Children and Media Outside the Home: Playing and Learning in after-School Care

This new study looks at what children do with media in the fastest-growing sector of the childcare industry, after-school care. Drawing on ground-breaking ethnographic research, Karen Orr Vered shows how children's media play in peer group recreational settings is collaborative, creative, and integrated with more traditional forms of play. Arguing that the intermediary space of after-school care has links to both home life and classroom activities, Vered shows how the informal learning experienced in play contributes to children's acquisition of media literacy. Increasingly used outside the home and beyond the classroom, electronic games, computers, television, and media production activities are fundamental to children's culture. Children and Media Outside the Home provides a fresh look at children, media, play, and learning.

About the Author:
Karen Orr Vered is Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies and Digital Media Studies at Flinders University, South Australia