Working with TV
One of the most important - and most challenging - aspects of engaging with the public about scholarly work is communicating through professional media, especially television. The following report by Amy Sheldon, Ph.D., Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota, describes such an experience. Prof. Sheldon is also an Affiliate of the Center for Cognitive Sciences and a member of the Graduate Faculty in Linguistics.
In the spring of 2006, I was contacted by a producer of the BBC television series, Child of Our Time. Our emails led to phone calls and then a visit to London for face-to-face work on a segment of their next show. The following is a narrative of a rather unique experience of public engagement.
Child of Our Time is a popular series in Britain, which started broadcasting in the year of the Millennium. The concept is to follow 22 families with children born in 2000, for the first 21 years of their lives. The show is a vehicle to discuss biological and social influences on children’s lives, and to explore current issues in human development for children and families as these children and families go through life stages and particular events. In England I discovered that it is well known and many follow it regularly, even if they don’t have children.
BBC works with academic specialists, usually from Britain, to develop the conceptual basis for each Child of our Time program. I was contacted by one of the producers, who knew about my work on language and gender in young children's social interactions. I collaborated on just one aspect of their next program..
On May 14th, BBC was bringing a subset of the children with their families to London for an intensive day of filming with multiple film crews, at the BBC Media Center. In a series of transatlantic phone calls, I sketched out the rationale and design for filming the children for the module, based on my research. The results would need to be interpreted, and this led to the idea of my coming over to work on the spot.
It was important to work out some of the filming details, and I was pleased to be able to do so. During filming, I had the help of a personal assistant (a Ph.D. in neuroscience) while I observed on a monitor in an adjoining room, and I coordinated with a child psychiatrist who was in direct contact with the children and film crew. At the end of the afternoon, after 5 pair of children had been filmed, I was filmed with the host of the program, Professor Sir Lord Robert Winston, M.D., discussing some aspects of the children's interactions that were captured on film. Despite the switch in cultural context, interaction turned out as predicted by my research in the U.S., but there were some intriguing twists as well.
I expect to continue the conversation with BBC as they edit the program over the summer.
Although I have been interviewed on radio and television before, it was helpful to have the expertise of the University News Service staff to discuss bridging from the university world to the media world.
This project also gave me the opportunity to renew my observations of local millennium children at the University of Minnesota Child Care Center, the original setting for this research, and at two local kindergartens as well.
I describe this project and the background work in some detail to give an idea of how fascinating it was to be involved in the translation of my research for television, how stimulating it was to coordinate with the talented BBC producers and their staff, in short, how much fun it was to step outside the academic context and work behind the scenes with the BBC. I was impressed with BBC dedication to translating academic research for public consumption in a way that stays true to complex ideas yet creates a show that is entertaining and develops an audience at the same time. I was reminded of the importance of the media as a conduit for education beyond the classroom, adding resources of value.
This collaboration with the BBC is a form of public engagement that we could call "knowledge transfer", the humanities and social science counterpart to "technology transfer". But the transfer goes both ways. Working with the BBC has been a good extension my research process and gives food for thought for teaching as well.
It was a pleasure to contribute to Child of Our Time, a most interesting and worthwhile project. Stay tuned for the next program.
Related bibliography
Sheldon, A. and H. Engstrom. 2005. Two systems of mutual engagement: The co-construction of gendered narrative styles by American preschoolers.. In. J. Coates and J. Thornborrow (Eds.) The Sociolinguistics of Narrative, 171- 192. Studies in Narrative 6. John Benjamins.
Sheldon, A. 1997. Talking Power: Girls, Gender Enculturation and Discourse. In R. Wodak (Ed.). Gender and Discourse, 225-244. London: Sage.
Sheldon, A. and L. Rohleder. 1996. Sharing the same world, telling different stories: Gender differences in co-constructed pretend narratives. In D. I. Slobin, J. Gerhardt, A. Kyratzis, J. Guo. (Eds.) Social Interaction, Social Context, and Language, 613-632. Essays in honor of Susan Ervin-Tripp. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Sheldon, A. 1996. You can be the baby brother but you aren't born yet: Preschool girls' negotiation for power and access in pretend play. In Research on Language and Social Interaction, 29.1, 57-80. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. REPRINTED in Mary Talbot, Karen Atkinson, David Atkinson (Eds.) 2003. Language and Power in the Modern World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sheldon, A. 1992. Conflict talk: Sociolinguistic challenges to self-assertion and how young girls meet them. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 38.1, 95-117. 1992 Annual Invitational Issue, "Talk in the Study of Socialization and Development" edited by C. Garvey,
Sheldon, A. 1990. Pickle fights: Gendered talk in preschool disputes. Discourse Processes 13.1, 5-31, special issue on language and gender. REPRINTED In D. Tannen (Ed.) 1993. Gender and Conversational Interaction, 83-109. Oxford: Oxford University Press.