Child-Father creative text-making at home with crayons, iPad, collage & PC

This study examines how the properties of digital (an iPad app and PC software) and non-digital (collage and drawing) resources for children’s text-making influence the creative expression of a three-year-old during collaborative text-making with her father at home. Particular attention was paid to the child’s ‘possibility thinking’ (Craft, 2008) and engagement in ‘what if scenarios’, her father’s support for this kind of creative expression and their joint creative collaboration as it unfolded during eight episodes of text-making. Video transcripts were analysed using thematic deductive analysis, supplemented with multimodal description of the processes and frequency measures for the individual and collaborative indicators of possibility thinking. This study makes three novel contributions. Firstly, it enriches our understanding of creativity as it is manifest in the home environment. Secondly, it focuses on father–child collaborative creativity, and demonstrates how adults in the home can influence the creative trajectories that children take in their text-making with different resources. Finally, this study shows how the features of specific text-making resources, both digital and non-digital, shape creative text-making as it unfolds. The differences in how creativity was manifest with the four resources indicate that each of the resources carry a distinct creative potential. This has implications for how we support early childhood creativity, both through the physical resources we provide for the activity and through the adult interactions that surround it, particularly in the home