The Routledge International Handbook of Learning with Technology in Early Childhood

Natalia Kucirkova, Jennifer Rowsell, Garry Falloon, Natalia Kucirkova, Jennifer Rowsell, Garry Falloon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351389853
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Routledge International Handbook of Learning with Technology in Early Childhood focuses specifically on the most cutting-edge, innovative and international approaches in the study of children's use of and learning with digital technologies.

This edited volume is a comprehensive survey of methods in children's technologies and contains a rich repertoire of studies from diverse fields and research, including both educational and developmental psychology, post-humanist literacy, applied linguistics, language and phenomenology and narrative approaches.

For ease of reference, the Handbook's 28 chapters are divided into four thematic sections:

• introduction and opening reflections;
• studies answering ontological questions, which theorize how children take on original identities in becoming literate with technologies;
• studies answering epistemological questions, which focus on how children's knowledge and learning are (co)constructed with a diverse range of technologies;
• studies answering practice-related questions, which explore the resources and conditions that create the most powerful learning opportunities for children.

Expertly edited, this interdisciplinary and international compendium is an ideal introduction to such a diverse, multi-faceted field.

Part I

Setting the scene

1
Introduction

Natalia Kucirkova, Jennifer Rowsell and Garry Falloon

Rapid growth of digital technologies during the 21st century have paved the way for an upsurge in young children’s digital play and learning, multimedia communication and new, multimodal literacies. Coupled with global inequalities in access to high-quality education, the socio- cultural impact of immigration and multicultural neighbourhoods on children’s daily experiences, digital technologies and media are reshaping childhood and young children’s lives. Technologies and media prompt us to consider what being literate means and implies for the children growing up today. Making meaning of these rapidly changing and complex relationships requires a multidisciplinary, open-minded approach with a range of rigorous, innovative and context-appropriate research methods.

When planning this Handbook, we set out to compile a collection of chapters that would discuss and exemplify how digital technologies affect learning and play, and the ways in which researchers study this impact on young children’s lives in the 21st century. We aimed to provide a thoroughly researched and comprehensive overview of current multidisciplinary scholarship concerning children’s media and technology. More specifically, we had three main objectives:

• First, we aimed to complement current efforts to coordinate diverse perspectives and facilitate dialogue among groups of researchers who typically collect and share evidence in segregated communities. This objective was pursued with a strategic approach to the choice of authors and areas of research they represent. We approached researchers who are well-known in their respective fields and who can collectively offer expert insights into diverse, mixed and cross-disciplinary approaches to technology/media research with children aged between two to eight years.
• Second, with our instructions to the authors, we aimed to collate chapters which would provide insights into the methods undertaken by the scholars in their respective fields. We envisaged that such an approach might empower other researchers to audit, reflect on and substantiate the value of their own methodologies and research approaches.
• Third, we aimed to trouble the currently dominant monodisciplinary view among many Western policy-makers who favour quantitative and large-scale trials in making decisions about allocation of school resources and accountability measures for teachers. To avoid disciplinary-oriented, one-dimensional understanding of children’s technology use, we aimed to emphasise the need for a ‘toolkit’ of diverse methodological and theoretical perspectives to inform the policy and public discourse on a topic known to be controversial and prone to emotional and reactive responses. This objective meant that we commissioned chapters from researchers who provide additional support for existing policy-makers, as well as researchers who interrupt existing discourses by co-designing educational resources through co-inquiry with teacher and parent communities.

Underlying the Handbook is a wider objective to add to the efforts of some to move beyond a publication system that considers research disciplines in silos and sometimes pits one method against one other. This ambitious goal was partly a reflection of significant intellectual divisions in 2017 and 2018 and partly a reflection of our own multidisciplinary work.

Providing space for multidisciplinarity

The editorial task of assembling works from a range of research traditions and contexts was an incredibly rich and challenging experience. As editors we wanted to be inclusive and receptive towards a wide range of disciplines, which often act in contention and have not been brought together in one collection before. We approached the leaders in their fields and were delighted that they accepted our invitation. The contributing authors have shared with us their current research interests, their understanding of contemporary childhood issues, research approaches and reflections on digital media/technology and key insights from their work. We deliberately and specifically aimed to have authors whose work cuts across diverse fields and historically contested fields of research, bringing together research which is typically reported in books, journals and conference presentations. As a result, the volume includes a rich repertoire of studies from educational psychology, posthumanist literacy, narrative approaches, developmental approaches, arts-based and child’s geographies fields, applied linguistics, language and phenomenology, developmental psychology and educational technology.

