Seminars for the group study of selected topics not covered by regularly scheduled courses. Topics will vary from semester to semester.

Some kids' media trusts kids to think about what they’re seeing in front of them. Sesame Street's commercial parodies taught kids to spot advertising and laugh at it. Fred Rogers slowed everything down and showed kids exactly how the TV studio worked. The Dog Man books show kids the joy of reading (and making) books. And ambitious projects like Science Court, which existed both as a Saturday morning cartoon and as a CD-ROM for the “single-computer classroom,” made kids do the work of disproving bogus scientific statements. This class is about that tradition: mass media designed to reach a lot of kids all at once, to keep their attention, and to teach them media literacy and critical thinking. This tradition has always existed in tension with the fact that kids’ media is eyewateringly profitable. And there are plenty of entities that benefit from, frankly, children not being media literate— not thinking critically about what they're consuming, not asking who made it and why, not recognizing manipulation as it’s happening. That tension was present in the 1950s, when television first arrived in American living rooms and immediately started advertising cigarettes during family variety shows. It took an unprecedented political intervention — the creation of public broadcasting — to carve out space for something different, i.e. TV without ads. The challenges intensified in the Reagan era, when FCC deregulation turned Saturday morning cartoons into thirty-minute commercials. And it’s escalated dramatically with platform capitalism: Roblox treating child safety as a barrier to growth rather than a foundational duty, Meta being found liable just this year for products "engineered to exploit the developing brains of kids," recommendation algorithms that are structurally incentivized to push children toward more extreme content in order to increase time spent looking at ads. So, with greater challenges than ever: how do we use mass media to teach kids how mass media works?

This course focuses on children ages 4 to 12, which is not one audience but several: a kindergartner watching Bluey and a fifth-grader watching Fortnite streamers say curses are in almost entirely different media landscapes. We’ll pay particular attention to television and graphic novels as formats that can, in principle, exist outside advertising dependency and platform capture — formats that a child can experience alone or with a grownup, at their own pace. We’ll also return repeatedly to dynamics of race and class; the children with the least protection from the worst of the media landscape are, consistently, Black, brown, Indigenous, and low-income children, and that’s an issue that representation alone won’t solve.

Each week features a practitioner or researcher joining us via Zoom (or sometimes in person) for a conversation — creators, critics, researchers, and advocates who have spent their careers in or around these questions.

This is a DeCal led by a student facilitator, undergraduate ISF major Channing Kennedy.

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