Abstract:

The role for digital technology in educational settings is a widely debated topic. This paper takes a different ways of approaching digital/analogue activities in early childhood, through the embodied and interactional view of children’s reasoning. The data builds on a visual and sensory ethnography (c.f. Pink, 2015), of a science project about spinning at a preschool. During the science project, the children encounter a range of educational activities, consisting of both digital technology and more traditional activities promoting bodily movement and outdoor play. The data analysed for this paper concerns how children reason with and without the use of digital tools across the science project.

The children use movements and gestures from their bodily play activities and integrate these when they are reasoning in front of the digital screen. This suggest a view of digital technology as integrated in the educational encounter. It suggests a perspective, following Edwards et al. (2016) that encourages researchers to overview the ecology of educational activities and tools that children actually encounter during their days, to understand how digital technologies interplay with range of other educational environments, tools and activities.

The concept of embodied reasoning is promoted to understand how children reason in front of the screen and elsewhere. The concept suggests an ecological approach akin to Gibson’s (1986) ecological understanding of affordances, and perspectives from embodied cognition (Clark, 1997) and interaction (Streeck, Goodwin & LeBaron, 2011). Here, children are seen as developing in relation with their material and social worlds and that their thinking and reasoning skills are aided by the affordances of the environments children encounter.

The results suggest how reasoning with digital interfaces is an embodied endeavour, that might be influenced by previous non-virtual activities with similar aims. This suggests a view of young children’s thinking in educational environments, that cut across concepts such as an digital-analogue divide and instead directs the foci to where the experiencing child and its development in relation to an array of educational activities.

References:
[1] Clark, A. (1997). Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
[2] Edwards, S., Henderson, H. Gronn, D., Scott, A. & Mirkhil, M. (2017). Digital disconnect or digital difference? A socio-ecological perspective on young children’s technology use in the home and the early childhood centre. Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 26 (1): 1-17.
[3] Gibson, J.J. (1986[1979]). The ecological approach to visual perception. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
[4] Pink, S. (2015). Doing sensory ethnography. (2. ed.) London: Sage.
[5] Streeck, J., Goodwin, C. & LeBaron, C.D. (eds.). (2011). Embodied interaction: language and body in the material world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Keywords:

Early childhood education, digital tools, embodied, ecology, science learning.