Kenway, Jane, and Bullen, Elizabeth. (2001). Consuming Children: Education-Education-Advertising. Buckingham & Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Pp. 212.
$29.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-335-20299-3
$86.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-335-20299-0
Reviewed by Peter Appelbaum
Arcadia University
November 15, 2002
Since cultural studies is largely concerned with the critical relationships among culture, knowledge, and power, it is not surprising that mainstream educators often dismiss cultural studies as being too ideological, or that they simply ignore its concerns about how education generates a privileged narrative space for some social groups and a space of inequality, disparity, or subordination for others. But this sort of superior self-critique is unfair and pointless, I would say. I do not think that anybody is focused so much on ridiculing current educational practices as much as interrogating their own current practices in the light of what they do together with young people. So I ask another set of questions:
- Why does cultural studies suffer from a marginalized history of itself, when all it is really doing is working with young people, teachers and community members to develop an interdisciplinary and cross-constituency focus on schools in their community and larger social contexts?
- Cultural studies challenges the ideological and political nature of any research claim by arguing that teachers always work and speak within historically and socially determined relations of power. Can we legitimately claim this relative superiority?
- Educators whose work is shaped by cultural studies do not simply view teachers and students either as chroniclers of history and social change or as recipients of culture, but as active participants in its construction. Is this, then, the key issue in recognizing the difference between what we are thinking we do here in cultural studies and what we think is missing elsewhere?
- What’s the point of cultural studies work in curriculum development? What’s the point of curriculum work in cultural studies?
This review responds to the work of Kenway and Bullen, using this work as a typical example of recent concerns in curriculum work regarding the place and/or position of consumer culture and cultural studies. It is our “lucky state of affairs” that schools and colleges of education have been organized, historically, around either traditional subject based studies (e.g., mathematics education) or into largely disciplinary/administrative categories (e.g., curriculum and instruction). I would agree with claims that this type of intellectual division of labor makes it pretty impossible to study larger social issues, and to recognize that there are overlapping macro and micro issues. Basing the study of education in current structures of curriculum means, indeed, that it would be unlikely that another way of looking at things could be understood as part of “the project.”
Does this mean that curriculum workers “today” will have to translate their work into “findings,” and in turn to translate such “findings” into their relevance for science, classroom management, language arts, and so on? This is surely at odds with the purposes of their work, in the field of cultural studies – efforts whose theoretical energies are mostly focused on interdisciplinary issues: stuff like textuality and representation refracted through the dynamics of gender, sexuality, subordinate youth, national identity, colonialism, race, ethnicity, and popular culture. By offering educators a critical language through which to examine the ideological and political interests and/or relationships that structure reform efforts in education – words with which they can really discuss the contexts of things like national testing, standardized curriculum, “success for all” programs, cultural studies incurs the wrath of educators who want to be silent, or at least outwardly neutral about the political agendas that underlie their own language and reform practices. Yet this leads me to the second-to-last “introductory question:” Would we really need to or want to characterize the stuff that we are talking about as highly politicized? I think not! I think, sure, everything that people do and say in education and in curriculum theory is a paramount political act. But I think the work is directly about understanding that the children (students) who are attending school, or who will be attending school in the next few years, see the world differently from “us,” or from many of the people who are older than they are. And the work – my work – is centrally about two things: (1) How to communicate with young people and begin to comprehend what is important to them within their own way of making meanings in the world; and (2) What to do about a schooling structure grounded on the fears and fantasies of the 1800s, way in the “future” now, in 2002. If we care about the crises of education and culture, then what can we do? I am not denying the political nature of all work in education and curriculum studies in particular. Nor do I deny the relevance of cultural studies approaches to understanding community contexts, adult experience, and so on. I instead wish to emphasize a critical aspect of the contemporary cultural/historical/trans-national moment: There is a way in which “youth” are constructed in this moment as the demarcations among education, entertainment, and advertising are collapsing, and as the lines between generations are at once blurring and reifying.
One particularly lucid perspective on this historical/cultural/transnational moment is offered by Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen in their recent book, Consuming Children. Kenway and Bullen offer an “eagle’s-eye view of consumer kids/consuming culture” in the hybrid realms of entertainment/advertising/education, while teasing out the variety of ways that “adults” are differently positioned within this matrix. This kind of perspective holds the potential to make cultural studies specifically relevant to curriculum work, and indeed might be the most forward- looking approach to curriculum happening right now, because it speaks directly to the forms of adult practices in the cultural/political matrix. These authors also build on their understandings and suggest pedagogies that they believe are likely to engage consumer kids while addressing some of the dilemmas that consumer culture evokes. Their book ends up being a challenge to readers to think about the purposes of schooling if the distinctions among “edutainment,” “advertainment,” and “entertising” [my words, not theirs] are rendered irrelevant in this “age of desire.”
