Digital Communication in a Preschool Classroom: Collaborative Social Interactions of Children and Teachers Writing E-Mail

• In Event: Portals to Understanding Learners’ Social Interactions Online

Abstract

With young children engaging increasingly in a diverse range of digital contexts in early childhood classrooms, there is growing interest in examining how they produce and understand digital texts. In Australia, 90 percent of children aged 5-14 years engaged with the Internet in the preceding 12 months (ABS, 2013), and there is evidence that children younger than five years are also users in Internet-enabled technology. Only a few studies examine multiliteracies in preschool contexts (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003) in order to understand a “technically literate generation” (Marsh, 2004, 2005). Early childhood policy and curriculum guidelines recommend the introduction of technology in meaningful ways into classrooms, such as using technology to support communication and engagement in the cultural and everyday experiences of home and community, and for information seeking (Australian Government Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relations, 2009). While endorsed, there is little empirical evidence showing everyday practices in early childhood classrooms with technology.

From a corpus of video recorded data that investigated young children’s engagement with technology in preschool and home contexts, this paper takes one extended sequence that shows a group time activity in preschool where the teacher introduces to the group of approximately 20 children, aged 4-5 years, the idea of sending an email to a teacher who had recently moved away. The episode was selected from over 100 hours of video-recorded classroom interaction of teachers and children in nine early childhood centers in Australia. The analytic focus is on how they draw on specific literacy practices using screen-based technology; it shows how they interactionally manage their social worlds with the affordances of digital material practices of using keyboards and computer screens, and cultural practices of composing texts to be shared.

Drawing on understandings of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) and conversation analysis (Sacks, 1995), the video-recorded episode was transcribed and analysed in close detail. As educational talk is accomplished predominantly through language, forcing analytic attention on the complexity of the discourse and focusing on the social organisation of the talk and embodied action by the participants offers insights into how social interaction is accomplished as a joint production of orderly discourse (Atkinson, 1981). In this analysis, we show how the teacher’s talk works to cohort the children, determines who speaks through allocating speaker turns, and monitors the session to progress the completion of the email. The teacher and children negotiate the material and technical aspects of writing the email as well as the social aspects of openings and closings to the email (Waldvogel, 2007), and the introduction and presentation of new topics. The teacher adds considerations to do with authorial voice, politeness markers, and writing conventions.

The paper contributes new understandings of digitally mediated interactions between teachers and children in early childhood settings, specifically the ways that digital literacy practices are accomplished in a cohorted setting. More broadly, these understandings show how digital practices in preschool have to move beyond operational skills to the broader understandings of digital practices as practical and situated activities.

Authors

• Susan J. Danby, Queensland University of Technology

• Christina R. Davidson, Charles Sturt University

• Karen Thorpe, Queensland University of Technology