Young Children Playing and Learning in a Digital Age

a Cultural and Critical Perspective

Christine Stephen, Susan Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138654686
• eBook ISBN: 9781317224976
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Young Children Playing and Learning in a Digital Age explores the emergence of the digital age and young children's experiences with digital technologies at home and in educational environments.

Drawing on theory and research-based evidence, this book makes an important contribution to understanding the contemporary experiences of young children in the digital age. It argues that a cultural and critically informed perspective allows educators, policy-makers and parents to make sense of children's digital experiences as they play and learn, enabling informed decision-making about future early years curriculum and practices at home and in early learning and care settings.

An essential read for researchers, students, policy-makers and professionals working with children today, this book draws attention to the evolution of digital developments and the relationship between contemporary technologies, play and learning in the early years.

1

TOWARDS A NEW KNOWLEDGE PERSPECTIVE

Introduction

As he pretended to be a delivery driver, three-year-old Sam handed over an imaginary parcel and was offered a small plastic card in payment. He tapped it on the corner of the old mobile phone being used as a card reader and having completed this contactless transaction climbed back into his van, turned a key to start the engine and called goodbye. This was a familiar play episode for Sam. He was enacting the kind of transaction he frequently observed during shopping trips. A card is tapped on a small rectangular box and a purchase is handed over. But his grandfather, his partner in the play, noticed his use of the contactless electronic with some surprise, although he would not have commented on Sam accepting pretend coins or even trying to place the card into the old phone and typing in some numbers. He was not surprised either at the use of a pretend motor vehicle and the actions of driving. Contactless payment is a relatively new practice for Sam’s grandfather and therefore noteworthy in a way that did not necessarily extend to his own everyday experience of paying electronically with a card and PIN number – and especially with driving a car. Sam’s understanding of shopping, communicating and engaging with digital technologies might seem different from that of earlier generations but just like his grandfather’s experience it is embedded in his daily life.

Books about young children and technologies often open with observations such as this one describing Sam and his grandfather. Typically, the vignettes are used to highlight what the authors present as the remarkable capacity of modern day children to use technologies. However, in this book we suggest that Sam and his grandfather are quite unremarkable. Culturally, both the child and the grandfather are of their time. Sam’s technological practices illustrate the evolution of knowledge, its application in technological innovations and the ways in which new knowledge and technologies transform the everyday practices of adults and children over time. This book is about cultural change, change in what is known and in the technologies made possible by new knowledge and understandings. Here we will argue that it is necessary to make sense of the evolution of changes in society’s knowledge and what that means for the technologies at our disposal and our everyday actions and interactions if we are to understand and respond to young children’s play and learning in contemporary times.

Culture is central to our thinking in this book. By culture we mean the dynamic nature of knowledge in the practices of everyday life. We explore how the process of cultural-historical change gives rise to contemporary knowledge (conceptual, practical and theoretical) and cultural tools and creates the conditions for transformative future innovation. It is our contention that this cultural perspective enables educators, policy-makers and parents to both understand the nature of the changes in play and learning in the digital age and, importantly, respond to these changes in ways that reflect the values and desires of contemporary times and the opportunities and challenges for future transformations. In order to think about how we can respond to the implications of technological change for young children’s play and learning in the digital age we will introduce some theoretical ideas about the relationship between people and technologies. One such important idea is that of taking a critical perspective on technologies. We will argue that adopting a culturally informed and critical perspective empowers educators, parents and all those responsible for caring for and educating young children in the digital age. Thinking culturally and critically is challenging. It requires a proactive and questioning approach that seeks to appreciate the cultural-historical transformations of the past, understand the present and consider future possibilities. However, we argue that just as changes in knowledge have informed technological innovation, so too should knowledge in the field of early childhood education evolve in the digital age. In what follows we seek to demonstrate the value of a cultural and critical perspective on young children’s play and learning in the digital age. First, however, to open our thinking and to lead the way in better understanding what we mean by a cultural and critical perspective we open this introductory chapter with an account of how research into young children’s engagement with technologies moved from being a predominately niche area of early childhood scholarship into a mainstream concern of early childhood education.

