Virtual worlds and online videogames for children and young people : promises and challenges

Online virtual worlds and games provide opportunities for new kinds of interaction, and new forms of play and learning, and they are becoming a common feature in the lives of many children and young people. This chapter explores the issues that this sort of virtual play raises for researchers and educators, and the main themes that have emerged through empirical investigation. I focus on children and young people within the age range covered by compulsory schooling, providing illustrative examples of virtual environments that promote play and learning as a way of underlining some key areas of interest. Drawing on work from a range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives the chapter emphasises how these environments have much in common with other imagined worlds and suggests that looking at the ways in which the virtual is embedded in everyday contexts for meaning making provides an important direction for future research

Apps, adults and young children: researching digital literacy practices in context

The widespread availability of portable digital devices, such as the iPad, has led to the tablet outstripping earlier technologies in terms of its impact on early childhood. In many households, iPads have become the device of choice for family entertainment being used, amongst other things, for on-demand TV, games and interactive stories. Early literacy practices have fallen under the sway of the iPad, which appeals to young children because of its size, weight, portability and intuitive touch-screen interface (Merchant, 2014). As a result of this, and a whole host of other environmental factors, literacy development for many children born in the 21st Century has come to be infused with digital technology. This raises important issues for parents, carers and educators. For a start the commercial and economic stakes are high. But also there are some crucially important questions about learning and development that educators are only just beginning to consider. Indeed, early childhood literacy is beginning to look rather different than it did in the past, and since various forms of semiotic representation and patterns of interaction are distinctive to new media, there may well be a need to re-draw our maps of literacy developmen

Digital literacy: New technologies for meaning-making in educational settings.

As new techno-literacy practices become embedded in society, they impact on ever younger age groups. The technological environment that children and young people now inhabit directly involves literacy, both in the broadest sense and in the more specific area of lettered representation. This has profound implications for how we conceive of the use of literacy in educational environments and how we plan for literacy curricula. My work focuses on children and young people's on-screen experience and particularly the productive aspect of writing-with-new-technology. I suggest that writers are involved in the production of new kinds of texts, and that these provide opportunities for different kinds of identity performance. Over the last six years I have looked at different ways of theorising changes in written communication and the relationship between these changes and curriculum design and practice. I have documented a change of emphasis in educational responses to digital literacy, a move from concerns about whether to use new technology to how to use it in literacy, and suggest that there is a need for more work that shows how digital writing can be embedded in classroom practice in ways that provide authentic contexts for learning and communication. Because digital writing involves new kinds of skills and new kinds of social practices it cannot simply be grafted on to existing instructional practices and curricular objectives, so through my classroom-based studies I have illustrated some of the possibilities and the issues that are raised by incorporating these practices. I argue that there is a need to re-evaluate the ways in which writing is taught and develop our understanding of what constitutes writing development in digital environments. This will involve more exploration of what experiences, resources and guidance are most helpful in the early stages of literacy in order to build an understanding of the appropriate balance between experimentation, skill instruction and critical engagement with new writing tools and processes

The challenge of 21st Century literacies

In the second edition of their influential book on ‘New Literacies’, Lankshear & Knobel (2006) argued that engagement with these practices was ‘largely confined to learners’ lives in spaces outside of schools’ (p.30). That was nearly ten years ago, and in some respects very little has changed. Of course, in many classrooms there’s a lot more technology than there was, provision of smartboards desktops, laptops and portable devices is better, and there is a greater variety of software and hardware on offer. But even when equipment is available, up-to-date and in good working order, problems of curriculum integration still arise. Despite all the rhetoric about the importance of ‘new’ or ‘digital’ literacies in education, recent curriculum reforms and their associated assessment regimes have tended to privilege traditional literacy skills and print text. Although some innovative teachers are able to incorporate 21st Century Literacies in their classroom practice (see digitalfutures.org for example), for others the challenge is greater, particularly when it is coupled with competing curriculum priorities or the extensive blocking of websites associated with certain approaches to Internet safety (Hope, 2013). An expansive view of new literacies in practice somehow seems hard to realize

