Using multimodal analysis to unravel a silent child’s learning

Although the English Foundation Stage Curriculum for children aged 3 to 5 years recognises that children learn through talk and play and through ‘movement and all their senses’ (DfEE & QCA, 2000: 20), there is comparatively little theoretical understanding of how children learn through diverse ‘modes’, such as body movement, facial expression, gaze, the manipulation of objects and talk, and there is little practical guidance on how practitioners can support children’s ‘multimodal’ learning. Indeed, mounting research evidence indicates that since the introduction of a national early years curriculum and early years assessment schemes, practitioners have felt under increased pressure to focus on children’s verbal skills in order to provide evidence of children’s literacy and numeracy skills in preparation for primary education (see Flewitt, 2005a & 2005b). In the context of these changes, this article relates the story of Tallulah, a 3-year-old girl with a late July birthday, who, like many summer-born children in England, spent one year in an early years setting before moving to primary school aged just 4 years. The article draws on data collected as part of an ESRC-funded study that explored the different ‘modes’ young children use to make and express meaning in the different social settings of home and a preschool playgroup (Flewitt, 2003). Examples are given of how Tallulah communicated her understandings at home through skilful combinations of talk, gaze direction, body movement and facial expression, and how others in the home supported Tallulah’s learning. These are then compared with examples of how Tallulah communicated in playgroup, primarily by combining the silent modes of gaze, body movement and facial expression. The article identifies how the different social settings of home and preschool impacted upon her choices and uses of different expressive modes

Parents' choice of education for their young children: lessons for inclusive education

This paper reports on aspects of a small-scale, UK-based study that investigated local discourses and practices operating for young children within a global context of commitment to inclusion. The study focused on parents of young children identified as having special educational needs, who opted for a combination of both inclusive and special early years settings to ‘get the best of both worlds’ for their children (Nind, Flewitt & Johnston, 2005). The paper discusses the implications of the emerging themes for the development of inclusive education

Understanding parents’ conflicting beliefs about children’s digital book reading

In light of growing evidence that many parents are deeply concerned about their young children’s increasing technology use, in this paper we report on aspects of a study funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, where we sought to understand parents’ views on children’s digital book reading. We introduced seven families to four award-winning digital books (story apps and e-books), observed how the mothers mediated their children’s digital book reading over a period of several weeks and subsequently interviewed the mothers about their shared reading experiences with the digital books. Focusing on the interview data and drawing on the theoretical framework of socio-materiality, this paper reports on how parents’ views about digital book features were entangled with their social perceptions of the value of digital reading. Analysis of parents’ accounts show three conflicted themes of trust/mistrust, agency/dependency and nostalgia/realism in parental attitudes towards their children’s reading on screens. The paper concludes with a discussion of how these findings regarding the unresolved dichotomies inherent in parental views about their children’s digital reading are highly relevant for future research on parental mediation of their children’s learning with digital media.publishedVersio

Understanding parents’ conflicting beliefs about children’s digital book reading

In light of growing evidence that many parents are deeply concerned about their young children’s increasing technology use, in this paper we report on aspects of a study funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, where we sought to understand parents’ views on children’s digital book reading. We introduced seven families to four award-winning digital books (story apps and e-books), observed how the mothers mediated their children’s digital book reading over a period of several weeks and subsequently interviewed the mothers about their shared reading experiences with the digital books. Focusing on the interview data and drawing on the theoretical framework of socio-materiality, this paper reports on how parents’ views about digital book features were entangled with their social perceptions of the value of digital reading. Analysis of parents’ accounts show three conflicted themes of trust/mistrust, agency/dependency and nostalgia/realism in parental attitudes towards their children’s reading on screens. The paper concludes with a discussion of how these findings regarding the unresolved dichotomies inherent in parental views about their children’s digital reading are highly relevant for future research on parental mediation of their children’s learning with digital media

Call for regulation on securing children’s data in personalised reading

While children’s reading experience is being transformed with digital reading formats, personalised and interactive books allowing for more personalisation, there are risks around the data this releases. Natalia Kucirkova and Rosie Flewitt identify four main areas of concern and call for regulation. Natalia is Senior Research Associate, and Rosie is Reader in Early Communication and Learning, both at University College London, Institute of Education. [Header image credit: B. Flickinger, CC BY 2.0_08]

Ethics and Researching Young Children’s Digital Lives and Learning (Provocations about ethics in early childhood research)

The aim of this keynote address is to reflect on some of the assumptions that are inherent in contemporary research ethics, and open discussion about what post-colonial and post-human approaches offer for development of dialogic and relational ethics

Interviews

Interviews, in one form or another, have long been used by researchers interested in understanding particular issues in their own society or the history, character and context of other cultures and other societies. For instance, they were used in nineteenth-century studies of poverty in English industrial cities, and were also often used by Western anthropologists as they sought to understand the social organisation and characteristics of ‘primitive’ or non-Western cultures. Throughout the twentieth century, researchers developed the use of interviews to investigate many different social issues, including in the fields of education, care and health. In the second half of the twentieth century, as research methods across the social sciences began to move away from the dominance of ‘measuring’ social phenomena using quantitative methods, so the use of interviews moved towards more informal approaches in qualitative research to investigate participant experiences, perceptions, identities and beliefs. Social science researchers who are seeking to understand the lives and perceptions of others often opt to use interviews as at least one of their chosen methods for investigation. Yet the interview is not a simple ‘tool’ that can be selected unproblematically from a methodological ‘toolkit’. It involves a relationship between two or more people, and however brief that relationship may be, its nature and quality will deeply influence what can be found out through the interview process. In this chapter, I encourage readers to reflect critically upon how interviews are always social events, where an interviewer and interviewee(s) meet to exchange information face-to-face, by telephone or in a virtual environment. Although in most interviews, the interviewer usually asks most of the questions and the interviewee responds to them, both participants express their opinions and views through what they say and the ways they say it. I review some of the many different forms that interviews can take, including structured, semi-structured and unstructured, and consider social relationships during the interview process, the different kinds of data that interviews can generate and how these might be interpreted. Although the chapter focuses on interviewing young people and children, thought will also be given to interviewing adults