The challenge of multidisciplinarity

Complexity brings to the fore multidimensionality as well as contradictions and conflicts. Many parents and educators acknowledge, but are also confused with, the complexity of considerations related to children’s technology use. We admit that we too grappled with a cogent and coherent way of representing the complexity portrayed in the chapters. As editors, we discussed at length the merit of individual approaches, their rigour, terminology and how they advance knowledge in the field. We disagreed and discussed, often via emails and videoconference calls, our feedback to authors.

We endeavoured to maintain a pluralistic view on the importance of diverse voices. Accordingly, when providing feedback to authors, we aimed to enter in conversation with them and encourage them to produce the best chapter they can by pointing out contrasting evidence, as well as celebrating their expertise in a specific area. We were keen to profile the different theoretical lenses and methods employed by researchers from different disciplines, but this meant we needed to be open to different writing styles, and at times, epistemological perspectives. In a field that still needs to construct a definition of its key terms, it was often not easy to find a common language.

Multidisciplinarity and diverse writing styles

Research is reported differently in different disciplines. We wanted to reflect this reality and as a result, the Handbook is written using various styles and formats. Some chapters are written in a subjective and narrative voice, some in an objective and persuasive voice. Some co-authored chapters explicitly reveal the authorship of individual sections by presenting them as a dialogue or attributing specific sections to different authors, while others are written in one neutral voice. Some chapters make an explicit reference to technology as a specific material resource that can be studied in its own right, while others conceive of technology as an integral part of children’s socio-material being in the world. Some authors highlight how prior research could contribute to understanding of children’s digitised lives, while others point out its inadequacy for a dynamically changing environment, defined by novelty.

Coming to the field with our own subjectivities and methodological biases, we needed to reconcile the authenticity of diverse research. Our editorial principle was not to judge but to showcase research practice that is firmly grounded in theoretical perspectives and empirical data. We did not homogenise researchers’ approaches by providing them with templates or requests for more ‘evidence’. Instead, we aimed to ensure they are honest and transparent about their methods and approaches, so that readers can truly see the multiple layers of children’s technology research.

Multidisciplinarity and diverse methods

We consider diversity as a source of celebration, not a road to reduction. We wanted to respect and celebrate the expanding methodologies in all disciplines. Consequently, some chapters draw on multiple-team studies that they evaluated through randomised controlled trials, while others describe an intervention they developed, implemented and evaluated themselves. Some authors provide an original synthesis of theories, while others position their work in a strong empirical base of cumulative evidence in a specific area. Some chapters are descriptive and discursive, some are explanatory and some are normative. All chapters are richly theorised, and they follow a systematic approach to generating original evidence.

This does not mean that we could escape questions around hierarchy of evidence. However, we felt that assigning prominence to one method, discipline or research team would be a partisan strategy. We decided to leave it to the readers to draw their own conclusion of how sound the individual researchers’ justifications are, and what their value is in the field of digital technologies. Had we favoured one type of evidence over another we would be complicit in an elitism that deems only a certain calibre of research worthy of informing policy and practice.

Multidisciplinarity and one-sided policy

Technology brings into sharp relief the need for conversations with researchers across communities. The educational research is at an important and exciting juncture in history, where a divided culture in methods and epistemologies (or to use more radical terms, positivist and humanist approaches) fuel partisan arguments and hamper progress in practice. We firmly believe there is a real danger in monodisciplinary approaches that eschew some research approaches as lower status if they do not follow a quantitative or large-scale evaluation. Through the attention to interdisciplinary evidence and diverse ways of approaching children’s engagement with digital technologies/media, we hoped to address the uncomfortable reality that policy, and in many cases educational practice, are behind scholarly understanding of children’s use of technology.

However, it would be naïve to assume that the individual chapters in the Handbook carry equal weight in their impact on policy and attracting research funding. Despite the richness and diversity represented in this Handbook, the national and international educational policies are remarkably one-sided and uneven. We can significantly bridge the divide if everyone participates in the conversation, and perhaps even if the Handbook sparks more and nuanced conversations. It is in this awareness that Natalia shares her own reflections on the value of multidisciplinarity in making an impact on educational practice.

