Mona Sakr

Mobile Experiences of Historical Place: A Multimodal Analysis of Emotional Engagement.

This article explores how to research the opportunities for emotional engagement that mobile technologies provide for the design and enactment of learning environments. In the context of mobile technologies that foster location-based linking, we make the case for the centrality of in situ real-time observational research on how emotional engagement unfolds and for the inclusion of bodily aspects of interaction. We propose that multimodal methods offer tools for observing emotion as a central facet of person–environment interaction and provide an example of these methods put into practice for a study of emotional engagement in mobile history learning. A multimodal analysis of video data from 16 pairs of 9- to 10-year-olds learning about the World War II history of their local Common is used to illustrate how students’ emotional engagement was supported by their use of mobile devices through multimodal layering and linking of stimuli, the creation of digital artifacts, and changes in pace. These findings are significant for understanding the role of digital augmentation in fostering emotional engagement in history learning, informing how digital augmentation can be designed to effectively foster emotional engagement for learning, and providing insight into the benefits of multimodality as an analytical approach for examining emotion through bodily interaction.

“Evil Cats” and “Jelly Floods”: Young Children’s Collective Constructions of Digital Art Making in the Early Years Classroom

ABSTRACT Digital technologies have the potential to offer new opportunities for children’s expressive arts practices. Although adult expectations surround and shape children’s visual art making on paper in the early years classroom, such expectations are not so established in relation to digital art making. So how do children make sense of digital art making when it is newly introduced into the classroom and adult input is minimal? Drawing on a social semiotic ethnographic perspective, this study explores this question by examining instances of 4- to 5-year-olds’ spoken dialogue around the computer during a week in which digital art making was first introduced into the classroom. Analysis focused on interactions where children proposed, reinforced, or challenged conceptions of digital art making. These interactions demonstrated that children’s digital art making was negotiated and constructed through particular processes. Three such processes are presented here: the use of collective motifs and metaphors, attributing “expert” status, and polarizing conflicts. Understanding these processes offers a starting point for thinking about how a new activity like digital art making can be integrated into the early years classroom and supported by practitioners.

‘Wrighting’ the self: new technologies and textual subjectivities

The expression of the self through multimodal texts is a central theme in education. While it has been suggested that new technologies act as important mediators in the relationship between texts and subjectivity, the mechanisms underlying such mediation has been a neglected topic of research. This paper considers the theoretical assumptions upon which speculation so far has been based and explores the methodologies that are best suited to investigating further the relationships between text, self and technology.

Making the 'here' and 'now': rethinking children's digital photography with Deleuzian concepts

The context of art-making offers the opportunity to engage with children’s embodied experiences of place and space. Through art-making, children both interact with and construct the world around them. The recent application of Deleuzian frameworks to studies of children’s art-making has disrupted the tendency to understand this process in terms of schemata organised into linear narratives (MacRae, 2011; Clark, 2012; Knight, 2013). In particular, Deleuzian notions of sense-making and of the rhizome unsettle modern, developmental approaches to art-making that emphasise the role of schematic representation and mimesis in children’s embodied experiences of space. As a contribution to this unsettling process, this chapter focuses on how these concepts can facilitate insights into children’s photography and the way photography enables children to engage with and construct the ‘here’ and ‘now’. By examining children’s photography from this perspective, we can develop new insights into how children’s experiences of and relationships to place unfold. In particular, we consider how children’s embodied interaction during the process of taking photographs, when analysed using these Deleuzian concepts, can challenge modern, developmental approaches to interpreting children’s experiences of the world.

In pursuit of quality: early childhood qualifications and training policy

Abstract This paper aims to critique policy discourses around the pursuit of quality in early years education. Taking England as a focal point, it problematizes the use of the term ‘quality’ and attempts to standardise its meaning; highlighting the disconnect that exists between policy and practice. The paper combines discourse analysis of a small number of key government documents with a series of interviews with early years stakeholders in order to identify issues that will have resonance and can inform a much needed continuation of debates about what quality might mean. Over the course of the research it became apparent that there was considerable disquiet amongst early years practitioners with regards the current qualifications and training landscape, particularly with regards to what many viewed as ideologically-driven policy-making, not informed by proper dialogue with the sector.

