I have nothing against emojis, just as I have nothing against kittens, turpentine or billiards. I’m more than happy for anyone who’s minded to stroke kittens, drink turps and swan around with a billiards cue. Equally, I have no problem whatsoever with people peppering their texts or tweets with smiley faces or grinning turds; each to her own. But, despite my laissez-faire approach to emoji in general life, I’m afraid this easy going, live-and-let-live facade melts away when teachers argue that emoji – or any other essentially transient pop culture phenomena – ought to be used or studied in the classroom.
There are, as far as I can see, two fronts on which it is argued that teachers ought to embrace the emoji. Firstly, some teachers take the view that emojis are a fun and engaging confection with which to wrap the tedium of the subjects they’re employed to teach; Shakespeare is so dull and quotidian for your average teenager that only something as immediately recognisable and familiar as an emoji could possibly enable them to tackle anything more challenging. This is both patronising and demeaning. If you think young people are suckered into thinking teachers are cool just because they know what an emoji is, you’re sadly mistaken. Children might feel alarmed and intimidated by the unfamiliar but that just means that we need to bring the remoter, more abstract areas of the curriculum to life with our enthusiasm for what we teach. Children deserve better than being fed a steady white bread diet of what they already know. They thrive on the arcane minutiae we’ve picked up over long years of study; they love to hear the stories that lie beneath the curriculum and make our subjects worthy of their time and attention. Our job is not to trick kids into doing a bit of work because there’s some superficial froth that they might find distracting; they deserve for us to make them fall in love with what we have to offer. And if you want to suggest that the kids you teach just don’t get Dickens or can’t be bothered with Beowulf, just remember, ability is the consequence not the cause of what children learn.
As far as this line of argument goes, emoji are irrelevant. It could just as easily be about using fidget spinners to teach medieval medicine or teaching quadratic equations through the medium of Pokemon Go. Or whatever. Feel free to substitute the gimmick of your choice.
The second line of argument is to claim that actually emoji are really interesting and, hey! They may even be a kinda language. There are people writing academic papers about emoji so how dare I suggest that children be robbed of studying something so crucial and culturally important. People who make this argument tend to suggest that emojis should therefore replace something else that children are studying – probably something in the English curriculum. Now, if your English curriculum is made up of young adult novels, cereal boxes and analysing Love Island then I can see why you might think they may as well study emoji. You’re probably labouring under the misapprehension that English is a ‘skills based subject’ and that because all children need is to learn the ‘skills’ of inference or evaluation, it doesn’t really matter what they practice on. Why bother reading something tricky like Romantic poetry when some celebrity’s Twitter feed provides an equally rich source of meaning?
This sort of approach to English pervades Key Stage 3 in many schools. It feels like the only reason some English teachers ever bother with literature is because it’s part of the GCSE specification. This is, I’m afraid, an approach I deplore. I’ve written before about the criteria I use to design a curriculum and won’t rehash the arguments here. Suffice it to say that the curriculum other people’s children get to study should be at least as good as the one we would want our own children to have access to.
What I want for my children is that they get to experience the broad sweep of English literature from its origins in ancient Athens and Rome, through the medieval period, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. I want them to see where Romanticism fits and why the novel latterly became our preeminent literary form. I want them to know the stories that make up Greek myth, English folklore and the Bible, and pervade literature right up to the present day. I want them to marvel at the invention of drama, character, dialogue and action and trace their development. I want them to revel in the finest examples of rhetoric the centuries have to offer and to master the basics of the grammar of their native tongue. And I want them to question, critique and discuss all of this.
As you might imagine, there’s a lot to get through if you’re going to plan a truly enriching, powerful curriculum and there just isn’t time to waste on the transient and the trivial.
What makes all of this so pressing is the economic concept of opportunity cost. Yes, if the time we had to lavish on children’s education was infinite then we could everything and anything. But it’s not, so we have to make choices. Curriculum time is always finite; you can only spend it once. I beg of you, please don’t fritter it away on junk food and consumer culture.
That you even have to express your disagreement with the teaching of emojis shows just how far out of favor a deep, knowledge-rich (and culturally diverse) curriculum has fallen in some circles.
Yes, good point
That was the first thing I thought, although less eloquently. David’s article is more intellectually rigorous than the subject it explores! A very interesting and well reasoned read – thank you.