If we take this approach to the issues, there are some key points to consider. First, stemming from the insights of Walter Benjamin, there are difference in generational experiences of the images of desire in consumer culture: an adult view takes the world from a position of superiority, while the child view enjoys a privileged proximity that problematizes the habitual, forgetful vision of the adult. These dimensions of the playful interaction with images of desire are transgression, mimesis or imitation, and collecting. Second, advertisers, in producing and disseminating symbolic goods, are doing the important, cultural work of processing transgression, mimesis and collecting. They can be seen as cultural and psychic mediators, teaching the “art of living,” the cultivation of lifestyle, helping us to understand, appreciate, and consume – through the production of “dreamscapes, collective fantasies, and facades.” Third, any adult, teacher or other child is rendered an “advertiser” in this production of “lifestyle.” Fourth, commodification, as an important process of consumer culture, does valuable work. For example, it replaces “shared values” with “shared things” that can be advertised, bought and sold. It offers consumers solutions to social problems by offering to sell products to individuals that promise an image of individualized solutions to these commodified problems. And it segments people into consumer demographic categories each with their own products and marketing strategies.
The media and consumer culture have offered children identities through the practice of “othering” adults even as they offer adults the chance to be “good” adults through buying things and solutions for children. Hybridization of entertainment and advertising, advertainment, the introduction of program – length advertising, and the construction of audiences, has strong repercussions for adults who wish to interact with youth, now categorized as distinct in interests and desires from those adults. Entertainment and advertising are constructed fro youth as separate from and superior to education, The adult response has been to hybridize entertainment and education – edutainment – as separate and distinct from advertising.
My concern, distinct from Kenway and Bullen, is this very generational disjunction. Take an experience that is one of hybridized edutainment. For the child this can either be advertainment or education. It if is advertainment, then it is enjoyed as such and not as education. If it is education, then it is ignored as inferior. Meanwhile, children bring advertainment with them to school. For the adult, it is either advertising and ignored as inferior, or it is edutainment, and treated as education. In no case is it identifiable as purposeful or pleasurable and in no case is there a kind of “common ground” between the adult and the child. The far- reaching aims of consumer culture so not stop at the generational door of course. School, people, subjects, systems, and concepts are commodified, bought and sold as advertainment, edutainment, edutizement, entertizement, etc. And in each case, the adult and the child have different, disjoint relationships to the experience. Designer schools and packages students “work for the image” and “sell the lifestyle.” Schools and students, as commodities, sponsor the legacies of global consumerism. For example, they sell the desires that are supported by the exploitation of workers, the substitution of lifestyle for living a “meaningful life,” widening gulfs between executives and workers, corporate censorship of public space, and growing gaps between rich and poor.
In response, Kenway and Bullen offer “profane pedagogies” and “pedagogies that bit/byte back.” The pleasure of cultural production takes center stage in profane pedagogies. Students are not just consumers but producers and marketers of products: they create videos, performances, and cultural events. In this way, they are privy to the “dark side” of image and commodity production. They are more likely to entertain their peers than meet perceived requirements of the teachers. They evoke the carnivalesque and employ postmodern marketing approaches that could be characterized as “dedifferentiation” – established hierarchies of high and low culture, education and training, politics and show business, are eroded, effaced, and elided in the service of entertainment. One example is a large “Global Rock Challenge” that takes place in Kenway and Bullen’s native Australia. This event incorporates music performance competitions, health education, the creation of television spectacles, innovative technology design and costume design work. Unlike much school activity, the “Challenge” inspires almost fanatical devotion among participants. It seems to offer “lessons” in the ways it taps into the desires and fantasies produced by popular youth cultural forms and then maps these onto the performing arts and technology/science experience in schools. Science becomes the “magic” behind the “illusion” of popular culture.
Pedagogies that bit/byte back are designed to “plunder the corporate vernacular and also anti-corporate activist practices” in order to blend the playful and the earnest. “Cool hunting: is one such pedagogy, adopted from a marketing strategy of the same name. Here we have an example of advertation – a hybrid of advertising and education designed to subvert the expectations of edutainment. Students undertake a cultural and social biographic analysis of the “objects of cool” in their own culture. They explore the sub-cultural, cross-cultural and retro influences, in addition to asking the questions of who made the object and where it originated. (For example, the current cult of body piercing might be examined in light of ethnic cultural rituals and practices and their highly gendered signification, as well as in relation to the currency it has for the young cultural groups of the moment.) What significance can be read into a pierced nose, a baseball cap worn backwards, or a Power-Puff Girls lunchbox? When does an object lose its cool and why? What is its exchange value in terms of the identity, solidarity, or pleasure the consumer desires, and how does this compare with the functional uses of the item? Are there stereotypes involved? Has the use of the product changes over time? Cool hunting discloses both the appropriation of objects (Nike’s plundering of African-American street culture) and conversely the way consumer-mediated objects and identities are used by consumer groups (African-American appropriation of Bart Simpson). The “social life of things” has a life cycle, gets represented in film, print and broadcast media, and confronts the “illusion of reality” by making codes of production evident.
