of the ideas that are built by those words and sentences. Recent vocabulary scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example, showed that American children are making few if any significant gains in understanding the meaning of complex words, with a wide gulf between white students and those of Hispanic students and African American students. So if there are ways to build that word learning and even more importantly build a deeper knowledge base that enables comprehension in today's children, don't we have a moral obligation to seize it?
Joint Media Engagement and Knowledge Building
Given their potential, moments like those between Brandon and his father are now the subject of a growing body of scholarship. They have spawned a new term in the world of media research: “joint media engagement,” sometimes shortened to JME. This kind of engagement can happen when any two or more people—parent and child, siblings, or peers—are looking at the same media at the same time, are involved in the content together, and are prompted by what they are seeing to interact with each other and bring more meaning to what they are watching or doing. The term was coined in 2010 by researchers at the LIFE Center, a collaborative lab, funded by the National Science Foundation, whose name is short for Learning in Informal and Formal Environments. Run by the University of Washington, Stanford University, SRI International, Northwestern University, and the University of California at Berkeley, the group has been pooling resources across neuroscience, cognitive science, education, and media research to examine what happens when people learn together with media. Research on JME includes traditional examples, such as parental “co-viewing” of Sesame Street and other TV shows, as well as just-emerging practices, like playing together with apps.
That kind of engagement is critical to helping children build a knowledge base, especially for struggling readers. Remember Dan Willingham, the cognitive scientist we introduced in chapter 2? Willingham had cited an experiment showing that children with mediocre reading skills but deep knowledge of baseball scored significantly higher than their peers on reading tests when the subject matter was baseball. Their interest in the content translated to a store of knowledge that enabled them to comprehend the text and whiz through the vocabulary that stumped other children.
Willingham's research builds upon theories that are often associated with E. D. Hirsch Jr., a professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, who has been vocal for decades about the importance of cultural literacy and background knowledge in helping children learn to read. For example, an introduction to the “Three Blind Mice” or the Statue of Liberty, Hirsch explains, can be helpful to children's future reading comprehension; there is a good chance they will come across a reference to that rhyme or statue in something they read in the future. In the 1990s, Hirsch wrote a series of books such as What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know and What Your First Grader Needs to Know, which expounds on the need for all children to acquire some “common ground” in their knowledge of concepts, characters, and artifacts from the worlds of literature, art, history, geography, science, and more. He is best known for the 1988 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, which made the New York Times bestseller list.
At the time of Cultural Literacy's publication, Hirsch's ideas were highly controversial, and in many ways they still are. To conservative critics, the focus on acquiring background knowledge sounds too much like dictating curriculum and national standards. Liberal critics fault his choices of classic texts and important historical moments and warn readers that his books are the product of an old white man's point of view. But Hirsch's larger point jibes with what has become well understood in language learning and literacy: children need to gain some knowledge of a thing before they can fully comprehend texts with direct references or allusions to it. It is not fair to demand that children excel at reading comprehension tests (or recognize words from the Anglo-centric story of the Little Red Hen) when they have not been introduced to the concepts that might help them build that vocabulary. Children need exposure to the subject matter of the world.
That exposure can certainly come from books, as long as the books are rich in content; it can come from field trips (apple orchards, construction sites, aquariums); it can derive from observing and asking questions of people about what they are doing or what they know (cashiers, nurses, bus drivers); and it can come from all sorts of audiovisual media (TV shows about zoologists with pet lemurs, video games about the spread of infection, DVDs on the history of Martin Luther King Jr.).
That last category is the one that many e-literacy pioneers are now aggressively trying to tap into. Children of all backgrounds love audiovisual media, and children from immigrant households may have even more to gain because they are in the challenging and yet ultimately enviable position of acquiring more than one language at the same time. Their parents certainly see potential: according to the Cooney Center report Aprendiendo en Casa, which surveyed 682 Hispanic parents, “Most parents whose child used educational media regularly reported that their child learned academic skills from media, particularly in reading or vocabulary.”
The survey also found that Spanish-only families generally spend more time in joint media engagement than English-only families. “There is value for both parents and children in media content that serves as a springboard for conversation and activities, as well as content that promotes joint media engagement,” the authors write. “Such content is sorely needed across all platforms.”
Making Meaning in Maine
Let us take you now to Milbridge, Maine, to see the power of joint media engagement when given a platform for success. Milbridge is a coastal town of 1,200 people southeast of Bangor with frigid waters, spires of narrow evergreen trees, and rocky shoreline. During the summer, the harvest is blueberries. Another source of work is Cherry Point Products, Inc., a nearby company that fishes, processes, freezes, and sells sea cucumbers and hagfish during the agricultural off-season.
It may sound like a remote place, but the challenges and opportunities within this town will probably sound familiar to anyone living in a part of the United States that has undergone rapid change in demographics. During the past fifteen years, Milbridge has undergone a dramatic demographic shift as migrant families from Mexico and other parts of Central America have been arriving to find jobs. The families piece together year-round work through a combination of blueberry harvesting, wreath making, and other seasonal labor. With little money for books and extracurriculars, and most parents still learning English, their children often struggle in school.