From niche research area to mainstream concern

Ten to 20 years ago, research about young children’s play and learning with technologies was a niche area of investigation. Defined as birth to eight years, the early childhood period tended to attract the interest of a committed band of scholars and researchers interested in understanding what types of technologies young children were using and how these technologies were being put to use in children’s play and learning (e.g. Haugland, 2000; Marsh et al., 2005; Yelland, 2005). Most of the research about young children’s technological experiences was conducted in relative isolation, focusing on what is variously labelled as preschool, nursery or early years education. Other sectors of education, such as primary, secondary and tertiary education, were pre-occupied with their own pedagogical technological issues and paid little heed to what was occurring in the early years (see for example: Collins & Halverson, 2009; Greenhow, Robelia, & Hughes, 2009). The early childhood sector meanwhile – in those moments when it did pay attention to young children’s engagements with technologies – tended towards a continuous re-enactment of the ‘benefits versus risks’ orientation towards the role of technologies in the lives of the very young. This orientation is most evident in the ‘Fools Gold’ debate occurring between Cordes and Miller (2000) and Clements and Sarama (2002) in the early part of the new century. What and how young children might be playing and learning with technologies was not a mainstream consideration for the field. However, leaders researching in this area continued to establish the empirical evidence base regarding young children’s technology use in multiple settings, including at home and in educational contexts (Plowman & Stephen, 2005). New ideas and concepts for understanding young children’s digital literacies (Marsh, 2004) and the emergence of digital play were slowly percolating (Zevenbergen, 2007).

Then, in 2010 came the iPad. Arriving with a suddenness that made the iPad seem as if it had arrived from nowhere, the early childhood sector was ill-prepared to greet this new technology in the lives of young children. Putting computing technology literally at the fingertips of the very youngest of children, an explosion of interest in young children’s technology use in the early years suddenly occurred. A quick Google search reveals a rapid succession of research publications focused on iPads in the early years. With titles such as ‘iPads as a literacy teaching tool in early childhood’ (Beschorner & Hutchison, 2013) and ‘Touch, type, and transform: iPads in the social studies classroom’ (Berson, Berson, & McGlinn Manfra, 2012) technology research in the early years was unexpectedly high on the agenda. There was interest from the popular media too. ‘Are iPads and tablets bad for young children?’ asked the Guardian newspaper (Cocozza, 2014) and ‘Toddlers obsessed with iPads: could it hurt their development?’ (Chang, Rakowsky, & Frost, 2013). Yet, despite this high profile rush of interest, research into young children’s technology use at home and in early childhood education settings had gone on somewhat quietly unnoticed for many years. Indeed, outside of the specifics of early childhood technology research, studies in the areas of media and new media had already provided many important insights and understanding about young children’s engagements with technologies – particularly those pertaining to what was once, at some earlier point in time, the newest of the new – first radio, and then television (Buckingham, 1993).

In this book we pay attention to the range of research and thinking pertaining to young children’s play and learning in the digital age. We consider both the ‘niche’ research of the past 20 years, and newer research and theorisation regarding young children’s engagements with technologies. In particular, we draw on our own research – some of which was conducted and published during the ‘niche’ era, and some of which makes a more contemporary contribution. For example, we draw heavily on the ground-breaking work of Stephen and colleagues in their three Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded projects (‘Interplay’ 2003–2005; ‘Entering the e-Society’ 2005–2007; and ‘Young Children Learning with Toys and Technology’ 2008–2011) examining young children’s technology use in the home. Predominately pre-iPad, this research drew attention to forms of learning with digital technologies that go beyond acquiring new operating skills and established that learning in the digital age was mediated not just by the technology but by the key pedagogical contribution of parents and educators. We also build on the contributions of Edwards (2003), who in this niche area contributed to one of the first-ever publications on touchscreen technology use by young children in early childhood settings – anticipating and describing young children’s preference for input devices as culturally acquired skills (Romeo, Edwards, McNamara, Walker, & Ziguras, 2003). Some newer work (e.g. Edwards, 2013) regarding the pedagogical positioning of technologies in early childhood education is also canvassed. Here, we focus particularly on Edwards’ (2015) approach to the problem of integrating technologies into early childhood education settings where she argues for an increased focus on understanding, developing and conceptualising digital play over a continued emphasis on teaching teachers to use technologies with children. This work has set in motion a newer body of work in which researchers are now examining how early childhood teachers view technologies as play (Nikolopoulou & Gialamas, 2015; Palaiologou, 2016), and the extent to which technologies are likely to be integrated by teachers into the early childhood curriculum according to their own constructs of digital play (Arnott, 2016).