Cyberflậneurs are bit/byt-ing back by using web technology to support international activism. This pedagogy makes the “branded web” and its connections to youthful consumer-mediated culture the object of the youths’ attention. Student build peer communities around peer interests and concerns, and plunder existing WebPages to create their own in the pursuit of a “cyberspace” of their own creation, which they in turn market themselves. Finally, “culture-jamming” is another consumer-culture pedagogy. Students create media that take on the characteristics of existing media – WebPages, Zines, radio programs – but they use them to jam the airwaves with alternative content: fake ads, graffiti, spamming … original versions of advertisements and programs are downloaded, manipulated and re-presented as parodies and alternatives.
As I see it, these exciting and generative pedagogies heighten the importance of my original questions. Because they do not speak to institutional interests, but instead to the mediated desires of youth, they are destined to be celebrated by the “already converted” cultural studiers of education, advertising and entertainment. As “new pedagogies” they market themselves as superior alternatives to the old “technologies of education,” the old curriculum practices. They are the new “expansion slots” for the system, the new “plug-ins,” and thus the “solutions” to the “new problems” – new problems not yet recognized as relevant to the pursuit of mainstream educational studies. In the end, by offering a superior curricular vision, Kenway and Bullen, like others, offer an “adult” relationship to the curriculum, a relationship characterized by a habitual, forgetful and detached external and utilitarian view. They end their work with the following plea:
It is the responsibility of adults – teachers, parents, policy makers – to ensure that school education is not absorbed into the ‘vortex of the commodity’ and that it makes powerful connections with the young people of today who, in many ways, have ‘no choice’ about their image- and commodity- drenched surroundings. At the very least, school could teach them to understand the differences between data, information, knowledge, education, entertainment and advertising. But can the marketized school tell the difference? Schools can play a role in alerting the young to matters of politics in addition to matters of lifestyle. But if kids are to listen, we also need to re-enchant the school.” (pp. 187- 188)
Maybe this is a valiant model for how we can translate our work into the language of mainstream curriculum design and development. In such a discourse, we use the adult, superior language of planning and outcomes, and we ground our argument in social and epistemological importance. Yet I can’t help wondering: How do we know that children working in profane pedagogies and pedagogies that bite/byte back won’t identify with the “dark side” of commodification? How do we know they won’t buy into the dark side as necessary and appropriate in order for them to become “adult” and achieve utilitarian ends? These seemingly new pedagogies confront consumer culture but they are not necessarily biased toward any particular politics of culture. They can easily be used toward ends that curriculum theorists would abhor. In the end, they reproduce the “same old same old” in expecting school to teach the youth. I ask us to move in another direction.
What would an alternative “child’s” relationship to curriculum be? Growing out of the hybridized advertisement and entertainment, it would enjoy the privileged proximity that problematizes that adult vision. Curriculum would be enunciations of transgression, mimesis and collecting, and in the process would be a teasing out of the “art of living,” the cultivation of lifestyle. It seems to me the job of the teacher as curriculum worker would be to make it possible for students to generate this very type of curriculum. Such an enabler would have to act as translator for the students to the adult authorities. As mediator, the curriculum worker would interpret transgression, mimesis and collecting in terms of standardized, adult goals and objectives. For the child, the curricular experience is not about the adult’s goals; it is about the work they are doing. In many classrooms this work becomes following the whims of the teacher, copying formats and mannerisms, and so on. But in other classrooms, those that we would dream of experiencing as students ourselves or for our own children, the students experience the work that they are doing as important and part of an important project. They transgress, imitate and collect the materials that provide a way of life in that classroom. And they cultivate a lifestyle. They advertise their work to others and celebrate the ways in which their work is of value to others, the ways in which their work is a commodity that others strive to own.
About the Reviewer
Peter Appelbaum
Arcadia University
Philadelphia, PA
Peter Appelbaum teaches curriculum theory, with particular emphasis on cultural studies and the implications of technoculture, at Arcadia University, in Philadelphia, USA. He also works with teachers and schools in multicultural education, and mathematics and science education. He is the author of Multicultural and Diversity Education (ABC- CLIO 2002) and Popular Culture, Educational Discourse, and Mathematics (SUNY Press 1995), and a co-editor of (Post) Modern Science (Education) Peter Lang 2001).
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