Boxes of poison: baroque technique as antidote to simple views of literacy

Rich and complex meaning making experiences, such as those associated with virtual play, sit uneasily with the view of literacy reflected in and sustained by current systems of accountability in education. This article develops a baroque perspective as a way of destabilising the ‘regime of truth’ associated with simple models of literacy - models that have emerged through educational reform. Building on poststructural approaches, we suggest that a baroque sensibility can help assert the messiness of educational experience and the contingent nature of meaning making that lie at the heart of literacy and learning. We draw on 6 techniques of the baroque exemplifying their use in an original methodological approach that we call ‘stacking stories’. These stories offer different accounts of actions and interactions in and around a virtual world visited by 9 and 10 year-old children in a UK classroom. The stories, together with the gaps, contradictions, continuities and discontinuities between them, read together through a baroque lens, trouble the taken-for-granted. They evoke the affective intensities produced through interactions between body, text and place as they infuse each other in multiple acts of meaning making. This baroque approach disturbs ways in which meanings are represented in both research and practice adding to poststructural accounts that foreground multiplicity and complexity. We suggest that such an approach provokes generous, ebullient and vivid accounts of literacy that are elided by simple models of literacy

Literacy-as-event: accounting for relationality in literacy research

Research in New Literacy Studies has demonstrated how literacy consists of multiple socially and culturally situated practices illuminated through a focus on literacy events. Recently, this sociocultural perspective has been complemented by relational thinking that views literacy as an ongoing reassembling of the human and more-than-human. This conceptual article proposes that, in exploring how relational thinking might be deployed in literacy research and practice, it is helpful to re-visit conceptualisations of literacy events. Specifically it proposes the notion of ‘literacy-as-event’ as a heuristic for thinking with the fluid and elusive nature of meaning-making, elaborating on three propositions: 1. event is generated as people and things come into relation; 2. what happens always exceeds what can be conceived and perceived; 3. implicit in the event are multiple potentialities. Approaching literacy research through engaging with literacy-as-event promotes an expansive, reflective, and imaginative engagement with literacy practices that aligns with relational thinking

‘The naughty person’: exploring dynamic aspects of identity and children’s discourses before and during the Libyan Uprising

This paper draws on data from an ethnography exploring young children’s interactions in a multi-ethnic school in an urban area in the North of England. It focuses on the ways in which children explore and negotiate their identities against the shifting backdrop of local and global discourses about religion, race, gender and political change. In particular, we explore how children of the Libyan diaspora take up the semiotic resources available to them in their daily negotiations about identity. We show how through their spoken interactions, drawings and writings the children perform identities dialogically, with each other and with adult professionals, talking about salient issues of religious, cultural and national heritage before and during the Libyan Uprising in 2011. Using MacFarlane’s (2007) concept of ‘translocal assemblages’ we show how discourses and media narratives that circulate amongst diasporic communities provide a set of resources that children use to make sense of themselves in local contexts

Closing the gap? Overcoming limitations in sociomaterial accounts of early literacy

This article uses a sociomaterial perspective to explore how deficit views of young children’s language and literacy are sustained and can be challenged. Foregrounding the notion of multiplicity, it considers how diverse sociomaterial relations work to uphold particular kinds of practice and particular arrangements of bodies and things over others. These relations may interfere with and interface with each other in different ways, sometimes sustaining but also potentially disrupting deficit discourses and practices. Our sociomaterial perspective is illustrated with a short vignette from a study of children and touchscreen tablets in an early years setting. An initial analysis is followed by a series of alternate and tentative tracings of other kinds of relations that play through those moments. The article contributes to debates about social inequality by troubling the certainties generated though deficit models of children’s literacy, whilst working proactively to envision and produce alternate possibilities that foreground the potentialities generated as people and other materials assemble together

Assembling literacies in virtual play

Virtual worlds provide opportunities for new kinds of interaction and new forms of play and learning, and they are rapidly becoming a common feature of the lives of many children and young people. This chapter explores the digital writing and textual activity that circulates around this virtual play and the issues that it raises for both researchers and educators. Drawing on work from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives we look at the ways in which the virtual is embedded in everyday meaning making and indicate important new directions for future research. In doing this we trace some possible relationships between writing and virtual play and consider how to engage with notions of authorship, particularly given the fuzzy boundaries between human and non-human activity. We propose that encountering such activity with a mood of ‘enchantment’ (Bennett, 2001) enables researchers and practitioners to approach moments of writing as fluid human/non-human assemblings and in doing so more fully appreciate the complexity and potentiality of virtual play