Among witches and dragons - young children’s interaction and negotiations when creating fairy tales with digital tools
Submitted by:
Kristina Danielsson
Abstract:
The use of digital tools, such as tablets and smartboards, is rapidly becoming part of literacy practices in early years of schooling (e.g., Hultin & Westman 2013). Hence, teachers need to find ways of integrating such resources in their everyday classroom practice in ways that support students’ possibilities for learning and participation (cf. Beam & Williams 2015). Thus, an important question is what potential digital tools and digital resources have – when integrated in educational practices – to support, e.g., young pupils’ text creation. Therefore, the aim of this study is to explore ‘what’s happening’ and ‘what’s possible’ when 6/7-year-old pupils jointly create a digital fairy tale with the use of an application in a tablet. This is done by investigating how a group of children in a Swedish school interact with each other and the digital tool, which was new to them at the time of the activity, when exploring the application and creating their fairy tale. To enable fine-tuned detailed analysis of the pupils’ multimodal interaction, the three pupils were video recorded during this classroom activity. Also, the pupils’ digital fairy tales in the form of animations were collected. The children’s actions, interaction, and negotiations through different semiotic modes (speech, gestures, bodily action, etc.) were analysed through tools developed within Goodwin’s theory of interaction (e.g., Goodwin 2007, 2018).
Preliminary results indicate that i) the children position themselves mainly through bodily action in relation to the tablet and to each other, but also through words (sometimes resulting in a mismatch between words and bodily action), ii) the child with the highest writing skills takes the power position, iii) the children jointly explore the digital resource in playful ways and, while exploring the digital application, they create different version of a fairy tale, iv) the children clearly focus on the task to create a digital fairy tale and to adhere to the frames given to them by the teacher. The results are discussed in relation to implications for research and education.
References
Beam, S. & Williams, C. (2015) Technology-Mediated Writing Instruction in the Early Literacy Program: Perils, Procedures, and Possibilities, Computers in the Schools, 32:3-4, 260-277, DOI: 10.1080/07380569.2015.1094320
Goodwin, C. (2007). Participation, stance and affect in the organization of activities. Discourse & Society,
Goodwin, C. (2018). Co-operative Action. Cambridge University Press.
Hultin, E., & Westman, M. (2013). Early literacy practices go digital. Literacy Information and Computer Education Journal (LICEJ), 4(2), 1005-1013.