Unbalanced minds? Children thinking about television

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Chapter 4. Unbalanced minds? Children thinking about television
Howard, Sue (1998). Unbalanced minds? Children thinking about television. In Wired Up: Young people and electronic media. Howard, S (ED.), Chapter 4. pp 57-76, UCL Press London.
Key words: assimilation, accommodation, educational television, equilibration, internalization, Piaget, Vigotsky, ZPD, zone of proximal development.


This reading is part of the Module Handbook of Educational Broadcasting.
In this text the author questions the bad reputation of television in the public mind. She recurs to Piaget and Vigotsky to pursue a study with kids from 3 to 10 years old. In the study she demonstrates that television shows can stimulate intellectual activity. The programmes she used are: Sesame street, The Simpsons, Bill Cosby, Bugs Bunny and others. As seen with those shows, she pretended to stimulate critical thinking from programmes different from documentaries, educational television, news programmes, science, wildlife and so on.
The most relevant concepts she introduces in the study are: Piaget’s assimilation and accommodation and equilibrium and Vigotsky’s internalization and ZPD.
Useful quotes:

• Vigotskyan theory has had a major impact here in showing how the culture’s ways of knowing, thinking and solving problems are passed on to children by more competent others through social transmission. P59
• Any function in the child’s cultural development appears twice, or on two planes, First, it appears on the social plane, and then on the psychological plane. First it appears between two people as an interpsychological category, and then within the child as an intrapsychological category. P59
• A model of thinking and learning that can account for both social and individual perspectives is thus probably one tat combines aspects of both Piagetian and Vigotskian theory –Paiget’s theory of equilibration and Vygotsky’s theory of the zone of proximal development. P59
• What is equilibration? Essentially it is a drive for order. Piaget (1954) claimed there seems to be an instinctive or innate need in people to find order structure and predictability in their existence. Equilibration involves the testing of our understanding against the real world. P59
• Assimilation occurs when people use their existing schemes to understand experiences or events in the world. P60
• Sometimes schemes have to be adapted, modified or new ones created and this is a result of the other process: accommodation. P60
• Vigotsky’s zone of proximal development can be seen as a companion state to Piaget’s disequilibrium. P60
• The zpd is defined as the distance between the actual developmental level of a child as determined by independent problem-solving and the level of potential as determined through problem-solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers (Vigotsky 1978:86) P60

Alberto Ramirez Martinell