Turning towards discomfort in postdevelopmental approaches to childhood art: The potentials of multimodal mediated discourse analysis

Postdevelopmental approaches to childhood art aim to go beyond the constraining parameters and trajectories of the dominant paradigm of developmentalism. Postdevelopmental researchers embrace methods that enable us to engage more fully with children’s art-making by actively turning towards aspects of the experience that may be uncomfortable or disruptive. Multimodal mediated discourse analysis (MMDA) is a methodological tool that can be used as a way to tune into ‘pivots’ in the action of children’s art-making. In doing this, MMDA can be used as a means to provoke a wider and richer discussion of children’s art-making. In this article, I show how working with MMDA can deepen our dialogues about taboo, disgust, mess, cleanliness, waste and scarcity in relation to children’s art-making

'It just opened my eyes a bit more': student engagement with Instagram to develop understanding of complex concepts

How can we make use of image-based social media to develop students’ critical engagement with concepts like equality and diversity? In this paper, I draw on bell hooks’ description of liberatory theorising to discuss findings from a project that involved 60 2nd year BA education students taking and sharing photographs through Instagram as part of their learning on a sociology module underpinned by a critical pedagogy approach. Thematic analysis applied to ten interviews with student participants shows that while the project supported students to connect everyday experiences with abstract concepts, their criticality was hindered by the perception of the task as one of ‘capturing’ unambiguous representations of concepts. The findings highlight that if we are to use popular image-based social media sites as part of a critical pedagogy approach, we need to be prepared to support students in using the visual mode as part of liberatory theorising

'We’re just gonna scribble it': The affective and social work of destruction in children’s art-making with different semiotic resources

In this paper I explore children’s destruction of their artwork as it occurs on paper or digitally via the interactive whiteboard (IWB). Social semiotics offers a theoretical lens for understanding children’s acts of destruction as meaningful and how different semiotic resources shape the meaning-making involved in destruction differently. To explore this further, I consider two episodes of art-making: firstly, an episode of child-parent art-making that ended in the five year old child scribbling over a drawing on paper with a black crayon, and secondly, an episode of a five year old child using touch to cover over the drawing she had made on the classroom IWB during free-flow activity time. A comparison between these two episodes is used to explore how digital and paper-based semiotic resources may impact differently on the experience of destruction and the affective and relational work that it can achieve

Multimodal participation frameworks during young children’s collaborative drawing on paper and on the iPad

Due to its distinct affordances, the iPad might foster alternative forms of collaborative creativity when compared with pens on paper. In this article I examine how a collaborative drawing task among five pairs of 5-6 year olds unfolded on paper and on the iPad, framing the investigation through the concept of multimodal participation frameworks. Through multimodal analysis of 25 episodes of video observation, I focus on the multimodal actions that comprised the children’s collaborative creativity and identify three patterns of interaction: 1) working together, 2) collaboration ‘coming loose’ and 3) vying for control. I then explore how the affordances of the resources used were implicated in these distinct patterns of interaction. The analysis suggests that participation frameworks were tighter and more focused on the task when children drew via the iPad, perhaps because the resources were more physically confined, the screen was harder to see and the drawing app produced a novel and dynamic visual effect. During collaborative drawing on paper, the pens often acted as a distractor, drawing attention away from the drawing and disrupting the fluency of turn-taking. These findings suggest the need to challenge the popular perception that iPads facilitate solitary game-playing and video-watching at the expense of collaborative creativity

‘She’s nice company and a good friend’: thinking with Haraway to reconceptualise children’s playful interactions with Alexa in the family home

The aims of this chapter are to explore the ways in which children think about Alexa – the conversational agent that inhabits Amazon’s The Echo device – and what happens when they playfully engage with it/her in a family context. In particular, the chapter seeks to examine the potentials of children’s play and playfulness with Alexa through Donna Haraway’s concepts of ‘the cyborg’ and ‘making kin’. In Haraway’s post-human philosophy, the cyborg as an entity generates possibilities for troubling a number of divides that we live by (human/non-human; male/female; mind/body). [...

Young children drawing together on the iPad versus paper: How collaborative creativity is shaped by different semiotic resources

Facilitating collaborative creativity among children involves offering material resources that support collaborative and creative interactions. Popular views of tablets, such as the iPad, suggest that they are better suited to solitary game-playing or video-watching than to collaborative open-ended tasks. I explore this further through a social semiotic lens, applying the concepts of ‘semiotic resources’ and ‘affordances’ to develop a more nuanced understanding of what tablets have to offer in relation to children’s collaborative creativity. Through this lens, I compare observations of six pairs of 5-6 year old children engaged in a collaborative drawing task completed either on paper or on the iPad. I apply a thematic analysis to the children’s dialogue across 25 episodes (15 iPad, 10 paper) and the visual dimensions of their 41 drawings (23 iPad, 18 paper), and develop three interwoven themes: 1) attitudes to space, 2) momentum of the line and 3) pathways to representation. For each of these themes, I explore how the affordances of the iPad and/or the particular app feed into these aspects of the drawing process and the implications of this for children’s collaborative creativity. The analysis suggests that drawing on the iPad can be more responsive and less subject to personal planning than drawing on paper. I suggest that this difference is shaped by physical properties such as the touch-screen interface, but also emerges as a result of the cultural investment in drawing on paper as a form of ‘self-expression’, a notion that works to limit exploratory and collaborative engagement with the resources. Since participants were noticeably open to exploring new ideas together while drawing on the iPad, I argue that we need to reassess the potentials of touch-screen tablets to support tasks of collaborative creativity in educational contexts

Everyday advocacy work of the Baby Room Leader

There is a growing body of literature on leadership and leadership development across the early years (EY) sector. EY leadership research so far has tended to focus on positional leadership demonstrated by setting managers or preschool room leaders. There is a notable gap in our understanding of the role of the Baby Room Leader (BRL), leading practice for birth to two year olds, and how leadership can be developed in this specific context. Drawing on a design workshop with BRLs and nursery managers, as well as five follow-up semi-structured interviews with BRLs, this article offers an insight into the role of the BRL with a particular focus on everyday advocacy. The article presents four advocacy themes in baby room leadership. These are 1) highlighting and understanding the impact of baby room practice, 2) sharing passion for working with babies, 3) advocating professional development specific to the baby room and 4) challenging discourses and stereotypes surrounding those who work in the baby room. These themes represent both current realities in baby room leadership and opportunities for future development and mobilisation

Stretchy time or screen time: how early years practitioners conceptualise time in relation to children's digital play

There is a tension between the early years (EY) ideal of ‘stretchy time’ for free-flow play and discourses surrounding children’s digital play, which emphasise the need for time limits. To explore this tension further, we engaged in collaborative reflective dialogue with 20 EY practitioners in a workshop exploring apps for young children. Based on a thematic analysis of the written notes made by practitioners during the workshop, we present four conceptualisations of time adopted by practitioners in relation to digital play: balance, limitation, self-regulation and open exploration. . We then present three factors that shape these conceptualisations of time: 1) whether apps are seen as tools or activities, 2) pedagogic emphasis on purposefulness versus playfulness and 3) take-up of popular discourses of concern. Based on the findings, we suggest how practitioners might use observation, reflection and their own playful experiences as a way of generating new possibilities for managing time around digital play in EY environments