Journal Article

Of Ladles and Laptops: Exploring Preschool Children’s Digital Play

Flint, Tori K, Adams, Marietta S

2024

Overview

In order to create and foster learning spaces that build upon children’s knowledge and experiences, we must respect and value their ways of knowing and being, including their play. Accordingly, this study highlights the ways that young children (re)imagined spaces, materials, and identities through their digital play in an analog (containing no physical, digital-based toys/materials) preschool classroom. This qualitative study utilized a framework of children’s play as murmuration (a transmodal assemblage), to analyze and discuss the children’s various digital play engagements. Three main themes were identified within/across these engagements, including the ways the children: (re)imagined the digital, drew from popular digital culture and media to make connections and construct meaning, and composed digital identities. Insights highlight the ways the children set aside perceived rules for materials, objects, spaces, and identities and created space for critically (re)envisioned ideas, concepts, realities, and futures to emerge. We encourage educators to continue to create and foster classroom spaces that value and build upon children’s playful ways of knowing, being, and becoming in the digital world.

• Publisher: Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Classrooms / Computer & video games / Identity / Portable computers / Preschool children / Preschool education / Qualitative research / Teachers