Digital Writing and the Young Child: The Sociomaterial Processes of a Five-Year-Old Author

• In Event: Interrogating the Status of Digital Writing in Practice and Pedagogy

Abstract

Objectives
A focus on young children as producers of digital text needs to look more broadly than at only on the human actors within the text production process. There is a need also to investigate the digital ‘stuff’ of learning to write as well to understand how children use digital resources and enable interactions as they produce text. This paper attempts to address these complex practices by looking at the digital writing practices of one child.
Theoretical Framework
The entanglement of human and non-human, of materials and technologies throughout text production needs to be explained to reveal how meaning-making occurs through the varied and multiple immaterial ways that materials are used. The immaterial refers to the experiences, memories, feelings, perspectives, and ability of the child participants and the material as “the ‘stuff’ such as artefacts, walls, texts and screens” (Burnett, Merchant, Pahl & Rowsell, 2014 p. 92). Fenwick and Edwards (2014) argue the “assemblage of materials, ideas, practices and pedagogies that are always active and interrelated” (p. 3). It is in understanding how “…things come together, and manage to hold together” (Fenwick & Edwards, 2011, p. 2) that we begin to acknowledge and value the situatedness (Fenwick, 2014) of interactions and their many interrelations.
Methods and data sources
This paper draws from one instance from a digital playgroup session. I analyze a 33 minute segment of video data captured through a camera on a tripod and head-camera (Go Pro); the segment focuses on the processes of one child (aged 5) as he creates digital texts and works alongside two other children (aged 5 and 7 years). The analysis focuses on the literacy practices of the children, which span real and virtual networks, and considers how space is conceived and used in both onscreen and offscreen contexts, and the similarities and differences that emerge. Research questions include: In what ways can young children be text-producers? In what ways are digital resources used for text production? And, what kinds of interactions are enabled?
Results
Findings show that theories of assemblage and sociomateriality enable examination of this particular context, the child’s linguistic repertoires, the artefacts and the social relationships evident in this instance. The inclusion and focus on the digital - iPads, digital, multimodal, place, movement, material and sound – enable us to re-focus upon the things or ‘stuff’ within the context to explore relationships between the material and immaterial.
Significance
We must look at what is going on in contexts of learning where the means of text-production and communication technologies are continually expanding and changing. When we look to the multibodied and multispatial aspects of specific interactions we understand the complexity of the process and the importance of sustained engagement, feedback from purposeful interactions, and the power of collaboration for text production practices. Additionally, findings suggest that out-of-school digital literacy practices have relevance to children and young people’s life worlds (Comber & Hill, 2000; Comber & Kamler, 2004; Livingstone, 2002); this paper makes this case and highlights the potential for findings to inform school-based literacy pedagogies.

Author

• Lisa Kervin, University of Wollongong