The Routledge Handbook of Digital Literacies in Early Childhood by Erstad Ola;

Author:Erstad, Ola;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2019-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

What would it take for pedagogy and curriculum to respond to these changes?

This question is particularly pressing in the context of digital technologies, digital media and popular culture, and the implications of new play pedagogies for teachers. Our research contributes to current debates about the implications of converged play for children’s learning, as well as new forms of agency, multi-modal communicative competences, and metacognition that are evident in new literacies research (Robson 2010; Burnett and Merchant 2013; Bezemer and Kress 2016). Digital technologies, digital media and popular culture are situated within new media ecologies that permeate all aspects of children’s experiences, thereby provoking new developmental challenges. These challenges have profound implications for practices of curriculum and pedagogy in contemporary ECE. Therefore, we propose that corresponding shifts need to occur in three areas.

First, new play pedagogies can support converged play by enabling teachers to build on children’s funds of knowledge and interests in ways that promote multi-modal approaches to learning. Web-mapping as tool and process enables teachers to identify children’s converged play, and to make pedagogical decisions about how to motivate learning that is related to children’s interests and competences, and can be connected to curriculum goals. Such changes can be facilitated when teachers have opportunities to collaboratively imagine new practices, based on exposure to examples of new or unfamiliar practices.

Second, we argue that the implications for curriculum require a dynamic focus on learning processes, and on content. In terms of processes, our research project indicates that converged play enables children to develop positive dispositions for learning, such as engagement, persistence, agency and concentration, alongside the metacognitive skills of inquiry, creativity, creating and solving problems in meaningful contexts. In terms of content, converged play can relate to the disciplinary forms of knowledge within the areas of learning that are represented in national curriculum frameworks for ECE. We argue that a focus on dynamic learning processes and content enables teachers to orient toward children’s everyday life worlds in ways that can reduce anxieties about curriculum compliance.

This links to our third point, that curriculum frameworks should incorporate the key concepts associated with those practices, and to represent these as curriculum goals or learning outcomes. We have argued that policy frameworks in ECE continue to rely on child development theories as the knowledge base for teacher education and curriculum construction. However, there is no developmental framework for understanding converged play. In contrast, new theories of transmedia ecologies and playscapes suggest that the knowledge base for teachers needs to move beyond developmental theories of play and learning. This is because children are engaging with multi-modal digital texts, and inventing their own uses for digital media, both of which reflect the complexity and fluidity of converged play for extending children’s learning. We argue that this complexity and fluidity require critical consideration of teachers’ curriculum planning and new pedagogical approaches to play.

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