An Audience for the Aliens

This account of the making and sharing of self-authored digital videos in a Year 5 classroom focuses on the way that the children appear to be influenced by their awareness of audience. Drawing on evidence of video observation, written and moving image texts produced by the children and semi-structured interviews with them, I examine the factors that appear to guide them in their creative endeavours. I consider the children’s motivations in relation to their social relationships and the cultural interests and aspirations reflected in the intertextual aspects of their work. A sense of the children’s awareness of themselves as collective and individual audiences emerges from an examination of the forms of expression that the children draw on. I argue that the children’s orientation towards this very particular and familiar audience has a significant and motivating influence on the way that they shape and create video texts and that this has implications for their learning.