iPads in the Early Years

Developing literacy and creativity

Michael Dezuanni, Karen Dooley, Sandra Gattenhof, Linda Knight

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317676577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Digital devices, such as smart phones and tablet computers, are becoming commonplace in young children's lives for play, entertainment, learning and communication. Recently, there has been a great deal of focus on the educational potential of these devices in both formal and informal educational settings. There is now an abundance of educational 'apps' available to children, parents, and teachers, which claim to enhance children's early literacy and numeracy development, but to date, there has been very little formal investigation of the educational potential of these devices.

This book discusses the impact on children's learning when iPads were introduced in three very different early years settings in Brisbane, Australia. It outlines how researchers worked with pre-school teachers and parents to explore how iPads can assist with letter and word recognition, the development of oral literacy and digital literacies and talk around play. Chapters consider the possibilities for using iPads for creativity and arts education through photography, storytelling, drawing, music creation and audio recording, and critically examine the literacies enabled by educational software available on iPads, and the relationship between digital play and literacy development.

iPads in the Early Years provides exciting insights into children's digital culture and learning in the age of the iPad. It will be key reading for researchers, research students and teacher educators focusing on the early years, as well as those with an interest in the role of ICTS, and particularly tablet computers, in education.

Chapter 1 Literacy and digital culture in the early years

Karen Dooley and Michael Dezuanni

DOI: 10.4324/9781315771830-1

Introduction

Guidelines for using the iPad for literacy education began appearing soon after the release of the device. They advise early years teachers about selecting book apps (e.g. Cahill & McGill-Franzen, 2013; Morgan, 2013; Zipke, 2013) and incorporating them into shared reading (Hoffman & Paciga, 2013), embedding educational apps into instructional routines for phonics and fluency (Northrop & Killeen, 2013; Reutschlin Schugar et al., 2013; Thoermer & Williams, 2012), and using drawing, mind-mapping and other open-ended apps to teach comprehension strategies (Hutchison et al., 2012). There is an air of excitement in this professional literature: mobile devices have been hailed as ‘revolutionary’ because they create ‘opportunities to apply proven practices (the best ones) more often with all students’ (Roskos & Neumann, 2014, p. 509). In short, the iPad is rich in possibilities for best practice.

But some question what has been described as the ‘domestication’ of the iPad to established forms of literacy education (O'Mara & Laidlaw, 2011). Literate practice on digital platforms, they argue, is more likely to require creative decision-making about multiple modes and tools than is print-based practice. It may entail considerably more author-audience collaboration because of the easy interconnectivity of both parties on social media platforms. Moreover, this flows through into learning, favouring collaborative relationships such as mentoring rather than the hierarchical transmissive relationships that seem to have a place in at least some aspects of print-based literacy education (Luke, 2008; Marsh & Yamada-Rice, 2013). Developed for print platforms, established practices of literacy education have yet to address these epistemic and pedagogic developments adequately. This has borne on the ways that the iPad is taken up in schools (Lynch & Redpath, 2014; O'Mara & Laidlaw, 2011).

Our aim here is to contribute to the normative conversation about the use of the iPad for literacy education. To this end, we look at iPad-based digitalisation of traditions of literacy education. Four broad traditions have been identified: the authentic, the didactic, the critical and the functional (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012). Each tradition is epistemically distinct, characterised by a particular way of making knowledge (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012; New London Group, 1996). The authentic tradition entails situated practice or experience of the known and the new. An example is the reading workshop approach in which children read and respond to literature with the support of mini-lessons as required (e.g. Serafini & Youngs, 2013). The didactic tradition entails overt instruction or conceptualising by naming and theorising. Synthetic phonics, the systematic and decontextualised teaching of sound-symbol relationships, is an example of this tradition (e.g. Lloyd, 1992). The critical tradition entails critical framing or analysing functionally. This tradition is exemplified by critical literacy approaches which enable children to examine contrasting versions of a story (e.g. Exley et al., 2014). The functional tradition entails transformed practice or applying appropriately and creatively. An example is the genre approach to writing which develops children's awareness of the purpose of a genre such as narrative and the structure and language features of texts in that genre (e.g. Woods et al., 2014).

