Children’s Digital Boundary Crossings when Moving in between Porous Ecosystems

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Technology as a Catalyst for Change

Proposal

Children and young people are growing up in an increasingly digital society, and research is needed to understand how they navigate and live with ubiquitous technology permeating the fabric of their everyday lives. However, much of what we know about this topic rests heavily on quantitative studies, often from an adult perspective; it is in these perspectives that mainly screentime is measured, while the depth and context of what children and young people do online are less visible (Lafton et al., 2023). We aim to take up the shortcomings in existing studies by adopting a qualitative approach focusing on the context of children and young people’s digital lives. We believe an approach that listens to and includes the voices of children and young people is necessary to better understand the digital interactions and social relations taking place in their lives. In this paper, we take a closer look at how the affordances of digital technology in children and young people’s everyday lives enable them to participate and take agency in a world that reaches outside the limitations of their physical one.

Building on Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) nested ecological systems theory, and Neal and Neal’s (2013) networked ecological systems, we explore how children and young people’s digital interactions contribute to constructing new mesosystems, beyond the ones predefined by their physical/everyday/tangible microsystems. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory (EST) highlights how children and young people’s development is contingent on context, here looking at how Bronfenbrenner’s (2005, 2006) later work refocuses attention on the agency that children and young people have. However, Bronfenbrenner’s theory was fully developed by the turn of the century (Rosa and Tudge, 2013), so it did not include the impact of digital technology on children and young people’s lives. Hence, using Bronfenbrenner’s theory requires a consideration of the meaning of the situated—or contextual—in relation to an understanding of ecological practices as multilayered, in which participants engage with a material environment (e.g., digital technologies; Aarsand and Bowden, 2021). For instance, the meaning of situated or contextual media can be seen in how various media have long been used to extend educational experiences beyond the classroom, leading to the affordances that networked technologies have and the potential to enable more active participation in the wider world (Burnett, 2011).

This participation is facilitated by how digital technology moves children and young people’s participation beyond the boundaries of, for example, home or the local classroom. Considering this, we argue that digital technologies allow children and young people to span across microsystems, creating mesosystemic interactions in new ways and highlighting the overlapping arrangement of microsystems connected by social interactions (Neal and Neal, 2013). In our study we find that children and young people exploiting the porosity of such systems may create new learning spaces that teachers and parents are unaware of. In these spaces, knowledge that is or is not recognised in traditional learning spaces can be created and shared among children and young people themselves as well as moral strategies and conducts of behaviour. We argue that this calls for greater involvement from adults in the digital lives of children and young people.

Author

• Halla B Holmarsdottir, Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet)