In this chapter, I want to outline research findings from an arts and media project, funded by the Arts Council England’s New Audiences programme. Most members of the research team had had some previous experience researching media and literacy work in schools; much of their work undertaken jointly with the British Film Institute and King’s College, London, under the auspices of the Centre for Research on Literacy and the Media. The project, which will be described in greater detail below, teamed a poet

and an animator-in-residence with a school-based researcher and revolved around the adaptation of a fictional narrative, first into an episodic poem and then into an animated film. The research element constituted an exploration of the relationships between the adaptation process and literacy. We wanted to unpick how traversing genres and media with a single core text as a touchstone might enhance the learning experiences of the young people involved. We were particularly interested in the movement between print and moving-image media and were looking to explore through this a series of hypotheses that arose from previous work (Parker, 1999; Oldham, 1999). Before we move on to discuss the work in more detail, I will offer a brief

overview of some recent research that focuses on the relationship between moving-image and literacy, including our own earlier work. I do this primarily in order to contextualize the project within a broader field, but additionally because it is necessary to provide some of the findings from separate studies across disparate fields that, in combination, seem to aggregate into a set of similar and significant conclusions. The relationship between media and literacy has a relatively long and

fiercely contested history. This is unsurprising, given that it acts as a conduit for aspects of broader educational debate – primarily notions of standards, and a perception of those standards falling in relation to previous rates of literacy attainment. The long-held popular theory that a correlation exists between a decline in literacy standards and a concomitant rise in the consumption of media by young people has been endorsed by the press for many years, despite there being little or no hard evidence to support the

claim. Brooks (1997) has shown, through a rigorous comparative study, that, despite public perceptions to the contrary, in real terms, there has been no significant decline in literacy attainment in the UK since 1945. While Brooks found a fall in average performance among eight-year-olds in the late 1980s, which could have been attributed to large numbers of experienced teachers taking early retirement, he also found that reading standards in Britain had remained almost static throughout the past half-century. This is despite the rise and fall of radically different teaching methods throughout that time. Neither traditional phonics teaching nor the ‘newer’ techniques have significantly improved or worsened average performance. Nevertheless, simplistic correlations continue to be made between many

social problems and the popular media, especially film and television. In reality, within schools a somewhat different story emerges. For many years a body of research has built up from within university education departments, especially within the Anglophone countries, which suggests powerful links may exist between the kinds of narratives children and young people enjoy as consumers and the kinds of learning expectations schools and parents hold as desirable in relation to literacy. Marsh and Millard (2000) compellingly show how ‘top-down’ models of literacy can fail to connect with what is popular in terms of valued texts among young people and thereby exclude rather than engage. They also illustrate how uses of media can unlock a renewed motivation within learners and create the necessary conditions for re-engagement with literacy and the acquisition of print-based skills. Similarly, Robinson (1997) has described how a ‘social reading practice’,

one which draws film, TV and video into the ambit of what is ‘acceptable’ in terms of reading texts, can be enormously empowering for emergent readers. Children, it seems, are able to draw on connections and parallels that are natural to their growing understanding of story and story constructions, moving freely across media and modes, but which the adult world, perhaps through its need to compartmentalize knowledge and experience, seem invisible. Mackey (1999) has also pointed out the multiple levels of reader engagement with film and televisual texts. Her work has shown how it offers a way into structural aspects of narrative – conveyed visually through the medium of the moving-image it can be remade conceptually to fit print-based skills. At the British Film Institute (BFI), a range of research and develop-

ment projects, and particularly those that arose out of collaboration with King’s College, have examined some of the links that can be exploited by teachers when media is incorporated within literacy teaching. My own work (Parker, 1999) has suggested ways in which structural similarities and differences between films and books can be used to compare moving-image texts and written texts as part of a media production process. And (Parker and Sefton-Green, 2000) how, specifically, the process of animation can

promote, through a staged interaction with plot, theme and narrative, an incrementally ‘framed’ engagement with print texts. In an accompanying research project, Oldham (1999) has shown how reading multiple film adaptations of a source print text can raise levels of critical literacy among groups of readers, illuminating both the book and film versions of a single narrative. Her work suggests embedded understandings of narrative structure, along with important skills such as prediction, may be developed through moving-image media, but that they would need teasing out through teacher mediation in order to fully inform understandings of print media. In the USA Van den Broek (2001) illustrates in an online paper1 the positive relationship between TV viewing and the development of reading comprehension. Overall, then, there is a growing body of research worldwide that suggests

that the simplistic notion of a negative relationship between media and literacy is not substantiated by grounded research studies. The research suggesting other more positive relationships between moving-image culture and print literacy forms the context for the findings of the Animated English project.