Occurrence of selected key competences in television production for children recipients
The submitted publication titled Occurrence of Selected Key Competences in Television Production for Children Recipients deals with an issue of specialized television channels intended for a child and adolescent viewer. The objective of the paper is to examine and analyse the state of current offer of programming services for a child recipient and to clarify the current status and role of specific television formats aimed at this target group. We focus our attention on the content and formal aspects of this type of media contents and their position in the programme structure of commercial televisions in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The main goal of the paper is to ascertain the present state of child and adolescent television channels in Slovakia and Czech Republic, primarily in the context of how their media contents allow the development of key competences of children of a pre-school and early school age. We will analyse television channels Baby TV, Duck TV, Ťuki, Disney Junior, Nick Jr., and Minimax.
Key words: Child television viewer, key competences, television channels, globalization, television production.
Introduction
We can say that television and internet have a positive influence on a child recipient in many ways – they help with attention development, teach foreign languages, educational programmes help a child with acquiring positive behaviour patterns and ethical norms. However, discussion about effects of television cannot end here. There are always two sides of the coin, the influence of television on a child viewer not excluded. If we talk about positive influence, in the same vein, we must add that negative influence also exists and is often latent, difficult for parents without a sufficient level of media literacy to notice, which can lead to a great risk to their children. Television depicts violence, can induce fear in children; they might acquire negative behaviour patterns, poor dietary habits, they are subjected to experience that they cannot emotionally process without explanation; they can easily substitute reality with the virtual representation of reality. Similarly, excessive television watching can contribute to their loss of concentration, obesity, insufficient exercise, loss of interest in other leisure activities. And these are only a few of negatives watching television without the presence of parents’ educative element might bring. In our opinion, the influence of television on a child recipient is still being trivialised in Slovakia. There is still a substantial number of parents who just “put” their child in front of television, while they cook/clean/do the necessary. That is why we have decided to focus our attention on globalization trends in the programming for children and adolescents. We will be interested in the content and programme structure of channels aimed at our selected age group, suitability of the programmes and their educative influence, and other areas.
1. Key Competences in the Conditions of the Slovak Republic
Essentially every government from 1993 has declared the area of education as one of the fundamental priorities of their four-year term of office. However, it is also the fact that the post of minister of education is one of the most problematic and there have already been 16 of them in modern history of our country. The average period of mandate of one minister of education is only 1.6 years (Suchožová 2014: 16).
In our opinion, this is an alarming trend and a significant obstacle to the attempts on a conceptual work not only in education, but also science, research or sport. Despite this, we are able to refer to several strategic governmental educational documents. Project “Millennium” is the national programme for the next 15 – 20 years developed in 2002. It included development of key competences as one of the central goals of education and training process. It defines them as an ability to show skills, knowledge, and capabilities on the level of practical activities. They are of a trans-subject character and are realized more in relation to methods of schooling than within the actual curriculum. Millennium is characterised by six principal key competences:
1. Communicative capabilities – are skills related to written and spoken expression. They also involve ability to explain, information search, reading comprehension, memory abilities, and, not least, communication and the ability to generate information in mother tongue and foreign languages.
2. Personality (interpersonal) skills – ability of an individual to improve themselves and their performance. This category also includes the disposition for independent and rational learning throughout life, for regulation and control over one’s behaviour or the ability to create interpersonal relationships on a progressive level. It further includes the ability to participate on teamwork, to tolerate different opinions, attitudes, culture; taking responsibility for one’s words and actions, respecting ethical values of humanity as a whole, respecting fundamental human rights, as well as the ability take care of one’s own health and the health of environment in which we live in.
3. Capability to solve problems in a creative and critical way – being able to focus not only on identification and analysis of problems, but also bring suggestions for further practice, learn from them, reflectively evaluate them, and, what is important – to be able to do all this in difficult and stressing conditions under challenging circumstances.
4. Ability to work with the achievements of modern information age – an adequate capability to work with computer, internet, various information sources and channels during both the working and leisure time.
5. Realization of specific applications – mainly in the numeric and symbolic areas; these are key competences related to natural and technical sciences, less related to social sciences.
