Researching Children's Media-Related Play: Multimodal Narratives of Lived Experience

• In Event: 64.073 - Exploring Lived Experiences Through Multimodal Texts and Methodologies: Narratives and Complex Representations of Learning

Abstract

Purpose
This paper presents our findings in a project exploring children’s playground games in which the players themselves, aged between 7 and 11, were engaged as co-researchers, using a range of digital and other media. The purpose was to find ways to explore and represent contemporary play in the new media age and to look for continuities and differences with playground games of the past 50 years.

Framework
The theoretical frames employed in the work combine, amongst others, multimodality, new literacies, play theory and media literacy (Bezemer & Kress, 2016; Burn & Richards, 2014; Gee, 2015; Marsh, 2004). The data presented is drawn from an ongoing two-year UK research council funded study, Playing the Archive, conducted by UCL Institute of Education and the University of Sheffield. The overarching aims were twofold: to explore childhood play in the digital age and to offer a contemporary lens on an earlier archive of children’s games (Opie & Opie, 1954; Willett, Richards, Marsh, Burn, & Bishop, 2013)

Methods
We drew on existing and emergent methods and methodologies, including those derived from theories of multimodality, focused ethnography, democratising and participant research (Fielding, 2004; Jewitt, 2011; Knoblauch, 2005; Kress, 2003). Children were engaged as co-researchers using tools such as wearable GoPro cameras, iPads and handheld voice recorders, alongside pen and paper. Our methods were thoroughly evaluated by the university ethics committee and we rigorously adhered to principles of fully informed consent from parents, carers and children, as well as mandatory data protection, throughout.

Data
We worked with a core team of 15 child researchers in each of two school playgrounds in urban, multiracial settings; both schools had in the region of 400 children enrolled. The datasets comprised video clips of various kinds, audio recordings, maps of playspaces created by the children and more. We researched their contemporary play and responses to items in the games archive, including their re-enactment of games from the past. Several emergent themes were coded across the datasets using multimodal analysis.

Findings
Our findings show that media-rich methods of both data collection and analysis enabled children and academic researchers to create detailed multimodal narrative accounts of contemporary play. We have witnessed how games played in our research settings are remediating popular cultural reference points, such as those derived from gaming and YouTube, alongside unpacking continuities with childhoods of the past. We have data which speaks back to concerns around screen-based play by showing that physical play is alive and well in playgrounds and that children are agentive and active authors of their own remediation of digital culture.

Significance
This work is significant because it shows how multimodal narratives, developed by and with child researchers, allow us to pay attention to the detail of children’s lived experience, something which is absent in larger-scale quantitative work. This project, with its emphasis on meaning-making across modes of gesture, movement, image and speech affords us richer understandings of contemporary childhoods, communication and play in the digital age.

Authors

• John Potter, University College London Institute of Education

• Kate Cowan, University College London