Dark play in digital playscapes

Play is typically conceptualised as a cornerstone of well-being in early childhood and as an intuitive means of fulfilling social, emotional and physical needs. As a result, the darker sides of play and playfulness can remain neglected and undertheorised, and become invisiblised from debates (Grieshaber and McArdle, 2010). Despite Sutton-Smith’s (2009) comments on the potentials for play to involve instances of negative affect, and more recent research on aggression and loss in the context of early childhood play and experience (Madrid, 2013; Silin, 2013), these are often pushed beyond the theoretical and discursive parameters of play and left unconsidered. In this way, presentations of play as only ‘good’ and ‘healthy’ contribute to the limiting, final vocabulary (Hawkins, 2002; Rorty, 1995) and mythic speech (Barthes, 1972; McClure, 2011) that surround children and childhood, and further reinforce ideas about childhood innocence (Robinson, 2013). In this special issue, a rich collection of articles extends and expands theorisations of play to bring darker aspects to the fore. Collectively, the articles examine children’s use of play to explore negative affect and difficult circumstances, and go on to question how and why children’s play, particularly that which is in some sense dark, is often so deeply unsettling for adults. By attending to an exploration of digital playscapes, the articles also address the ways in which children co-construct, interrogate, disrupt and appropriate darker elements of popular culture through play. This issue of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood responds to an urgent need to engage with the darker sides of play at a time when digital environments are opening up play experiences and territories that feel unfamiliar, and potentially even menacing, to adults. In this special issue, children’s play is conceptualised as unfolding in online and offline spaces, in what Burnett et al. (2014) describe as a physical-digital network of material and immaterial components. Research by Marsh and Bishop (2014) has done much to elucidate how children engage with play in a digital era, as they move through online and offline spaces. More recently, Lafton (2015) deployed Deleuzian theories to offer conceptualisations of digital technologies as agentive non-human actors in the making of childhoods. This special issue contributes to this emergent field of enquiry by examining ‘the dark’ physical-digital networks of children’s everyday play to challenge established ideas about how children do and should play, and expose a need for educators and parents (and the myriad others involved in the creation of digital resources) to continue to grapple with our conceptions of the child and contemporary childhoods. The issue begins with an article from Carolyn Bjartveit and Lisa Panayotidis in which the authors recount pedagogical attempts to playfully disrupt and transform early childhood educators’ conceptions of children’s ‘dark play’, as provoked by contemporary popular culture. Embracing the imaginative potential of darkness and liminality, the authors invited students to problematise and expand their thinking about what constitutes children’s play scripts with a specific focus on fear, power and violence. Recognising that many educators are reluctant, and some even refuse, to allow children opportunities to engage in play centred on troubling social issues, the educators were invited to co-author a fantastical tale, inspired by the Disney film Frozen. This exercise was a core pedagogical device and incorporated course topics, classroom observations and personal childhood memories of ‘dark play’. Paley’s (2004) influential work about the relationship between 714074 CIE0010.1177/1463949117714074Contemporary Issues in Early ChildhoodEditorial editorial2017

Personalized Story-Making on the iPad: Opportunities for Developing the Self and Building Closeness with Others

This chapter presents a participant observation case study of a child aged 5 1/2 years who used the interactive personalized app ‘Mr Glue Stories’ together with her father. The app encouraged the child to personalize a given narrative with text, audio recordings and her own drawings. Building on Bruner’s (1994, 2001) and Lemke’s (2000, 2002) theoretical foundations around self, narrative and text-making, we consider how the various personalization features of the app played a role in developing the child’s sense of self. We also examine the potentials of personalization for facilitating and shaping moments of particular attunement and closeness (‘moments of meeting’; Stern 2000, 2004) between the child and father. Our findings suggest that personalization features in some iPad story-making apps provides unique opportunities for children to explore their experiences of the world and share these with adults close to them.

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

In this article, the author explores children’s destruction of their artwork as it occurs on paper or digitally via an interactive whiteboard. Sociocultural accounts of children’s art-making and social semiotic approaches to meaning-making offer a theoretical lens for understanding children’s acts of destruction as meaningful and the way in which different semiotic resources shape the meaning-making involved in destruction differently. In order to explore this further, the author considers two episodes of art-making: firstly, an episode of child–parent art-making that ended in a 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 interactive whiteboard 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. In this article, the author argues that a social semiotic exploration of destruction can help to move discussions of children’s art-making beyond developmental preoccupations with individual intentions and towards a post-developmental account that engages with the richness of children’s experiences and actions.