Abstract
Contemporary children live in localities but are increasingly in a position where they connect globally with others across time and space. It can happen online through games, shared web pages and via social media and also through everyday schools and kindergartens. One possibility seems to be that children are able to play together in new ways that include both physical and virtual worlds. The local cultural and social life of children, with playing, experimenting and narrating can be expanded and combined with global interactions taking place on the internet.
This themed edition is inspired by a number of questions asked at meetings of an international research project where children, teachers, pre-school teachers and researchers communicated globally through the internet. This was part of the MakEY project, where we examined how makerspaces could develop young children’s digital literacy and creativity (https://makeyproject.eu/).
A school in Australia, a school in Denmark and one in Britain shared images and drawings and asked each other questions about things that made them curious. These meetings took place in what was framed as a global makerspace, where the focus was on inventing, constructing and experimenting using digital and analogue tools and materials in both local and global communities. A Google+ Group was used as the way to communicate.
A number of questions arose from the research questions: How can we imagine a global makerspace, where children exchange and develop ideas, drawings, photos and objects to play with? What platforms are needed to support children’s creativity, communication, play and co-production of ideas and objects across time and space? How does this exchange, transform our potential for knowledge building? How can teachers, parents and researchers take part in playing and experimenting together with the children?
The articles in this themed edition frame a number of experiences, projects, suggestions and also generate more questions, based both upon the project The Global Makerspace, but also in other contexts. All of the articles can be used to inform future projects, where the focus is on play and experimentation across time and space both inside and outside educational settings.
Steen Søndergaard describes a research project where the use of digital media in kindergartens moves into the global arena, with the goal of extending the local kindergarten digital experience to a wider, global context. He suggests we view the implementation of digital media as a ladder, where digital media begin as a supplement to everyday activity in the kindergarten. As they become more familiar, they become integrated in the existing pedagogical practices, and as they do so, challenges emerge that change existing pedagogical practices. In the final stage digital media, including online communication become an integral part of the culture in the kindergarten and permeate all aspects of everyday practice.
Louisa Haugaard Pedersen shares examples of the ways in which global makerspaces can ignite interest and the collective enthusiasm for Global Makerspaces that exemplify this themed edition. A number of images from the exchanges on the Google+ group demonstrate the inspiration and transformation, that happened through drawings, photos and text. She suggests the term trans-glocal playculture, where children play with each other globally and locally, transforming what they encounter to something that they can enjoy by themselves and something, they can communicate to others.
John Potter & Kate Cowan discuss children’s playgrounds as dynamic sites for making and re-making, and reflect on the concept of a ‘makerspace as mindset’, where creative collaborative meaning-making occurs ceaselessly in a range of modes. They also talk about the physical and virtual playgrounds that might have more similarities than we might think. For the players themselves the different playgrounds are closely related and impact on each other in reciprocal ways.
Mary Kay Culpepper & David Gauntlett connect makerspaces as a mindset, with platforms of creativity, where people can meet across time and space and build connections that form stronger networks. Eight principles behind the platforms of creativity are presented and they apply to both online settings and for physical encounters. One of principles concerns the understandings about the relationships between online and offline acting as a continuum of learning. Makerspaces can act as a respite from a connected world and a chance to heighten the participants creativity by connecting with others outside the makerspace.
Tom Gislev, Klaus Thestrup & Pernille Risør Elving present a model for networked learning, where schools in a media ecology construct the virtual and physical spaces, children and teachers need to communicate and exchange. The meeting place is flexible in the sense, that those involved are the ones, who decide what do, and when and where they do it. This flexible meeting place can include classrooms, makerspaces and other pedagogical formats. They suggest a process, where the children and teachers in a school move from being outside the global network towards becoming experimenting communities in several networks.
In the final paper, Anca Velicu & Greg Giannis describe makerspaces, where the participants take apart, recycle, fix and reuse everything from electronic waste to discarded toys. These (un)makerspaces can raise awareness of important issues of global importance and. They do this via engagement with waste, encouraging a reassessment of that which was previously considered of no value and considering solutions. In this context children and teachers can become better equipped to tackle the problems of our time: civic agency, climate change, environmental degradation and consumerism. The global makerspace is also global in the sense, that it looks at the challenges of the world.
A lot of possible questions for future research open from the ideas canvassed in the articles in this themed edition. First of all, it should include more countries, regions and different cultures in order to make the movement more extensive in the global context. One possible area of investigation is related to how children and teachers can meet each other and design ways to incorporate play, production and experimenting into their programs. The roles of teachers and children in educational settings, that goes beyond the local school or kindergarten is also an interesting aspect to consider, as both parties are closely connected in the attempt to communicate. It would also be relevant to consider the ways in which children are already active in online gaming and with social media and how they bring content and form from the digital and virtual world to the physical world – as well as vice versa.
Finally, other examples of children’s communication and playing inside and outside educational settings, locally and globally should of course be examined more closely to continue to inform the academic community worldwide about the developments in terms of their activity constituting research data, in a particular pedagogical setting and cultural practices.
There are several projects mentioned in this issue. The recent MakEY project, that sparked the idea of the themed edition, was supported by the European Commission Horizon 2020 Programme (H2020-EU 1.3.3) under Grant: 734720. The authors and the editor would like to express their gratitude to all the children, researchers, students, pedagogues, teachers and principals involved in the different projects through time. Without their eager participation none this edition would not be possible. The authors and the editor also want to acknowledge the reviewers of the papers.
Hopefully this edition will stimulate more suggestions and reflections to the question about how children can play, experiment and communicate across the globe.
Enjoy your reading
Klaus Thestrup, July 2020