This article explores 4- to 7-year-old children’s tablet computer (tablet) use, drawing on empirical data from day-care institutions, primary schools and private home settings in Denmark. Data were gathered via video observations in two different studies: (a) a media ethnography on children’s tablet play practices in home settings and (b) a socioculturally informed, design-based study involving children as co-producers in institutional settings. We understand children’s tablet use via practice theory, framing tablets as actor-enacted objects in play practices expressed through play moods in qualitatively distinguishable ways. We suggest a conceptual spectrum (not dichotomy) for understanding how sociomateriality is articulated in children’s tablet play practices, ranging from absorbent to utensilent. Within sociomaterially absorbent practices, the tablet is foregrounded in intense involvement, thus mediating a focused play mood which relies on not being disturbed by outside actors. Within sociomaterially utensilent practices, the tablet is backgrounded as a node or nexus, thus mediating a distributed play mood of involvement with places and agents beyond the tablet. We contribute to previous findings by Marsh framed within the post-humanist approach as we suggest the empirically observed complexity in children’s digital play can be approached by tracing the relationally generated object positions. We add to this by proposing an analytical spectrum ranging from absorbent to utensilent sociomaterial practices that can be employed when analysing children’s digital play.
This article is based on qualitative and quantitative data collected from teachers and pupils in Danish schools in June 2020, as schools reopened following closures in the spring due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It investigates the transformations in school life that took place in this period in response to strict official guidelines to prevent the spread of infection, transformations both in school learning environments and in teaching activities. Using factor and cluster analyses and logistic regression, it explores the relation between teaching environment and pupils' emotional, social, and academic wellbeing, identifying correlations between key factors in the environment and the three dimensions of wellbeing. The study contributes both to understanding and dealing with the crisis in which education systems in the Nordic countries have found themselves in and adds relevant knowledge on themes of importance for education in the future.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, digital technologies have come to the forefront of mostpeople’s social, professional, and educational lives, and children have, like everyone else, depended on digital media for remote schooling as well as informal communication with their peers. This article presents results from a qualitative interview study among 20 Danish children, aged 3–12, and their parents during the spring and summer of 2020. As would be expected, age predicted a certain level of proficiency with, and access to, digital media technologies. However, children across the age spectrum of our sample relied on adult facilitation of digital practices in similar ways during a time where these were foregrounded in unforeseen ways. We discuss these findings in relation to a triadic theoretical framework of distributed agency, dynamic affordances, and access-oriented aspects of children’s practices with communication technology.
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