Digitalisation of literacy education has long been envisaged (e.g. New London Group, 1996), although progress in the early years has been patchy, especially at the preschool level (Paciga et al., 2013). Given this history, it is significant, then, that the advent of the iPad seems to have generated new digital possibilities – and enthusiasm. A recent review of research on touch-screen tablets and emergent literacy described what can be understood as experiential and didactic uses of book apps and ‘educational’ apps, presenting evidence of the efficacy of these (Neumann & Neumann, 2013). Preschool teacher uptake of such possibilities warrants investigation. Much of the contention around the embedding of the iPad into literacy education in the compulsory early years is paradigmatic and explained in terms of the institutionalisation of print-based norms in an era of curricular conservatism (Lynch & Redpath, 2014). But what of the pre-compulsory years?

Here we look at the uptake of the iPad in preschool from a perspective that assumes the epistemic moves of the traditions of literacy education are neither stages in some pedagogic formula nor in need of the ‘balancing’ so often touted as the solution to paradigmatic tension. Rather, they should be selected according to the learning goals for particular groups of students in a given context (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012). But what should those goals be? In this chapter we seek to inform this normative decision-making by describing and explaining the way contending paradigms are negotiated in the classroom as iPads are embedded in preschool literacy education.

We develop the chapter in three sections. First, we elaborate our analytic framework, introducing the concepts of literacy event and literate practice and specifying these for the iPad platform. Second, we present analyses of literacy activities that involved stories, scientific information, and basic skills, highlighting complications that arose in the enactment of one or another tradition of literacy education. Third, we return to normative conversation about the use of iPads for literacy education. We discuss paradigmatic conundrums related to the scarce classroom resource of adult time, suggesting some ways of thinking about these when planning literacy education in the early years.

iPad-embedded literacy education

To describe and explain iPad-embedded literacy education, we make use of the concepts of ‘literacy event’ and ‘literate practice’. These concepts were developed originally for print-based literacy. The concept of ‘literacy event’ referred to:

occasions in which written language is integral to the nature of participants’ interactions and their interpretive processes and strategies. Familiar literacy events for mainstream pre-schoolers are bedtime stories, reading cereal boxes, stop signs … In such literacy events, participants follow socially established rules for verbalizing what they know from and about the written material. Each community has rules for socially interacting and sharing knowledge in literacy events.

(Heath, 1982, p. 50)

Literate practice referred originally to the social practices brought into being through the print-based literacy events of a given community, along with the conceptions of reading and writing inherent in these (Street, 1984, p. 1). It drew attention to the particularity of the ways literacy is used in a given context for specific purposes and to attendant relations of power. Three decades on, this concept, along with that of literacy event, has been extended beyond the written language of print texts to visual and other modes integral to literacy on digital platforms (e.g. Marsh, 2005; Pahl & Rowsell, 2005; Street, 1997, 2009). To describe textual modes in iPad-embedded literacy events, we use a version of the typology suggested originally by the New London Group (1996).

The multiliteracies manifesto (New London Group, 1996) called for instruction in five modes additional to the linguistic. These were the audio, the spatial, the gestural and the visual – and in the case of digital multimedia texts, the multimodal. The manifesto was re-visited a decade or so later by some of its authors (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009). At that time it was argued that multimodality was more central than it had been in the mid-1990s (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009). Written language, it was noted, was increasingly coupled with the visual, not only in digital texts such as blogs and email, but also in textbooks, magazines, newspapers and other print forms influenced by digital conventions. At the same time, greater delicacy was achieved by splitting the linguistic mode into the written and the oral, and adding a new mode: the tactile.