Now that the topic of ‘young children playing and learning in a digital age’ appears to be the concern of so many writers, researchers, teachers, families, policy- and decision-makers we seek to do more in this book than simply broaden the existing scope of this once niche area of interest. While a summary of the relevant literature and a distillation of ‘tips’ for teachers and parents may seem superficially attractive, it is our firm belief that the field of early learning both deserves, and needs, more than this to guide our thinking regarding young children’s engagements with digital technologies. Distilled literature and tips will not help teachers, parents, policy-makers and even researchers understand how it is that iPads ‘suddenly’ arrived in the lives of the very youngest of children. Nor will such a summative approach help researchers and teachers attend to what is significant and important about young children’s play and learning in a digital age and their own role in contemporary childhoods as they evolve in a digital context. Even further, concentrating on tips for technology use in families and early-learning settings denies the field a comprehensive understanding of what actually comprises the digital age and how this ‘digital age’ came into existence. It is our contention, that to teach children growing up within a particular ‘age’ we must at the very least, have a basic cultural-historical understanding of how things came to be in order to inform what it is we decide to do next.

Thus this book is different to many books that consider young children’s play and learning in a digital age. We do not begin with breathless claims about the brave new world of digital media. Nor do we commence with arguments pertaining to the digital native-hood of very young children. We know that for some people digital technologies are a source of anxiety and regret. Technologies may be viewed as threatening historically valued ‘developmentally appropriate’ approaches towards learning and as substituting virtual engagement for face to face interaction with adults and peers. Perhaps technologies are understood as encouraging inactivity and closing down experiential learning, collaborative problem-solving and creative engagement. Other people may well favour the power of digital technologies to extend children’s horizons and communicative power and value the motivating influence of on-screen activities and the opportunities which they offer for personalised leisure and sharing of digital media content. For some commentators digital technologies matter because they are part of the 21st century knowledge environment (e.g. Parette, Quesenberry, & Blum, 2010). They argue that young learners have to acquire familiarity with using digital resources and the competencies that will allow them to enter and make good use of the knowledge economy afforded by evolving technological developments.

Discussion of these approaches is common enough now in the literature about young children and digital technologies. The justification for much of the inclusion and recognition of the digital in early years education increasingly comes from claims that the children of today live in a technological world and therefore must be educated and brought up to effectively use these technologies (e.g. Parette, Quesenberry, & Blum, 2010). While we sympathise with this form of justification, we also view this rationale as a somewhat superficial reason for including technologies in the early years. Instead, we argue that it may be more productive to understand that a particular ‘age’, whether digital or not, will always contain within it the cultural-historically developed practices and technologies that characterise what people of that time period do. Young children playing and learning in a digital age is not about including technologies in the early years because children are now living in a technological world. Young children playing and learning in a digital age is about understanding what it is that people – both adults and children – do with technologies to communicate with each other, to be entertained, to create and share digital media and content, and even to make money. In avoiding dichotomised debates about the benefits and/or limitations of technologies for young children’s play and learning in the digital age we try to circumvent the replication of what technological historian Colin Divall (2010) calls ‘techno-tales’.

Beyond techno-tales

Techno-tales are the explanations people develop about technologies to account for what they see happening around them in society. In the seven years since the release of the iPad, early childhood as a sector, both educational and in the arena of ‘parenting’ literature has begun to develop its own series of techno-tales about young children and technologies. These tales already make somewhat familiar reading – as discussed by Plowman and McPake (2013) as a series of ‘myths’ about young children and technologies. ‘Young children naturally learn to use technologies’ is one such story. This story is captured in the popular catchphrase ‘digital natives’ as first proposed by Prensky (2001). In fact, the research of Stephen and colleagues shows that, while it seems children naturally learn to use technologies, the process of technological learning is clearly socially and culturally situated (e.g. Plowman, McPake, & Stephen, 2008; Stephen, Stevenson, & Adey, 2013). Children learn to use the technologies to which they are exposed in their family and community settings. The use to which they put these technologies relates to how they are applied by older family members and peers. Furthermore, social learning practices, that have gone on for generations, are evident in the learning process – parents, siblings and peers model technology use, actively scaffold children’s developing technology skills, mediate access to newer technologies and digital media and explicitly teach children the skills required to operate given technologies.

Yet another techno-tale in the field of early childhood education is that ‘young children get enough technologies at home – they don’t need more of them in their early learning settings’. Again, there is research that speaks against this tale. Young children do not all equally experience access to technologies. Even where research shows that children across different socio-economic statuses have access to similar types of technologies – the practices to which these technologies are put clearly differ. Children from lower socio-economic groups tend to use technologies in ways that are orientated towards the consumption of digital media, whereas children in higher socio-economic groups access technologies for the generation of digital media, searching for information and communicating with families and friends (Harris, Straker, & Pollock, 2017; Yuen, Lau...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword: introduction to the EECERA Book Series
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Towards a new knowledge perspective
• PART I The evolution of the digital age
• PART II Play and learning
• PART III Children and technologies
• Index