Multidisciplinarity and reality

I have been studying children’s engagement with personalised books from a developmental psychological perspective in an experimental paradigm (Kucirkova et al., 2014), as well as from a qualitative educational perspective using a multimodal discourse analysis (Kucirkova et al., 2013). I have also co-designed ed apps, and my work has been published in either psychology or education or human-computer interaction journals. The methods and theoretical frameworks that I have been following over the years were aligned with the rules and norms of their disciplinary orientations. This approach has meant that I could produce messages that are valid and recognised in the individual research groups and their publication outlets.

Together with my colleagues, we documented how digital, personalised books support positive parent-child interactions at home and motivate children to read and learn new concepts. Based on the research findings, I took several steps to support teachers’ integration of personalised books into pre-K education: I wrote articles for practitioner magazines (e.g., Exchange, The Reading Teacher, Teach Primary, English 4–11) as well as blogs in newspapers with significant circulation (e.g., Newsweek, The Huffington Post, The Guardian). I have also regularly presented my work at several large-scale professional organisations, including the annual conference of the International Literacy Association, United Kingdom Literacy Association and British Council.

These efforts were not completely without success, but they were certainly not a game-changer. This is not because teachers did not like the idea of creating or co-creating books with their children. Many found the idea and the research behind it interesting. However, in most cases this was not enough to sustain the practice long-term. In some cases, the teachers could not even imagine how to initiate book-making in their busy classrooms, as they were focused on preparing children for tests and exams. I realised that my approach required a larger structural change, but also that my focus on scalable outcomes assumed a top-down model of science.

I thought that a way of addressing it was to adopt the opposite approach: bottom-up and work with teachers directly to initiate the educational change. This happened organically during my postdoctoral studies, when I was approached by a pre-school (kindergarten) teacher. Amy (pseudonym) read about my work on iPad apps in the local press and was keen to try the Our Story app (a tablet app for making digital books that we developed at the Open University) in her classroom. We exchanged several emails and began a conversation about what might work in her classroom. The teacher introduced me to her colleagues, who worked incredibly hard to support children from low-income families in the English Midlands. They were keen on using Our Story to support the children’s language and early literacy skills. I conceived the study as a formative experiment that would elucidate how digital personalised books could be implemented in a pre-school environment and meet established pedagogical goals. The goals were set by the teachers, and as per the typical educational design research, we planned and adjusted the data collection according to what was happening in the classroom.

Unlike carefully controlled approaches that focus on demonstrable outcomes of effectiveness, formative experiments recognise and actively address the complexity of classroom environments. These design-based models of teacher professional development directly focus on knowledge co-creation, teacher-researcher collaboration and teachers’ empowerment. The teachers enjoyed using the app, and through their enthusiasm, developed a suite of engaging activities for the children which they continued long beyond my involvement. There was no doubt that the teachers and children enjoyed making their own personalised books. Their self-evaluation report and children’s smiling faces showed a lot of enjoyment in the process of making and sharing stories. However, if we were to measure the impact of this approach on children’s learning it would be of a negligible effect size. The teacher-led approach towards the books’ design and content was not maximised for the children’s academic skills.

How might we interpret the educational ‘impact’ of these examples? Researchers who follow the medical model of evidence would argue that my approach would need refined models of delivery and higher accountability or incentive measures for teachers who do not follow the implementation protocol. Researchers who follow a humanist approach towards evidence would argue that a top-down approach of disseminating research to the teachers is both misguided and generalised, and that teachers need to be co-creators of the materials they are supposed to teach from. In other words, data should be co-produced together with individual participants and the wider community they are part of. I believe that we need both approaches towards evaluating impact (in addition to more substantial and repeated studies in my specific case) and we need to integrate them with the notion of multiple realities that characterises multidisciplinarity.

The more I engage in the ‘politics of research’, the more I learn that one type of evidence (or one type of research approach towards evidence) cannot make a lasting and/or significant impact on practice. Teachers are diverse groups of people and they have their own epistemologies, ontologies and practices that inform what they do. We can accommodate this diversity only if we support multiple narratives that partake in jointly securing equal status and legitimacy to the two-fold nature of teachers’ agency: competence and empowerment. Research evidence on what works needs to make sense and be of value to the teachers. They need to be willing to make changes to their practice through intrinsic motivation and contribution. At the same time, teachers need to feel competent in their teaching and have...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Hlaf Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on editors
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Part I Setting the scene
• Part II Studies answering ontological questions
• Part III Studies answering epistemological questions
• Part IV Studies answering practice-related questions
• Index