Professional Meeting Description

On April 6, I attended a professional meeting at Temple University. The presentation was by Sherri Hope Culver and was entitled “How Girls See Gender and Ethnic Stereotypes in the Mass Media.” In her research, Ms. Culver had interviewed 96 girls (equally divided between African-American, Asian, Latina, and Caucasian girls) from ages 6-10 about their favorite television programs and the influence that these programs have on their lives, their ideals, and their friendships. She explained that the survey she gave to the girls included a list of every TV show she could think of – from cartoons to sitcoms to the news – and asked that they choose their top five favorite shows. During the meeting, we viewed and discussed the three programs that all ethnic groups of girls ranked in their top five – Zoey 101 (on Nickelodeon), Lizzie McGuire, and That’s So Raven (both on the Disney Channel). From these shows, the girls considered the main characters to be their role models. They also learned about making friends, being a good friend, and solving sticky situations with their friends by watching the groups of friends on their favorite shows.

During the meeting, we watched clips from Zoey 101, Lizzie McGuire, and That’s So Raven. We talked about our observations from the shows and about Ms. Culver’s research to compare the lessons that each show gave about diversity and about friendship. Zoey 101 takes place at a boarding school on the coast of California. Hence, all of the lessons in the show come from interactions between Zoey and her group of friends – the families of these adolescents are not present in the show. The group of friends includes boys and girls, but all are white except for one African-American boy who has a very small part. Ms. Culver explained that Zoey herself is always the impetus for the moral lessons about treating your friends with respect. In Lizzie McGuire, Lizzie (a white middle-school girl) learns both from her family and from her two best friends – a white boy and a Latina girl (although the program rarely refers to Miranda’s ethnicity). She is often awkward and immature, and learns from others’ advice or actions. That’s So Raven was Ms. Culver’s example of an ideal show to model friendship and diversity to young girls. Raven is a very confident African-American girl who interacts with her family, with her best friend Chelsea (a Caucasian girl), and with many other characters of different ethnicities. The show explicitly talks about and deals with issues of diversity and race, as well as with lessons about how to be a good friend. Ms. Culver explained that lessons in these shows must be very obviously pointed out for young girls to recognize them and to understand that problems in the program could relate to problems in their own lives. We talked about developing critical viewing skills and talking with young children watching television to help them take advantage of lessons in these programs.

Maybe even more interesting than hearing Ms. Culver’s talk was listening to the other participants speak. The group was fairly diverse – some teachers, some college students, some administrators, some parents, and a group of young people who came from a sort of alternative school/home. While Ms. Culver had viewed only three episodes of each of the programs, some of these participants were very familiar with the shows and had watched many episodes. There was even a ten-year-old boy (someone’s son) there who told us that That’s So Raven is one of his favorite shows as well. People were very aware of the multicultural (or monocultural) aspects of the shows and had observations to share about other episodes.

Attending this conference made me consider the role that popular television had in my own life and in that of my students. (I decided that Topanga from Boy Meets World had been my own television role model when I was younger and probably did influence some of the ways that I saw myself and my friendships.) I also wondered about my students – who they saw as their role models, and how conscious they were of cultural diversity in their viewing. In our class, many of the materials made an effort to include characters of every race (see my description of multiculturalism in my classroom). This seemed incredibly obvious to me. However, toward the end of my time there, one of my students (who is half-black and half-white) saw a newspaper article with pictures of riots in France and commented “Oh – do they have black people in France?!). I was surprised that she hadn’t realized that from the materials that we used. Perhaps Ms. Culver’s conclusion that children need explicit and concrete articulation to fully realize implications of a story or a picture. In the classroom as well as on television, multiculturalism could be explained and demonstrated in a more obvious fashion.