This book deconstructs traditional developmentalist logic around children’s engagement with digital media where the focus is on what the digital ‘does to’ children’s bodies and brains. Rather than seeing children as vulnerable and passive recipients, the authors position children as co-creators and digital artists, embracing the richness of children’s digital play. The chapters cover a wide range of topics including indigenous digital art, digital drawing, learning to code, social media and artificial intelligence. The authors use a diverse range of theoretical perspectives, including posthumanism, feminist new materialism, social semiotics, socialcultural and multimodal approaches to childhood to generate new ways of seeing the relationship between children and the digital. The book includes chapters from academics and practitioners based in Australia, Canada, Sweden, the UK and the USA and a companion website showcasing innovative and interactive material, including visual essays and soundscapes.
Marisssa McClure Sweeny is Professor and Program Director of Early Childhood Education at Carlow University, USA.Mona Sakr is Senior Lecturer in Education and Early Childhood at Middlesex University, UK.
Introduction Mona Sakr and Marissa McClure Sweeny 1 How Participatory Art Offers Children Postdevelopmental, Experimental Forays into Coding: You/Me/Us: AI Linda Knight 2 Shaping and Writing by Hand: On Situated Uses and Semiotic Potentials of Digital Pencils in a Swedish Fourth-Grade Class Anders Björkvall, Fredrik Lindstrand and Ida Melander3 Trans-spatial, Trans-media Flows: Family Ethnographies of Children’s Creative Exploration of Identities In and Out of Digital Space(s) Yinka Olusoga and Jessica Bradley 4 Ethnocomputation and Afrofuturism in Theory and Practice Nettrice Gaskins5 Wrestling the Tentacular: Compost and Contamination Making Children, Clay and Video Heather Kaplan and Diane Elisa Golding6 Queer Songbook Orchestra’s Childhood Casey Mecija and Hannah Dyer7 Thinking Collaboratively in the Virtual Space: Middle School Students’ Sympoietic 3D Art Hayon Park 8 Youtubing without an Internet Connection: Young Children Documenting Representing and Presenting Their Selves through Video-making Mona Sakr9 Reframing Learning to Code Tomi Slotte Dufva10 Teen’s Creative Experiences in TikTok as an Infra-Structure of Feeling Laura Trafí-PratsIndex