6. Ability to form civil society – active interest and participation of citizens on building and consolidation of democratic system in the society on all levels – local, national, European, and global. In connection to our country, but also globally, we should also support sustainable social and economic model in regard of environment protection and responsibility for the elementary condition of our existence – preservation of life on the planet (Suchožová 2014: 16-17).
The aforementioned key competences should lay certain common ground for this area of educational process for both the European area and the Slovak conditions for education or other professional training. This also provides space for teachers and educational institutions in general to create their own educational programmes. Naturally, they should be based mainly on national concepts and should concentrate on implementation of key competences with regards to regional needs and challenges. In our case, we can primarily mention the national educational programmes ISCED 0 and ISCED 1, issued by the National Institute for Education. The former is aimed at pre-primary education, the latter at primary education. They provide a constructive basis for education of children of preschool age and early school age at the first stage of primary school (1st – 4th year of study). We will introduce them in more detail in the following chapters.
1.1 ISCED 0 – National Educational Programme for Pre-Primary Education
At this age, we encounter a child’s first steps within an organized school collective. From the pedagogical point of view, we speak of formation of competency fundamentals. In defining these, the Programme based on the Recommendation of the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union of 18th December 2006 precisely explicates key competences within individual phases of lifelong learning. It the preschool age, it mostly tries to take into account the developmental specificities. Main goals of pre-primary education are concentrated in three areas – socio-emotional, cognitive, and motor-perceptual. Through these, a child is getting ready for school education and the life in the society. The starting ground of this process is influenced by uniqueness of a child, their integration in a collective, and active learning. If we want to be specific, we can define these objectives of pre-primary education as:
- meeting the child’s need for social contact with peers;
- facilitating easy adaptation to a different environment and child’s smooth transition to a collective of kindergarten and, later, the primary school;
- supporting child’s attitude towards acquiring knowledge and learning through play;
- developing child’s personality in several key areas (moral, social, emotional, psycho-motor, and cognitive) in a creative atmosphere in a systematic and purposeful way;
- finding balance between the goals of education and a different socio-economic and socio-cultural background of a child;
- protecting and exercising child’s rights in cooperation with the involved institutions (family, school founder, school, etc.) while respecting ethical principles and individual needs;
- cooperating with parents – providing individual educational counselling with an aim to increase their confidence in a teacher and their work, focusing their attention on positive behaviour of their child, but also point out the negative ones, and, if necessary, being able to determine further consultancy with specialists (psychologist, paediatrician, speech therapist, etc.) (National Institute for Education 2008: 5).
1.2. Methodology of the Paper
According to the document ISCED 0 from 2006, we have created tables of key competences that children should attain from Baby TV, Duck TV, Ťuki, Disney Junior, Nick Jr., and Minimax through key competences we have obtained from ISCED 0. ISCED 0 precisely defines key competences within individual phases of lifelong learning. In preschool age, it mainly tries to have regard for developmental specificities. Main goals of pre-primary education are concentrated in three areas – socio-emotional, cognitive, and motor-perceptual. Through them, the child is preparing for school education and transition to life in the society. The bases of this process are influenced by uniqueness of the child, their integration in a collective, active learning, and classification based on an intentional, purposeful, and systematic cognitive process. In the disciplines of social sciences, this means recognition of social processes and phenomena. Such cognition has its specificities. According to S. Nowak, a scientific method is: “a specific, repeatable way of solving some scientific problem. It defines a reproducible way of collecting information of certain type that are necessary for solving a given research (empirical) problem.” (Nowak 1965: 13-14). A significant source of data information is obtained through the main method, i.e. the analysis of documents and content analysis of the programme structure of the specialized children’s television channels. Content analysis is one of the traditional procedures of document analysis. The main advantage of this research strategy is the variety of documents that opens the access to information that is otherwise difficult to acquire. Another advantage is the fact that data are not subjected to the influence of the source of error or bias. Although subjectivity of a researcher plays a role in selection of documents, it does not in information contained in the documents. We thus talk about a nonreactive method of data collection. Based on official documents (annual reports, statistics, etc.) and virtual data (internet), we conduct the analysis of the programme structure of specialized television programmes aimed at children and adolescents with an objective to map the state of this issue.
