Of Ladles and Laptops: Exploring Preschool Children's Digital Play in the Analog Classroom

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: Cultivating Young Children's Literacies

Abstract

In order to cultivate meaningful and equitable education systems for children, we must create and foster learning spaces that respect, value, and build upon their knowledge(s), experience(s), and ways of knowing. Accordingly, this research highlights how children forefront the multimodal, affective, and identity-related nature of meaning-making through their play in a preschool classroom. Findings and implications suggest that, for young children, play/learning and digital/analog are not binaries, that children draw from popular digital culture/digital literacies to make connections to their worlds and to the world(s) of others, and that play is an important vehicle for learning, identity exploration, and joy.

Authors

• Tori K. Flint, The University of Louisiana at Lafayette

• Marietta Smith Adams, University of Louisiana at Lafayette