Recently several of these families have had the opportunity to take part in an unusual early childhood education program called Comienza en Casa | It Starts at Home. We first heard about Comienza en Casa in 2012, its founding year, when we interviewed one of its co-creators, a gregarious teacher and Maine resident named Bonnie Blagojevic. At the time, she was already known in early childhood circles for her ambitious approaches to blending storybooks and new technologies with hands-on activities. Blagojevic described a program in which a home visitor—who happened to be her daughter—arrived at homes with armfuls of learning materials and guided families in lively learning sessions that involved iPads, iBooks, podcasts, print books, toys, cardboard boxes, cooking recipes, and art supplies. It sounded like a blast. Better yet: almost every bit was offered in both English and Spanish.
We resolved to learn more. In May 2014, we sent Lindsey Tepe, a member of Lisa's team at New America, to Milbridge. She was guided by Ana Blagojevic, Bonnie's daughter, who designed the program as an educational initiative for the nonprofit organization for migrant families in Maine called Mano en Mano | Hand in Hand. Ana introduced Lindsey to teachers, parents, and children to help answer a flurry of questions: Were families genuinely interested in participating in the program? Were there any visible or measurable signs of success? And what exactly was the point of the iPad?
Nurturing a Scientist, On Screen and Off
Lindsey met the Vazquezes, a young family with an active, smiling, five-year-old with round cheeks, dark brown eyes, and an insatiable appetite for learning new things. Jayden was just a few months away from starting kindergarten. His mother, Juana, who spoke English and Spanish, said that before joining Comienza en Casa she had been unsure of what to do to help her son prepare for school. Fortunately the program had given her a bounty of ideas.
That afternoon Lindsey sat with Juana in her sunlit kitchen and watched how she nurtured one of her son's newfound interests: science. On their screened-in porch, several potted plants were set up for an experiment on how their proximity to sunlight would affect how fast they grew. A piece of paper was taped to Jayden's bedroom door that said “Scientist's Room.”
“He's also really into rockets and space ships,” Juana said. As Juana and Lindsey talked, Jayden used the iPad to pull up examples of a previous project, photos of a model spaceship he had built with his father. “Mom, can we save the rocket one, and record it?,” Jayden asked, speaking in English for Lindsey's benefit. “Okay,” Juana responded. During a prior visit with Ana, the family had started using an app called Shadow Puppet that enabled Jayden to narrate photographs and drawings. “Go to Shadow Puppet,” she reminded him.
“So first, I'm going to pick a few photos,” Jayden said aloud. “Pick a few photos—my rocket. Mom, what do we call it?” he asked as the app prompted him to name the video. He pressed the record button. “This is my rocket, you know about the rocket explodes up. It goes 100 miles up. I have all the materials to build it, so me and my dad built it.” Then Jayden pressed “Save.” Together, the photos he selected and his narration told a story that was now recorded for posterity.
“His vocabulary has gone up,” Juana said. By using interactive photos and e-books, she explained, “he can click on the stuff and it tells you what it is. His vocabulary is much better than it was before.”
Consider what unfolded as Jayden recorded his rocket story. Not only was he speaking fluently in his second language and translating concepts from what he knew in Spanish into English, he was using words about science and math. He had said the word explode. He had used terminology associated with measurement and distance: “It goes 100 miles up.” No matter that in this example it was actually a toy that, according to the packaging, could only be propelled 1,100 feet, not 100 miles; those kinds of details are not understood by most five-year-olds. What mattered was Jayden getting practice in how to express himself and document what he had created or observed. Moreover, he was building the background knowledge to draw upon years later when he might come across paragraphs—in either English or Spanish—about spacecraft, propulsion, and upward trajectories.
Of course, a touchscreen tablet is not required to entice children to make rockets, talk about explosions, or do arts and crafts. But here in Milbridge, at least, it was evident the device played a stimulating role. “He really likes drawing on the iPad and stuff, and then after that he started to like doing it on paper,” Juana said. “He didn't really know his letters at the beginning. I didn't know how to practice with him or show him, or what to really do.” The materials curated by Comienza en Casa, she said, “gave me lots of ideas and activities I could do.”
The tablet had become a handy device for organizing and personalizing material for the Vazquez family and other families in the Comienza en Casa program. A few months earlier, Blagojevic and her team had started creating iBooks to be used on each family's iPad with a combination of Spanish and English resources intentionally selected to meet the participating family's needs. Each iBook became a receptacle for monthly activity sheets for units of study that accompanied the Comienza en Casa visits. Blagojevic also loaded the iPads with Ready Rosie videos, podcasts, e-books, and games that related to the activities and specific themes. Not only were these materials now easily accessible, “families have really seemed to be enjoying them,” Blagojevic said.
“Before we started the program,” Juana admits, “we were reading a little bit, but not as often. Now we read every night, and he says ‘Mom, it's time to read’ and he's reading up to three books. Before, he would sit still, but he wasn't as interested.”
