Info: DigiLitEY Publications
Document: (pdf)
Contents
1. Introduction
1.1 Social Change: Families, Employment and Housing
1.2 Digital Transformations
1.3 Changing Childhoods: Consumption, Risk and Play
1.4 The Growth of the Schooled Society
2. Literacy in a Digital Age
2.1 Theorising Digital Literacies for Young Learners
2.2 Applying a Multimodal Analytic Gaze to
Contemporary Literacy Practices
3. Digital Literacy in Early Years and School Curricula
4. Our Agenda
4.1 Research Questions
4.2 The COST Action
5. Conclusion
References
«Introduction
»This paper outlines the context and research questions behind a Europe-wide project investigating young children, digital technologies and changing literacies. The claims made for the 'digital generation' keep on being recalibrated. First of all, the digital generation grew up with games consoles, then it was the Internet and subsequently the smart phone. Whilst each new phase of technological innovation might seem to set a new standard in what it means to be 'born digital, and no doubt this will continue to change with the 'Internet of things', we are now entering a period where the parents of children born today might themselves very much come from a generation that itself had been labelled, digital.
»There are important gaps and inconsistencies, structural inequalities and important divergences in any sense of wholesale change across the countries of Europe. Whilst it is true that a child born in any affluent city in Europe in 2015 may come from a family immersed in digital technology, constantly connected to the Internet with every member of the household possessing a smart phone, tablet, with PCs, smart televisions in the home and schools awash with smart boards, 100% Wi-Fi coverage and so forth, we also know they will have classmates with very different experiences of the digital.
»Less affluent families may well only have access to the Internet via a smart phone, of which there may be only one in the household and reliant on precarious pay-as-you-go tariffs. For that child, school may be the portal to the digital century.
»Nevertheless, we know that families with young children are more likely than families without children to be Internet enabled, that children over the age of eight are more than likely to have their own smart phone, and that the houses where they live will have several ways of accessing the online world with many children using more than one device, be they tablets, consoles or computers.
»Whilst categorically asserting that this, now, is the digital generation will therefore always require important caveats and disclaimers, we can say that everyday use of digital technologies is the norm. Young children, the subject of our study are, to a hitherto unknown degree, growing up immersed in and surrounded by digital devices and forms of communication right across Europe. What does this mean for everyday life, for learning, for families and for the future?
»Yet, digital technology does not determine social relationships: in reality it is the other way round so we ask, and will continue to investigate over the course of our project: in what ways are the literacies of young children being transformed by wider social, technological and economic changes across Europe? In this introductory section we suggest that there are four dimensions of contemporary social life across Europe that have an influence on the place and meaning of the digital in young children's lives. Across each dimension there are a key range of unknowns especially in relation to very young children – 0-8 years’ old – who are the focus of our project. It is noticeable how children themselves can exert little agency in some of these although in others they play an active part in constituting modern family life.
»First of all, we need to consider structural changes in employment, the constitution of the family as a social unit, migration, and significant changes in the allocation of public housing, all of which create a set of circumstances for parents of young children that in themselves have a great influence on the lives that their children lead. Secondly, we need to examine the specific nature of the technologies and technological change brought about by digitisation and media convergence. The growth and spread of digital media technologies as well as their changing capabilities seriously enables (or disables) interpersonal, community and individual communication, as well as significantly affecting what it means to be literate and to learn in the 21st-century. Thirdly, we need to consider the cultural construct of childhood and specially how this shift to the digital impacts on how, where and when children grow-up today. Here, we need to think about what different societies and communities think are the right and wrong ways to bring up children, how parenting might be changing, children's rights, and what might constitute a happy and good childhood. And finally, we need to consider the changing nature of public education across the societies of Europe and to reflect on how expectations about the meaning, nature, purpose and values of school are affecting young children of preschool age. Debates about curriculum and pedagogy show how fractured and challenging national visions of schooling are. These four dimensions are central in any investigation of what it might mean to grow up digital in Europe today and lead to a set of questions which will animate our project.
»In the rest of this opening section we outline these dimensions in more detail and then, in Section 2 we consider in more detail our understanding of literacy – or more precisely literacies – which characterise these changing forms of connection and relationship in which the learning of young children is so deeply embedded. Section 3 then explores how literacies, especially digital competencies, are defined in school curricula and Section 4 concludes by outlining our future research questions in this area.»
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