For years, the A Level English Language course has typically required an exploration of the role technology has and continues to play in the development of the English language. Could you not argue that the emojis are just graphical representations of nuances of mood and so therefore contribute to just another type of informal communication? I don’t think it’s a case of studying them because it’s easier than a potentially inaccessible text, I just think it’s another part of the patchwork quilt that makes up our language and so it’s perhaps important for young people to understand why we have them and to appreciate the context in which they’re used particularly when considering the prescriptive/descriptive approach to language change.
Is your argument that what is studied in A level language must be studied in KS3 and 4?
I think the argument is that our language is rich in so many ways for so many reasons and that it doesn’t do any harm to explore those facets and put them into context. Spending a lesson having some fun with emojis and abbreviated text speak in year 7 and discussing why and when we use them (and when we don’t) could be part of a wider discussion about how new words and types of communication are made through advances in technology. Isn’t all language essentially semiotic?
You seem to have ignored the points in my post: if you include x in the curriculum then you need to make room for it by getting rid of y. A ‘fun lesson’ in Yer 7 (quelle horreur!) may seem harmless but this means one less lesson on the Odyssey or Beowulf. Why is it you think lessons on Homer aren’t fun? If your view of English is that it has to made ‘fun’ by including emojis then are views of the subject are very far apart.
I guess I could imagine quite a useful lesson where you get pupils to write a story using emojis, which is then ‘read out’ by someone else. It would make a strong point about the hopelessness of them as a language capable of communicating anything of sophistication or precision, or which can – funnily enough – actually map the words which we speak.
Indeed, I can’t even begin to conceive how I would communicate that previous paragraph using emojis. Any talk of them becoming an exciting, new and relevant language which schools need to heed is a massive red-herring.
What a wonderful idea! I have done something similar using swear words (with older students) to the same end – to show how the nuances of language are lost when we limit our vocabulary.
I watched quite an interesting section on Sunday Brunch where an expert of some kind (that is not to degrade his expertise just that I missed the part where they said who he is) was discussing the emoji. As Twitter was mid debate I thought I would listen in. Anyway he made some points I found interesting.
Firstly that emojis are NOT a language as they crucially have no grammar so cannot be classified as such.
Secondly that although they are not language and cannot usually be used to convey meaning all by themselves, they have added the facial expressions element that was otherwise missing from online communication versus face to face. And that is interesting.
So if anything I think that might sit within study of cultures and society and how we use emoji as part of online and text discourse to replicate (for good and bad) the human contact element. A crying face emoji to show sadness or a crying with joy one to show how much you appreciate the joke etc.
So maybe a PHSE study rather than an English language one? I found it interesting just as a discussion about whether maybe it makes it easier for people to know, for example, if people are being sarcastic etc. Text communication can easily be misconstrued and certainly people now tend to add the crying with joy emoji to show they are joking so as not to cause offence. That to me is an interesting use of emoji.
So to sum up – not a language. And nothing past one lesson but I would consider talking about their use and asking students to consider how they could be used to be kind and/or mean in the context of text communication in much the same way that pulling faces at people does in real life.
Just my two pence based on that section of a tv show. Otherwise if people want to use or not use emoji randomly I care about as much as I do about all their other lessons. Which is not a lot so long as overall the students are learning.
One sure fire way to stop them being used as a cool thing is to have your teacher use them anyway, I suspect.
If at any point in the school curriculum in KS2, KS3 and KS4, a teacher was trying to explain/explore signs and symbols as one of the means we have of communicating with each other, might not emojis be an example alongside, say, heraldry, street signs, gestures, religious symbols, hieroglyphs, pictograms etc ?
Of course there is a linguistic theory that language itself is a ‘sign-system’ and many books which consider this use e.g. street signs as part of how to explain that theory. Presumably, a teacher could do that using emojis as well.
I would agree that if semiotics is something you want to teach anyway, then emojis are an obvious thing to use as an exploration of that.
Beyond that though, they seem to me like a linguistic cul-de-sac. The most time-consuming and challenging part of taught schooling is helping children fully map spoken language (and accompanying body language) into a non-verbal medium which contains as much verisimilitude as possible. Nothing can do this job better than writing.
If a teacher is needing to bridge the gap between speaking and writing, surely there are more than enough rich examples just using how people tell-stories & generally communicate verbally? If a child already knew semaphore or BSL, how would this prove advantageous to learning how to turn speech into writing (if they could speak and listen)?
I guess we don’t know if they are or are not a cul de sac. When people experimented with the alphabetic code 3000 yrs ago that might have seemed like something ‘on the side’. The point is that the world history of writing is full of experimentation. But hey, no one’s gonna make anyone teach emojis! Btw we did a Radio 4 ‘Word of Mouth’ about them. On iPlayer.