Juana's ability to talk about her families' reading habits and how they have changed speaks volumes. Think back to the many examples in the last chapter, in which researchers were experimenting with text messages and other tools to encourage parents to talk with and read to their children. Here, in many ways, it was Jayden who was leading his mother to new levels of interaction. Her child's desires, sparked by learning prompted by the materials at his fingertips, were helping them both find new ways to build knowledge about the world
English and Spanish Connections for Parents
Later that day, Jayden and his parents traveled to the town's primary school to participate in one of Comienza en Casa's group meetings, at which parents and children share what they are learning. In the second half of the meeting, the kids were released to play and the adults broke into groups to look through ideas for the next unit of study. One of the groups was examining tadpole eggs that Ana had brought in to identify several characteristics of living things. She also had books on tadpoles. The books were only available in English, but part of the lesson focused on how parents could use Google Translate and other online resources to identify new vocabulary words and find answers to questions when they were unsure of the correct answer.
Bonnie and Ana had developed content-specific vocabulary lists for each unit. But this time the mothers developed vocabulary lists themselves based on what they were finding in their research and in the books on tadpoles. They listed the words in both English and Spanish (gills, gel, eggs) that could be emphasized throughout the unit. After leafing through picture books from the public library, they checked out books to support their family's exploration of living versus nonliving things.
Because the Comienza program is designed for parents and children together, it has led to some important discoveries about parents' needs and strengths as much as those of the kids. Not only were parents getting an introduction to English, they were also learning more words in their native language. “The vocabulary and content knowledge, even in [the] native language, families didn't know,” Bonnie said. At the same time, the parents taking part in Comienza en Casa were clearly eager to learn. Their strong desire to give their children the best possible start, their openness to exploring new things, their ability to seek out new information, and their discoveries of the interplay and cultural connections between vocabulary in their first language and their second language: all of these were on view for their children to see, providing a model for their children of lifelong learning in a multicultural, multilingual world.
Tools for Building Knowledge
Like its hometown in Maine, the Comienza en Casa program is very small. About four or five families participate each year. But the general approach could easily be replicated in cities and towns around the country. In fact, many of the online and app-based resources curated by Ana and Bonnie Blagojevic are already available to millions of people every day. For example, Comienza makes heavy use of Ready Rosie, the video modeling company introduced in chapter 7. Because its videos are available in both English and Spanish, they became ideal vehicles for introducing Spanish-speaking families to activities to do at home.
Other apps and online tools could be harnessed for the same purpose. Take the Early Learning Environment, fondly known as Ele (“Ellie”), which is an interactive space designed by the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children's Media. Fred Rogers (aka Mister Rogers) was an early proponent of using media to help children. He saw getting involved as the answer to curtailing what might otherwise be media's negative effects. “I went into television because I hated it so,” he once said during a CNN interview, “and I thought there's some way of using this fabulous instrument to nurture those who would watch and listen.” Although Rogers passed away in 2003, his welcoming spirit is still alive in Ele. The home page presents a short welcoming video encouraging educators and parents to look around, browse through libraries of short videos that present fun activities for building word knowledge, and put together “playlists” of apps and games, online and off. Among the scores of examples are rhyming games to play while folding the laundry, science-building activities using food dye to make “colorful milk,” and videos of Rogers and Eric Carle reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Another research-based tool is Wonderopolis, a website and app from the National Center for Families' Learning, a national nonprofit focused on family literacy. Every day Wonderopolis publishes a “wonder,” a question posed and an answer supplied in a brief video. Wonder #1331 ponders, “Why Are Your Feet So Ticklish?” (http://wonderopolis.org/wonder/why-are-your-feet-so-ticklish/) Wonder #706 asks, “Do Warthogs Really Have Warts?” (http://wonderopolis.org/wonder/do-warthogs-really-have-warts/). Through e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, or simply by stopping by the website, tens of thousands of teachers and parents around the world are receiving these “wonders of the day” to show their kids. Kindergarten teachers have used them to kick off discussions during circle time. Science teachers assign them for homework. Anyone can nominate new wonders and vote for their favorites. At last check, the most popular wonder, with 841 votes, was Wonder #1048: “Is the Five Second Rule Really True?,” a PBS NewsHour clip that ends with the disappointing news that, yes, bacteria will attach to that Dorito dropped on the cafeteria floor no matter how many seconds it has been there (http://wonderopolis.org/wonder/is-the-five-second-rule-really-true/).
And to encourage intergenerational learning and play, the Cooney Center recently created a guide for parents, written comic-book style, entitled Family Time with Apps, that encourages the creation of family media projects, new ways to connect with distant family members, and taking advantage of tools to explore of the outside world.
In short, the proliferation of interactive media and digital video has made it easier than ever to help children acquire that background knowledge that Hirsch, Willingham, and many other scholars have shown to be so important to literacy. Not only do these tools offer rich content, from the Ice Age to the Digital Age, they do it in a way that doesn't shut out parents who may not have perfect English reading skills themselves. No longer do parents have to read their children a book about plants or rockets to introduce them to activities involving plants or rockets. Even better, some of these media moments are being designed as launch pads for adults to engage children in conversation about what they are learning.