A blog of my running thoughts while reading. *Warning: Spoilers*
I have some serious issues with this book. I’m bothered that the researcher, Anne Haas Dyson, seemed to respect the kids’ choices of source material so little that she couldn’t even be bothered to learn much about it herself. What message does that send to the kids? What message does that send to the teachers who read this book and listen to Dyson’s research? I’m more than a little bothered by the implications.
The “media summaries” in the book were not great and raised some real concerns. They occasionally had inaccurate or misleading information, which is frustrating, and they also sometimes cited a different version of the media story than the children did (for example, they summarized the movie version of the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” rather than the cartoon the kids were watching each week). I also found it frustrating that all the media summaries were written by research assistants, rather than by Dyson herself. This reinforced to me the image (accurate or not, I have no idea) that Dyson herself didn’t actually watch or learn much first-hand about the media that the kids were writing about and playing at. That’s extremely frustrating and has heavily colored my reactions to this book.
Dyson’s tables of data are kind of interesting - especially the one showing the percentages of stories involving media characters at each grade level and each gender. What stuck out most for me, however, was how many pieces of finished writing, regardless of topic, each group had produced and how there was a big gender disparity. It’s most pronounced in third grade. The boys produced more pieces per person than the girls. Why is that? What would make that happen? Supposedly girls are generally better with language and schoolwork than boys, but this seems to suggest just the opposite. More data would be needed to say anything with any kind of certainty, but I’m still bothered by it.
Dyson seems overfond of finding clever things to teach her readers and that last little two-page coda is a perfect example. It was really not needed in the book and actually felt extremely random and tacked on. I think the book would have been better without it (although Miles’ ideas about God as a literary figure are interesting, just really appropriate here).
Ok, Dyson kind of pissed me off at the end of her chapter looking at the practical pedagogy of all that she’s been examining in the book. She states that the cultural sources the children had been playing with in their writing, theater and games wasn’t stuff that would make anyone’s ‘recommended list’. I had gotten throughout the book that she didn’t think very highly of any of the media the kids discussed, but that statement really crystallized for me how poorly she regarded them - despite her pointing out the class issues involved in doing so. A lot of the media the kids played with is actually very good and should be respected. The X-Men have an incredibly complex story that makes for great reading or watching and is often very worth recommending. Aladdin is an extremely high quality film in terms of storytelling, acting, animation, music and just about everything else. The kids she observed even had reasonably good taste in video games! Sonic the Hedgehog is totally classic and actually a pretty good game. It regularly makes “top games” lists. I think Dyson, and likely many of her colleagues, need to open their minds and really look at the media these kids chose to interact with most - they might be surprised. But I doubt that will ever happen.
I’m impressed with the sophistication of the children’s stories, but not particularly surprised. They are telling stories that reflect the world around them, of which they are very aware. Why shouldn’t those stories be complex? The world is complex and they know it. The fact that it is largely the middle-class white girls who have an issue with race, especially when it comes to romantic encounters, is not a surprise either. They almost certainly don’t encounter mixed-race couples in their everyday lives as often as the other kids who have a higher chance of living in or next to a family containing at one (or more). It just means that we need to work on those perceptions, broaden the field of what seems ‘normal’. It’s kind of sad, in it’s way, though.
Dyson’s study is really interesting, but I have a number of issues with her methods. First of all, she herself knew nothing about superheroes when she started the study and largely relied on her student assistants to gather information about them. If she had little to no knowledge of the material herself, how can she really pull meaning from what the kids do with it? Of even more concern is her limited sample (one class) and brief time with them. She spent only the second semester of each of two school years observing the class. Why the break? Why didn’t she observe the first semester that second year (assuming she wasn’t ready to observe the first semester of the first year or some other reasonable reason)? It seems like a major oversight, and Dyson makes no remark on it, no explanation at all. If she had reasons for setting up her observation schedule that way, they failed completely to make it into the book. It makes no sense at all and is extremely frustrating!
I find it interesting to see Tina’s social activism and the way her ideas play into her stories. She clearly understood very early on and increasingly so over time that it’s not the quantity of female roles that matters so much, but the quality of those roles. This is really impressive thinking and especially so since she consistently defends it and backs it up with her own ideas. She must have been a fascinating child to study!
I like the girls’ X-Men stories a lot. Not only did they achieve their stated goal of letting more girls play and incorporate the relationship-based concepts they had previously been focusing on in their stories, but they also managed to stay more true to the source material. The themes and characters’ personalities were far more faithful to the X-Men seen in the cartoon of comics than anything the boys had written. I’m really not sure why that is, but it was certainly an interesting and unexpected phenomenon.
I find it very interesting that the kids Dyson observed, and many other kids as well, have such determined, and yet almost subconscious, images of gender. What’s actually in a particular show or movie is almost irrelevant. Rogue may be a powerful superhero, but to those kids, especially the boys, she’s just a girl who belongs to a boy. And no matter how much April O’Neill might accomplish, she’ll always be the pretty white girl who always needs saving! How do these images of gender get so forced that they begin to write over existing stories like this? The easy answer would be to say it’s another result of our over-gendering of babies and kids, but is it that simple? I doubt it. I’m sure they get some of it at least more or less directly from adults, which is also sad. The real question is, what do we do about it?