Abstract
Childhood has been changed by the accessibility of digital devices. Many children, especially in the wealthy world, are of a generation who have never known a life without digital technologies (e.g. Chaudron et al., 2015). Research demonstrates that children engage with technologies from birth in the home (O’Connor, 2017) and acquire appropriate skills to navigate new platforms by being immersed in the digital world. Consequently, children have evolved to transition between physical and virtual worlds fluidly (Marsh et al., 2016).
Children’s spaces and places for play and learning have similarly been transformed as innovative digital technologies provide mechanisms to bridge digital and non-digital worlds (Arnott et al., 2019; Fleer, 2019). Children’s play across their physical location, with artefacts and resources and during relational, social and cultural spaces shape the integration of technologies into early childhood pedagogy and daily life. The physical environment, the connected environment and the social culture are intertwined, and it is the dynamic interaction of new artefacts with cultural and pedagogical ways of being that result in a more holistic understanding of play experiences.
Core to all these discussions, therefore, is the argument that it is unproductive to distinguish between digital and non-digital resources or to separate spaces and places for play and learning. Instead, digital lives reflect the opportunity for richness in pedagogy and practice in early childhood education in the 21st century (Arnott et al., 2019, Marsh et al., 2019). As a result, it becomes even more difficult to distinguish the boundaries of digital and non-digital as well as physical, virtual or cultural worlds.
As technologies are now ubiquitous and because children now move across and between digital and non-digital resources in a blurred and continuous way, it is suggested that childhoods need to be conceptualised as multimodal (Yelland, 2018). In this context, technologies exist “as active interventions and transformative forces within the [children’s] world” (Stetsenko, 2017: 30). The multimodality of children’s world, therefore, offers new potentialities and conditions for children’s play and learning (Fleer, 2019).
Thus, research that examines play and learning in early childhood education in the post-digital era (e.g. Edwards et al., 2017; Gillen and Kucirkova, 2018; Plowman, 2016) seeks first to understand how the digital and non-digital landscape can be developed to support children’s multimodal lives. Second, it investigates how the multiplicity of contemporary resources can be navigated to provide opportunities to develop pedagogies and practices that will support children.
Research is emerging that has started using the multimodality of places and spaces to examine pedagogy and practice in early childhood. For example, Fleer’s (2017) work uses the lens of ‘playworlds’, a term coined by Lindqvist (2001, 2003), who was inspired by the work of Vygotsky (1967), to explore how children bridge the digital and non-digital to shape their experiences, particularly in relation to Science Engineering and Technology. Similarly, Marsh et al. (2017), building on the concept of makerspaces, explore how young children’s digital literacy and creative design skills can be bridged in specially designed spaces. This research now places an emphasis on the context and the content of these happenings rather than only focusing on the materials children are using (Fleer, 2017; Plowman, 2016; Yelland and Gilbert, 2017).
All these examinations suggest that culture, social perspectives and social relations drive the transformation of places where children engage with technologies. Pedagogy and practice must consider the multimodal terrain that is made possible by agentic beings, including educators, parents and children, whose ideas and dispositions towards digital devices frame their integration in early childhood (Arnott, 2017). In doing so, they create a space for play and learning which is dynamic and contemporary. Yet, the field needs a more comprehensive picture of what this looks like in action across early childhood provision such as nurseries, kindergartens, pre-schools as well as cultural spaces within communities. Similarly, more research is needed so we can begin to understand the digital cultures of family life, not only from an adult orientated and parental perspective but the child’s perspective of their multimodal worlds.
In this special issue, the main aim was to collect research evidence on the multimodality of children’s play and learning in the 21st century. Across the papers in this issue, we see discussions of children’s voice and agency, with children contributing their views to the discussion of their multimodal places and spaces in Mertala’s paper The best game in the world: Exploring young children’s digital game–related meaning-making via drawing. The article explores how children are actively involved in meaning-making via digital games. They discuss children’s gaming cultures and how children move beyond consumers of games towards mediated and creative agentic players.
The views of adult’s working with children are presented in Demetriou’s paper The relational space of educational technology: early childhood students’ views. The analysis according to Soja’s (1996) third space (combining the material and mental/attitudinal spaces) offers a unique contribution to the practicalities of exploring the entangled and inseparable exploration of place and space in this issue. They demonstrate the need to consider cultural and social influences combined with explicit instruction to develop children’s digital fluency and literacy.
Movement across the children’s digital learning landscapes is evidenced in Johnston’s paper Digital technology as a tool to support children and educators as co-learners where it is demonstrated how children integrate digital and non-digital tools in an enquiry-based manner, to deepen children’s and practitioners’ content knowledge. The paper presents the notion of technologies as a new modality to allow children and practitioners to learn together about matters that cannot be taught through direct observation in the classroom, in this case about outer space.
Knowledge of children’s learning in the classroom, and the pedagogical framing associated with this process, is then further explored in Ludgate’s paper Pedagogical approaches surrounding the touchscreen: The child and practitioner perspective. In contrast to Johnston’s paper where co-learning between adult and child is present, Ludgate highlights the disconnect between practitioner and children’s intensions with touch screen resources. The need for a child-led approach to technology use, within the limits of safe Internet use, is required where children’s interests are married with practicalities of preschool rules and regulations. Here, we see what Bers (2012) refers to as the need to create playgrounds, rather than playpens with digital resources.
The concept of pedagogies and practices framing children’s play then becomes all the more apparent in Lundtofte’s paper Absorbency and Utensilency: A Spectrum for Analysing Children’s Digital Play Practices. They conceptualise digital play as a continuum of sociomaterial practices, to interpret the place of touch screens within children’s play. The importance of tracking and observing digital play over time to see shifts in meaning and movement between foregrounding and backgrounding the technology in children’s digital worlds is made clear.
Across these papers, we see the complexity and diversity in children’s multimodal experiences. The final paper in the issue From foot to pencil, from pencil to finger: Children as digital wayfarers brings these concepts to the fore as Dardanou positions the child as agentic and leading their multimodal journey. In a museum context, she describes how children, with the help of touch screen technologies, are able to make sense of their experiences through the process of storying and creating a narrative. We see elements of movement between the digital and non-digital realms and of children’s positioning in relation to pedagogic instruction. This paper demonstrates the role of technologies as one modality among a sea of multimodal practices.
This eclectic mix of papers offers a new and diverse perspective on what we mean by space and play for multimodal childhoods. The papers span discussions of voice and children’s meaning-making in increasingly multimodal worlds. We see explorations of the importance of framing children’s play experiences (Arnott, 2017) and how the space and place for technology is interpreted and implemented differently across contexts. Overall, technologies become an artefact with social and cultural capital to support children’s play, meaning-making and learning. Yet the huge diversity of provision, hardware as well as social and cultural interpretations result in inherently unique experiences for every child and practitioner. A unified model is not presented, nor sought. Rather, we seek to present diversity of perspectives and interpretations to demonstrate that children’s multimodal learning landscapes are idiosyncratic according to context, culture and social meaning making. Therefore, practitioners, parents and children can embrace multimodality in a way which suits their individual needs.