Archives
Animation can be outlet for victimized children, a tool for research
Craig Chamberlain,
Education Editor
217-333-2894; cdchambe@uiuc.edu
7/17/06
|
CHAMPAIGN, Ill.
— Animation is a proven vehicle for biting comedy, a la “The
Simpsons” and “South Park.”
But some of the same qualities that make it work for comedy make it
valuable, too, as an outlet for victimized children and for a new research
method that tests the empathy of teachers who may deal with them, says
Sharon Tettegah, a professor of curriculum
and instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Tettegah believes so strongly in the value of animation – specifically
“animated narrative vignette simulations” – that she
sought out a computer science professor at Illinois, Brian Bailey, to help develop her concept for
a child-friendly program for producing them.
The program that resulted, called Clover, gives children, as well as
adults, a tool for making and sharing their own vignettes about their
personal and sometimes painful stories.
According to Tettegah, the program is the only one she is aware of that
allows the user to write the narrative, script the dialogue, storyboard
the graphics and add voice and animation, all within one application.
Those four major aspects of producing a vignette gave rise to the name
“Clover,” the plant considered to bring good luck in its
four-leaf form.
A paper about Clover, written by Bailey, Tettegah and graduate student
Terry Bradley, has been published in the July issue of the journal Interacting
With Computers.
In other research, Tettegah has used animations as a tool for gauging
the empathy of teachers and others who might deal with children and
their stories of victimization. One study with college education majors,
or teachers-in-training, showed only one in 10 expressing a high degree
of empathy for the victim, she said.
A paper about that study has been accepted by the journal Contemporary
Educational Psychology (CEP), with publication slated for later this
year. The co-author of the study is Carolyn Anderson, a professor of educational psychology at
Illinois.
Tettegah has done additional empathy studies with hundreds of participants,
and will present some of that research at the Association for Computing
Machinery’s (ACM) SIGGRAPH conference July 30-Aug. 3 in Boston
and at the American Psychological Association convention Aug. 10-13
in New Orleans.
Animations are valuable in this kind of research because they go beyond
just text in visually telling a story, yet don’t have the distractions
of video, Tettegah said. “Think about when you watch a cartoon:
You focus more on what they’re saying and not on how they look,”
she said.
Psychological research surveys often elicit “socially desirable”
or “forced choice” responses, Tettegah said. An animation,
however, can tell a story and then ask for an open-ended response, she
said. The subject has little or no clue what the researcher is looking
for.
In her empathy studies, Tettegah has found that most of the subjects
tend to focus on the perpetrator or other issues, rather than showing
concern for the victim.
This is a concern, she said, because a child being bullied or called
names wants the teacher’s support. Yet the results also fit with
research by others showing that teachers often don’t deal with
the problem when these incidents occur, the assumption having been that
they don’t know how, she said.
In the study to be published in CEP, each of the 178 subjects (142 women
and 36 men), were shown a short animated vignette, based on a story
collected by Tettegah in earlier research, involving a boy and girl,
both 9 years old.
In the vignette, the children are asked to work together on a class
project, and the boy tells the girl he doesn’t want to work with
her because her skin color might rub off on him. (Two different versions
were used, with the boy being black and the girl white in one version,
and vice versa in the other version. The races of the perpetrator and
victim had no significant effect on subject responses to the vignette,
Tettegah said.)
As the story progresses, the girl tells her father about the incident,
and he then talks to the teacher.
After viewing the vignette, each subject was asked an open-ended question
about how he or she would have responded as the teacher in the situation.
They were given unlimited time and space to respond.
Tettegah and four research assistants then did a line-by-line analysis
of the subjects’ responses and developed a system for coding the
content. They looked for content in four areas related to empathy for
the victim: concern for the victim, problem-solving with the victim,
mention of the victim and management of the situation with the victim.
After the coding, Anderson, a statistical expert, analyzed the resulting
data using sophisticated techniques involving latent variable modeling.
The results suggested a single latent variable underlying the responses,
showing very few of the pre-service teachers expressing significant
empathy for the victim in the vignette.
Overall, fewer than 50 percent of the study participants exhibited even
low levels of empathy and only 10 percent exhibited a high level of
empathy.
In light of these results, Tettegah, a former elementary teacher, thinks
some kind of empathy-awareness training, similar to cultural or ethnic
awareness training, should be considered as part of training future
teachers.
“I think that we are not, as teachers, tapped into those moral
emotions … it’s not a deliberate thing – you just
don’t even think about it,” Tettegah said. “But we
need to be more aware of our victims and what happens to them, because
they sometimes get damaged for life.”
Clover was designed with that concern also in mind, Tettegah said. The
program gives students a powerful means for telling their stories, whether
of victimization or dealing with other moral or social dilemmas, she
said. Ideally, their animated vignettes can be shared anonymously and
used in character-building exercises in the classroom.
The program “really engages students and excites them,”
Tettegah said. In producing the vignettes, they gain a strong sense
of ownership, she said, and at the same time build their writing, critical
thinking and technology skills.
Tettegah has been demonstrating and testing Clover in local schools
since last fall, and with positive results, she said.
The program is available for download.