2. Results of the Research
2.1. Cognitive Competences in Television Channels for Children of Preschool Age
Cognitive competences are based on the cognitive development of a child at the end of pre-primary education. Cognitive competences comprise all thought operations. They can be expanded through e.g. problem-solving tasks (child solves simple tasks in their surroundings and evaluates them spontaneously and independently and decides by themselves what they like/dislike, what is right/wrong, what is good/bad about particular things, people, opinions) as well as various practical activities aimed at content (child looks for algorithm of solving tasks using the trial-and-error method or eliminates possible mistakes according to given oral instructions) (National Institute for Education 2008: 13).
Overall, we recognize four cognitive indicators and our research shows that the most present indicator in the selected television programmes is the KZ1 – Seeking connections between particular information and discovering the information which facilitates problem solving. This indicator has mainly occurred in the Baby TV television channel, but it can be stated that it is the most numerous from all analysed cognitive competences.
Indicator KZ3 – Solving simple problem tasks is the second most appearing competence. As an example in this case we can mention the animated series Fireman Sam that depicts a fireman living in the village of Pontypandy. It tells adventurous and brave stories from lives of firefighters. Whether you need to put out a fire, save a child from a deep pit or rescue a cat stuck in a tree, Fireman Sam and his team are here (https://tvprogram.idnes.cz/tvprogram.aspx?t=detail&id=46722005)
Table No. 1 Occurrence of Cognitive Competences on Television Channels Baby TV, Duck, Ťuki TV, Disney Junior, Nick Jr., and Minimax (Number of the analysed competences in the programmes).
Source: own elaboration, 2019
|
ISCED 0 Cognitive Competences |
||||||
|
Indicators |
Baby TV |
Duck |
Ťuki |
Disney Junior |
Nick Jr |
Minimax |
|
Problem-solving basics |
||||||
|
KZ1 - Seeking connections between particular information and discovering the information which facilitates problem solving |
19 |
16 |
2 |
0 |
2 |
1 |
|
KZ2 – Resolving problems in personal and social layer independently or in cooperation with a teacher |
8 |
0 |
4 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
KZ3 – Solving simple problem tasks |
16 |
2 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
KZ4 – Applying mathematical thinking in play and different situations |
4 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
2.2 Competences to Learn in Television Programmes for Children of Preschool Age
Competences to learn are related mainly to inner motivation of a child and their interest in learning new things; they influence child’s capability to finish the started activity, as well as their ability to concentrate on play and work and the willing processes in play and other activities, etc. We can mention the following examples of competences to learn:
- the child overcomes obstacles in order to learn;
- the child masters the basics of learning on the basis of personal motivation;
- the child learns to play with toys, work with books, learning aids, etc.
Common denominator of competences to learn is drawing the teachers’ attention to personality characteristics of a child that are necessary to attain readiness for school education. Competences to learn are of a key significance in relation to readiness for school, which, however, does not reduce the value and importance of the other types of competences. Competences to learn are closely connected to other competences, especially the cognitive competences (National Education for Education 2008: 12).
There are 15 indicators of competences to learn. From all the examined television channels and their programmes, we have found out through our analysis that the most occurring competence to learn is the U1 indicator – Showing curiosity and spontaneous interest in learning new knowledge. We have noted the highest number of these indicators on the Baby TV channel, where our analysis found as many as 72 occurrences of this indicator. Another television, in which we have recorded an increased number of the aforementioned indicators, is Duck TV, where the U1 indicator appeared for 43 times.
A concrete example is the programme Barbie – Dolphin Magic. While scuba diving and exploring the reef, sisters discover rare rainbow-coloured dolphins that only visit once a year. This amazing discovery encourages them to continue exploring with an aim to preserve the coral reef and all its sea life. That is when the sisters meet Isla, a mysterious new friend who is also on a mission to save the coral. What seems to be a simple task turns out to be a real adventure, especially when it is revealed that Isla is a mermaid. But there is no time to celebrate this discovery, because Barbie and the girls must solve the problem and save the reef (http://www.minimaxcz.tv/shows/barbie-magicky-delfin/).