We make use of the revised list of modes (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009). The distinction between the written and the oral is especially useful for analysing data produced with young children. In the early years, the oral is taught as both a mode in its own right and as a means of access to the written mode. With respect to the tactile, however, we found the notion of touch as ‘means of activation’ of texts (Bezemer & Kress, 2014) to be useful. In other words, we do not treat the tactile as a mode – a set of conventional communication resources – although there are conditions under which that would be appropriate (Bezemer & Kress, 2014; Walsh & Simpson, 2014).

Recent research has complemented the concept of mode with that of interactivity (Rowsell, 2014). Critics have argued that understandings of literacy need to go beyond modal design to the embodied experience of literacy as creative play (Jacobs, 2014; Leander & Boldt, 2013). Consistent with this, a phenomenological perspective on reading (Rowsell, 2014) has shown how iPads enable a continuum of interactive reading experience. The eBook is located at the end of the continuum where reading experience is most similar to that of print reading; video games are at the other end. In between, in order of increasing interactivity, are websites, multimodal iBooks and social media. Similarly, recent research has brought the creative play involved in writing to the fore (Dezuanni & Woods, 2014).

In summary, we draw on an expanded typology of touch-activated modes (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012), a continuum of interactivity (Rowsell, 2014), and understandings of writing as creative play (Dezuanni & Woods, 2014) to specify the concept of literacy events (Heath, 1982) for iPad-embedded literacy activity. We now present analyses conducted within this framework, looking in turn at literacy events built around stories, scientific information and basic skills. In doing so, we consider the traditions of literacy education (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012) in which these literacy events are rooted and the literate practices (Street, 1984) they bring into being.

The research evidence

Stories

Book apps were integral to some story-based literacy events at all three study sites. The stories on these apps can be understood as ‘iBooks’, that is, as touch-activated multimodal narratives (Rowsell, 2014). Unlike the eBook, the iBook integrates multiple semiotic modes, typically, the written, oral, visual and audio. Yet, unlike the video game, it has a linear narrative that exercises control over the reader's meaning-making processes. In addition, book apps used in our study included activities such as manipulating images or colouring in. We now look in detail at story-based iBook reading events in one of the three centres. These data are presented here because they offer insights into some forms of literacy education common in early years classrooms; they are not meant to be representative of the study sites.

iBook re-reading

In interviews conducted over the course of the study year, the focal teacher described her ideal iBook reading event: a small group activity initiated by children during free play and enacted without adult participation. The story viewed or ‘read’ by the children is one with which they are familiar from whole-class storytime. In one variant, several children sit around a single iPad ‘peer tutoring and chatting’; in another, they use the same app, but on individual iPads, talking with each other while listening to the story at their own pace through headphones or doing some of the non-reading activities on the app. In either case, the children are persistent; they do not skip from app to app.

The teacher's ideal iBook reading event was established in the focal classroom three terms into the preschool year. iBooks had been available from the beginning of the year, but had been little used. In the fifth month of the study, the teacher observed that the children ‘haven't used the stories a lot’. If the children did open book apps at that time, they did not persist with the whole story. This was a point of contrast with the use of phonics and other educational apps the children viewed as ‘games’. To redress the lack of interest in book apps, the teacher loaded iBook versions of familiar print books onto iPads that she then put into the story corner. By way of interpretative background, it should be noted that print books and iBooks had been available in learning areas around the room since the beginning of the year; stories had never been confined to story corner.

[I was] trying to get them to use the iPad for reading stories; they weren't reading stories on it anywhere [in the room]. So we figured if we start there [in story corner], where they kno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: iPads in the early years: developing literacy and creativity
• 1 Literacy and digital culture in the early years
• 2 Arts education and iPads in the early years
• 3 Drawing and writing on the screen
• 4 Digital media literacies in the early years
• 5 Drama, storymaking and iPads in the early years
• 6 Visual arts learning with iPads
• 7 In and out of preschool learning with iPads
• 8 Networking iPads into preschool spaces
• Conclusion
• Index