Curriculum time is finite. If teachers want to spend it on Saussure then God help us all. Your appetite for nuance is probably unhelpful is this regard. Have you read this paper? https://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/fuck-nuance.pdf
In fact, the moment teachers talk about writing as ‘choice’ they are talking de Saussure. As it happens I’m more Voloshinov than de Saussure, but in fact, he’s taught almost universally without being credited.
I can make better case than that on the day called “World Emoji Day” this past week (7/17), that it was actually the UN Day of International Criminal Justice. Thus what ought to have been a day that “unites all those who wish to support justice, promote victims’ rights, and help prevent crimes that threaten the peace, security and well-being of the world” got turned into something stupid. Same with emojis in the classroom.
Ha!
In our KS2 curriculum we study Beowulf, The Iliad, Treasure Island, poetry including the Highwayman and nonsense rhyme, haiku etc, hieroglyphs, drama, Morse code, map symbols, pictographs, the list goes on. We study these aspects of communication yet we could still do with twice as long to really deepen understanding. Although a brief comparison could be made with emojis during, say, and Ancient Egypt lesson, anything more would be giving credence to a dumbed-down version of language over rich vocab and culture. I’d rather (our school) children develop a wide vocab-rich and text knowledge so, if they choose to in later life or in their own time, they can experiment with emojis to their hearts content.
They can – and will – experiment with emojis whatever you do. I align myself with Michael Young: “Schools enable young people to acquire the knowledge that, for most of them, cannot be acquired at home or in the community.”
http://www.fpce.up.pt/ciie/revistaesc/ESC32/ESC32_Arquivo.pdf
Children know about swinging on swings. They don’t know what about momentum, gravity and friction. They know about emojis but may not know about signs and symbols as theory and practice.
There are endless lists of what children don’t know about. We can’t teach them everything in the few years they’re at schools so we must make choices about what we will teach. On the other hand you could attempt to pebbledash them with snippets of everything, but I think that’s unlikely to be effective.
Our public and political spaces are dominated by people trying to engineer the sign-systems we see: politics, advertising, music business, cinema, TV etc etc. It’s total. We can’t escape it. There are hundreds of thousands of people involved in doing this (if we include the US). At some point between a child’s age of 7 and 16, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that education could take a few moments to consider this huge engineering enterprise. In order to find a way in to considering how this is done, then the more obvious signs might be a good starting point: road signs, emojis, religious symbols…before getting on to how e.g. fashion/TV set design/ads/stage design/political image-making etc work on us.
You really think emojis are the best way to do this?
[In answer to your last question, ‘do you think emojis are the best way to do this?] No, not the best but good as one of many. You’ll see that I put emojis in a list which included road signs and religious symbols. I can imagine a page in which all three categories would indeed be a good way into sign-making in society e.g. a men at work sign, alongside an emoji alongside a cross and an ‘orb’ alongside, say, a gesture and/or sign language sign. How do these signs ‘tell’ or ‘speak’? How do we ‘read’ them?
Not sure what your point is here – are you arguing that more curriculum time should be spent on emojis?
Apologies if I wasn’t making it clear. I am saying that at some point between the age of 7 and 16, if English, History or Art teachers were teaching sign-systems and/or symbols, then emojis are one example of many. I suggested that an emoji could sit on a page alongside e.g. a road sign and a religious symbol. This could raise the questions, what do they mean? How do we ‘read’ these? How do we get ‘meaning’ from them? I could imagine this being relevant to anything from talking about Nazi Germany, the moment in Beowulf when the lone warrior waits for Beowulf to emerge from the fight with Grendel’s mother, ‘Out out brief candle…’, the massacre of the innocents, etc etc. In order to explain a new concept (e.g. symbolism), isn’t one of our strategies (nb ‘one’) to use an example/analogy from the world known to the person being taught? For example, one of the ways I teach iambic pentameter, I use the word ‘today’. We repeat it five times, making it a rhythm. Done.
Ok. Thanks
Do teachers know much about it as well? If by some quirk a English teacher had some deep knowledge of signs and symbols, relating to theory and practice, they may well use it in their teaching (multiple other provisos aside). Even then emojis would likely be little more then a taster, like Craig said.
Another one is Minecraft, which seems to be the latest medium through which everything can now be learned. Here’s one of many articles:
http://www.teachhub.com/minecraft-classroom-teaches-reading-writing-problem-solving
[…] If, on the other hand, you’re upset I’ve not included time to consider the study of emojis, you can vent your frustration here. […]