Racial Inequalities and Creativity in Children's Digital Play in South Africa

• In Event: Structural Inequalities in Play, Creativity, and Learning With Digital Technologies

Abstract

Objectives
The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of children’s digital play in resource-constrained environments by shifting the attention from individual child agency to the complex agency of the historical, material, linguistic, political, environmental and socio-economic contexts of children’s digital ecologies. South African children have little or no access to toys invented by adults in the North, or purchased digital devices, in comparison to children from resource-rich communities. The transindividual analysis of the qualitative data shows how children’s creativity seamlessly moves between the different applications of one device only (mobile phone).

Methods, techniques or modes of inquiry
The qualitative data were analysed using a deductive coding framework which drew on the LEGO Foundation Learning Through Play Experience Tool (LtPET). The tool assists the analysis of how far a playful experience is agentic, but includes more than human’s agency. A posthumanist reworking of the LtPET tool reconfigures agency as not something that individuals have, but are part of (Barad, 2007). The modes of inquiry include affect theory (Massumi, 2015) and the notion of distributed agency (Bennett, 2010) involving complex human and non-human networks (Latour, 2011). The analysis shifts from skills and competencies to practices and experiences, thereby reconfiguring the notion of creativity.

Data sources, evidence, objects or materials
The data sources drawn on are case studies with nine South African families. Parents and children were interviewed and videoed. Parents also filmed their children and shared images and videos with researchers using WhatsApp. Case-study children were also given diaries to record their use of social media and television, and used GoPro cameras to record their digital play. Children were invited to create concept maps on a number of questions relating to play, technology and learning. In addition, the children were observed in schools using technology, and were also observed in a regular community/after-school club (and teacher/ after-school club leader interviewed). Finally, children in schools took part in focus group interviews, created collages, completed concept maps and built a toy they would like invented.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions
The study’s findings confirm the ‘digital divide’ (cf Dixon, 2020). Nevertheless, despite the two very different cultural, socio-economic, linguistic, ethnic and racial contexts, the findings show children’s creativity and resourcefulness in SA, for example, by seamlessly moving between applications on one device (e.g. from game to WhatsApp to video on the same phone).

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work

Despite the lack of access to technology and data, the racial, linguistic and other related deep inequalities, and the cultural differences in the way childhood is conceived in SA, the qualitative data show a wide range of examples of creative play. The case-studies discussed confirm postdevelopmental conceptions of children’s play by painting a more complex picture of who and what can be playful (Haynes & Murris, 2019; Murris, 2019). The paper shows how a transindividual analysis reconfigures the analytical LtPET instrument and makes significant suggestions about the role of research(ers) in combatting structural inequalities in resource-constrained environments.

Author

• Karin Saskia Murris, University of Oulu