Valuing Young Children’s Signs of Learning: Observation and Digital Documentation of Play in Early Years Classrooms

There is a growing trend in early childhood education towards using commercial software to record learning in digital formats, where video, audio, photographs and writing can be combined. These multi-media forms of ‘digital documentation’ offer new possibilities to recognise, represent and value children’s multiple signs of learning in new ways, and to share these narratives with parents and children. Yet there is little research-based guidance on digital documentation, so early education assessment practices run the risk of being guided by commercial drivers rather than by child-centred learning theories. In this study, we worked with educators to develop an early childhood pedagogy of observation, documentation and assessment that brings Froebelian principles of the ‘uniqueness of every child’s capacity and potential’ and ‘holistic nature of development’ to documentation practices in contemporary early years settings. Fieldwork included case studies of children aged 3-5 years living with disadvantage and/or in the early stages of learning English in three diverse multicultural early years settings in London. The study design was framed by a multimodal social semiotic perspective on learning (Kress 2010) and an ethnographic approach to social science enquiry. Data generation included video recordings, examples of documentation of children’s learning, interviews with educators, parent questionnaires and video-prompted discussions with children. Fine-grained multimodal analysis of video extracts resulted in rich findings regarding the opportunities and constraints of different approaches used by the participating settings in their observation and documentation of young children’s learning

Play and childhoods: how are the relationships between researching play and children changing?

This chapter reviews how recent scholarship examining the nature of childhood can enable insight into different aspects of play. Our approach develops from the new sociology of childhood’s conceptualisation of childhood as constructed and its advocacy of children being experts in their own lives. The chapter analyses how play features in three different research projects. In the first project, a ‘day in the life’ approach is used to generate and share data with children who are ‘temporarily displaced’ in Lebanon as a result of armed conflict in their birth countries. The second project involves a researcher working alongside two young children, developing a ‘child-conferencing’ approach over time to enable each child to work as a co-researcher of their experiences and perceptions of play. The third project involves adult researchers training and mentoring young children as researchers, drawing on play as a data collection method in their research design

The future-gazing potential of digital personalisation in young children's reading: views from education professionals and app designers

This paper reports on UK primary school teachers’ and children’s app developers’ views about the potential of using personalized digital resources to promote young children’s reading and play with ‘smart toys’. Many existing digital resources are ‘personalised’, that is, the content of a story or game is tailored to an individual child, and the content is adjusted to the needs and preferences of a specific user (either by an adult, such as a parent, or through algorithmic calculation by digital software). In this study, we focused on the role of digital personalization in children’s play with smart toys and in early reading with personalized books. Focus group interviews were conducted with 10 primary school teachers and 14 book and digital industry professionals, and the resultant audio-recordings were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. A dominant theme was participants’ association of digital personalization with the potential both to enhance and to jeopardize children’s and adults’ agency. Overall, the convergence of the digital and personalized aspects in some books and toys constituted a source of concern, with different views offered by the teachers and designers

A semiotic perspective on webconferencing-supported language teaching.

International audienceIn webconferencing-supported teaching, the webcam mediates and organizes the pedagogical interaction. Previous research has provided a mixed picture of the use of the webcam: while it is seen as a useful medium to contribute to the personalization of the interlocutors’ relationship, help regulate interaction and facilitate learner comprehension and involvement, the limited access to visual cues provided by the webcam is felt as useless or even disruptive. This study examines the meaning-making potential of the webcam in pedagogical interactions from a semiotic perspective by exploring how trainee teachers use the affordances of the webcam to produce non-verbal cues that may be useful for mutual comprehension. The research context is a telecollaborative project where trainee teachers of French as a foreign language met for online sessions in French with undergraduate Business students at an Irish university. Using multimodal transcriptions of the interaction data from these sessions, screen shot data, and students’ post-course interviews, it was found, firstly, that whilst a head and shoulders framing shot was favoured by the trainee teachers, there does not appear to be an optimal framing choice for desktop videoconferencing among the three framing types identified. Secondly, there was a loss between the number of gestures performed by the trainee teachers and those that were visible for the students. Thirdly, when trainee teachers were able to coordinate the audio and kinesic modalities, communicative gestures that were framed, and held long enough to be perceived by the learners, were more likely to be valuable for mutual comprehension. The study highlights the need for trainee teachers to develop critical semiotic awareness to gain a better perception of the image they project of themselves in order to actualise the potential of the webcam and add more relief to their online teacher presence