As a capitalist organism the television program, as explained by Todd Gitlin, uses its slant to sell itself to advertisers with similar leanings on contemporary social issues to maintain its flow of revenue. However, this concept of slant does not account for the broader network, which, like the singular program, cultivates a catalog of programming into a singular slanted message becoming an ecosystem of shows relying on each other to maintain viewership. The successful televised ecosystem will then be home to programs who enjoy long runs and display an easily recognized shared slant. As an example of the televised ecosystem, this thesis explores seven animated programs from Cartoon Network including The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack,Regular Show, Adventure Time, The Amazing World of Gumball, Steven Universe,We Bare Bears, and Craig of the Creek.Recognizing the programs ranging in release from 2008 to 2018, Cartoon Network’s ecosystem is highlighted for its evolving display of progressive representations of race and gender and presenting them to a child audience.

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Language learning takes place in the context of social relationships. Yet, we know little about the mechanisms that link social interaction to word learning. This dissertation focuses on two aspects of that relationship, social contingency and eye gaze, and asks whether these cues may be a critical ingredient in the well established link between social support and language learning. Specifically, we investigate how toddlers learn novel verbs in one of three conditions. In one, training on four new words was conducted using live interaction. In the second, children were trained on the same words using a contingent screen condition (video-chat). Finally, in the third, they were taught the same words in a video condition that did not maintain social contingency (yoked video). Results suggest that children exposed to novel verbs via contingent screen condition learned these words to the same degree as children in the live condition and far exceeded their peers who were exposed to non-contingent video only. Analysis of looking patterns during training further suggests that children in contingent interactions rely on eye gaze during social interactions, which predicts language learning. Taken together, this dissertation begins to operationally define social cues and to illuminate the mechanism that links social interaction and language acquisition. It also speaks to the literature on learning through screen media as the first study to examine word learning through video chat technology. / Psychology

Screen-based educational media, as an extension of the schooling process whose history has mirrored brick and mortar institutions, have traditionally espoused narratives of Eurocentricity, shifting relatively recently to multicultural yet simultaneously raceless narratives. While many viewers have learned from and been inspired by these media, the enthusiastic response to the film Black Panther (2018), as demonstrated by financial earnings and sustained social media energy, revealed an intense yearning in the Black community for media positively centering the strengths and successes of Black lives. Launched from the sociocultural fervor for Black concordance in media, and extending concordance into the educational media landscape, this qualitative study sought to assess responses from African-American children, ages 3-8, to educational media concordant to them, and contextualize these responses in recognition of race socialization patterns within the home. Children’s responses to the media ranged from acknowledgment of skin color as well as hair texture and style, to full identification with and enthusiasm for animated protagonists. Caregivers responded positively to the samples while self- reporting varying degrees of race socialization. These responses demonstrated promising potential for identification with concordant educational media based on phenotypic resemblance, particularly for children approximately 8 years of age.

This dissertation investigates meaning-making in children's joint-reading transactions with literary apps. The analysis of meaning-making focuses on embodiment as a central aspect of literary app's texts and their reading and on children's negotiation of agency in the act of joint-reading. Meaning-making is understood through a multimodal social semiotics perspective, which considers that meaning is realised in the dynamic transaction between reader, text and social context. Therefore, the dissertation integrates the analysis of the apps and of the children's responses to capture the dynamics of meaning-making in such transactions. Case studies were conducted with six families, who read the apps The Monster at the End of This Book (Stone & Smollin, 2011) and Little Red Riding Hood (Nosy Crow, 2013) in an English public library. The central method of data collection involved video-recorded observations of parent-child joint-reading events, complemented by graphic elicitation, informal interviews and a questionnaire. The video data was analysed through multimodal methods. The findings indicate that the participant readers used their bodies not only as a material point of contact and activation of the interactive features but also as a resource for meaning-making in their transactions with the apps. The reader's body was essential in their engagement with the material and interactive affordances of the apps, in reader's expressions of their responses, and in the sharing of the reading experience with the parents. The body of the reader, through spontaneous and interactive gestures, is a mode of communication in the multimodal ecologies of both the text and the reader's responses. Furthermore, the child readers constantly negotiated their agency within the constraints posed by the text, which include the narrative itself and its interactive features, and those posed by the joint-reading situation. The bodies of the readers played an essential role in this dual negotiation of agency. Children's agency was scripted, that is, the readers exerted their agency within the limitations of a script. The script, however, allowed readers to improvise, and their performances also involved resistance to the script through playful subversion. In the joint-reading event, children's agency was foregrounded, positioning the children as protagonist readers, who performed most of the interactions and lived the aesthetic experience of the text fully, to the expense of their parents, who mostly participated as supporting readers, transferring their agency to the children through scaffolding.