Technology-Making Children or Technology Making Children?

• In Event: Techné in the Making: Literacies, Technologies, and Wonder in Research and Practice

Abstract

Purpose

In this conceptual piece, we compare multimodal (Scollon, 2001; Kress, 2003) and agentic realist (Barad, 2003) lenses to expand understandings of the complex developmental possibilities in playful making at a preschool art table. This troubles assumptions in a prominent anthropocentric pedagogy that reads child/material productions primarily as evidence of a linear, developmental sequence. Rather, we explore how our research methods privilege order and coherence, tame chaotic intra-actions among materials and humans, strip away material catalysts, and perhaps child purposes. This paper advances a notion of development as transitory doing and undoing of new materiality in which children and technology are products and actants of development.


Research Context

Using excerpts from a Design Playshop study (Author 4 & Author 5, 2015; Author 4, Author 5, Author 3, & Colleague, in press) of three preschool classrooms (60 3-5 year old children, 6 teachers), we analyze a vignette of playful making with craft materials, small toys, and Squishy Circuits playdough electronics kits (Johnson & Thomas, 2010) among small groups of children. We selected the video data with buzzers as key sites of engagement (Scollon & Scollon, 2004), that is, where multiple discourses, action, actors, and materials converged causing contestation.


Perspectives and Analysis

We first looked at activity from a maker’s perspective using multimodal microanalysis and mediated discourse analysis (Author 4, 2011; 2014) of video data to track interactions: to see how children interact with technologies to fashion artifacts, manipulating modal affordances of technologies to craft cultural meanings. We then tracked intra-active encounters at the table to foreground materials in shaping outcomes looking through diffractive lenses at emergent development (Lenz Taguchi, 2013). This meant understanding how one materiality can simultaneously be another depending on the instrument (Barad, 2003). We produced a sensory translation of sound to visualization by overlaying video excerpts with animations.


Findings

The mediated activity lens revealed social actors’ intention in which buzzers are wielded to emphasize particular material properties, develop design skills, and shape children’s social relationships in peer playgroups. When multiple buzzers sounded at various pitches, children made sense of the cacophony through sensory exploration, feeling, listening, and interpreting the sounds. The materialist lens de-centered people into the larger picture that emerged. This revealed intra-actions among actants, materials, and ear-piercing sounds--annoying to adults, amplified by children. Shifting the instrumentality produced a sensory translation from auditory to visual, that literally makes visible the material and social worlds that blurred making, sound, bodies, and technologies..


Significance

When we attend to these design potentials and world-making possibilities, instructional limitations dissolve into sticky relationships that the technologies/making/child express together. For children growing up with digital interactive technologies, their virtual-physical materiality, and their possibilities for sensory translation, it is important to recognize the limitations of predictable adult purposes. This paper recognizes the interplay among technology and children as simultaneously producing the child and the technology. New media art practices of sensory translations can teach us to recognize the power of material force through diffraction across senses by intentionally highlighting materiality as a recognized developmental actor.

Authors

• Anna Keune, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Karen E. Wohlwend, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Kylie A. Peppler, Indiana University - Bloomington