Table No. 2 Occurrence of Competences to Learn on Television Channels Baby TV, Duck, Ťuki TV, Disney Junior, Nick Jr., and Minimax (Number of the analysed competences in the programmes)
Source: own elaboration, 2019
|
ISCED 0 Competences to learn |
||||||
|
Indicators |
Baby TV |
Duck |
Ťuki |
Disney Junior |
Nick Jr |
Minimax |
|
U1 – Showing curiosity and spontaneous interest in learning new things |
72 |
43 |
7 |
2 |
5 |
3 |
|
U2 – Using adequate signs, symbols, notions |
39 |
7 |
1 |
0 |
2 |
1 |
|
U3 – Using methods of observation, experiment, examination |
28 |
4 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
U4 – Seeking connections between the acquired experience and knowledge |
10 |
2 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
U5 – Their application in play, life situations, and other activities |
9 |
5 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
U6 – Asking questions and looking for answers, understanding the surrounding world of things, people, relations, and phenomena |
7 |
3 |
3 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
|
U7 - Spontaneous (through own curiosity) and intentional (under the pedagogue’s guidance) learning |
27 |
4 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
U8 – Expressing willing efforts in play and other activities |
1 |
2 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
U9 – Overcoming obstacles in the process of learning |
13 |
1 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
2 |
|
U10 – Planning optimal conditions for activities |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
U11 - Showing activity in individual and group learning |
2 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
|
U12 - Evaluating own performance, pleasure from success, respect and recognition of others’ performance |
0 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
1 |
|
U13 – Mastering the basics of learning through personal motivation |
1 |
5 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
U14 – Acquiring habits of working with toys, learning aids, books |
1 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
U15 – Concentrating for adequate periods of time on play and purposeful educational activated directed by a teacher |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
2.3 Information Competences in Television Programmes for Children of Preschool Age
Information competences are related to working with information in the broadest sense – from seeking information in children’s books, magazines, encyclopaedias or atlases to working with digital technologies. An important tool and means of developing information competences of children of preschool age is educational software containing meaningful educational games (National Instutute for Education 2008: 10).
There are two information indicators and our research clearly shows that the I2 indicator – Making use of different sources of information gathering, also outside the kindergarten, appears in the analysed televisions the most, mainly in the programmes of Duck TV, where we have recorded 7 instances of the aforementioned indicator in total. As an example, we present the animated series from the Duck TV production – Africa: Stories of Animals from the Africa Continent. This children’s programme introduces animals from Africa. Child learns to recognize animals and connect them to their natural environment (https://www.ducktv.tv/series/afrika-17.html).
Table No. 3 Occurrence of Information Competences on Television Channels Baby TV, Duck, Ťuki TV, Disney Junior, Nick Jr., and Minimax (Number of the analysed competences in the programmes)
Source: own elaboration, 2019
|
ISCED 0 Information competences |
||||||
|
Indicators |
Baby TV |
Duck |
Ťuki |
Disney Junior |
Nick Jr |
Minimax |
|
I1 – Showing pleasure in autonomously acquired information |
3 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
I2 - Using different sources of information gathering, also outside the kindergarten |
0 |
7 |
3 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
Conclusion
In the submitted paper, in both the theoretical and empirical part, we have addressed the issue of specialized television channels aimed at a child viewer that are available in Slovakia. We have put emphasis mainly on the content of the selected television channels and their programmes intended for the age group of younger children. We have paid attention to the content aspects of this type of media contents and to their position in the programme structure of commercial televisions with global reach. Further, we have analysed the selected television channels in relation to key competences aimed at children of preschool age issued by the National Institute for Education. Within research, we have used the international classification ISCED (International Standard Classification of Education), which is the source of formation and evaluation of educational programmes in Europe and is accepted also in other countries including the international organizations UNESCO and OECD.
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Bibliography and Sources:
Hendl, J. Kvalitativní výzkum. Základní teorie, metody a aplikace. Praha : Portál, 2012.
Hrmo, R., Turek, I. Kľúčové kompetencie I. Metodicko-pedagogické centrum v Bratislave, Bratislava, 2003.
National Institute For Education. 2008. National educational programme ISCED 0 – pre-primary education.
Nowak, S. Metody badaň socjologicznych. Wybór tekstów. Warszawa : PWN, 1965.
Suchožová, E. Rozvíjanie a hodnotenie kľúčových kompetencií v edukačnom procese, 2014.
Duck Tv https://www.ducktv.tv/series/afrika-17.html
Minimax Tv http://www.minimaxcz.tv/shows/barbie-magicky-delfin/
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