Growing Up With Technology

Young Children Learning in a Digital World

Lydia Plowman,Christine Stephen,Joanna McPake

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135188528
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Bildung
• Categoria: Bildung Allgemein

Growing Up with Technology explores the role of technology in the everyday lives of three- and four-year-old children, presenting the implications for the children's continuing learning and development.

Children are growing up in a world where the internet, mobile phones and other forms of digital interaction are features of daily life. The authors have carefully observed children's experiences at home and analysed the perspectives of parents, practitioners and the children themselves. This has enabled them to provide a nuanced account of the different ways in which technology can support or inhibit learning.

Drawing on evidence from their research, the authors bring a fresh approach to these debates, based on establishing relationships with children, families and educators to get insights into practices, values and attitudes.

A number of key questions are considered, including:

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• Which technologies do young children encounter at home and preschool?

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• What kind of learning takes place in these encounters?

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• How can parents and practitioners support this learning?

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• Are some children disadvantaged when it comes to learning with technology?

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Growing Up with Technology is strongly grounded in a series of research projects, providing new ways of thinking about how children's learning with technology can be supported. It will be of great interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students on a range of courses including childhood studies, and those with a particular interest in the use of technology in education. Parents, practitioners and researchers will also find this a fascinating and informative read.

Chapter 1
Growing up with technology

The children in our studies were three or four years old. Like Evie and Andy, they used technologies in different ways. They went to nursery, enjoyed active lives and engaged in a diverse range of pursuits with friends and family. While all the children had exposure to technologies at home, their experiences varied: some children lived in homes with high levels of technology, but preferred to read books, draw pictures or play with toys; other children lived in homes where parents lacked confidence or interest in how to use technology, yet the children were able to find creative ways of integrating technology into their play. Evie’s favourite toy was the LeapPad but, apart from that, she did not show much interest in technology, preferring to look after her guinea pigs, play hopscotch or draw pictures. Andy was a keen Game Boy player and enjoyed surfing the web with his dad, but he also liked dressing up, playing football and swimming.

Where families were enthusiastic users of technology, parents encouraged their children’s engagement with computer games or websites such as CBeebies and Nick Jr. In these families, children’s developing competences with technology were noted with pride and seen as necessary for a successful future. Andy’s mother believed this, too. Unlike her husband, she was no enthusiast but reluctantly acknowledged that she would need to familiarize herself with computers for her own career. There was no need for technology in the MacGregors’ working lives and, in any case, they did not have much in the way of spare income to buy products and they were worried about the effect they might have on Evie’s play. Other parents said that they were not against digital technologies, but they would leave introducing them until their child indicated interest, preferring to encourage imaginative games with dolls or outdoor play. Most of the parents had some ambivalence about the ways in which technology could be beneficial or detrimental to their children’s wellbeing and described uncertainty about the role it should play in their family, sometimes expressing contradictory views within the same interview.

Although the vignettes of Evie and Andy may reinforce some stereotypes – Evie is a girl, is not very interested in technology and is from a financially-disadvantaged home and Andy is a boy, likes technology and is from a financially-advantaged home – overall these different patterns of experience and attitude were not divided by the socioeconomic status of the families. We found a more complex picture in which there was often a stronger link between parents’ own experiences of technology in the workplace or in educational settings and the ways in which these experiences influenced the opportunities they offered their children. Although some children had more access to technology at nursery than they did at home, we found very different patterns of provision and support there, too. In circumstances such as these, in which children are exposed to a wide range of experiences before they start school, do we need to be concerned that some children are disadvantaged compared to others in terms of their opportunities to use technologies? If so, what does this mean for their future education? These questions are of more than academic interest when governments increasingly see education as an opportunity to familiarize young children with the technologies associated with global knowledge economies.

Preparing children for the knowledge economy

UK governments see computers as having the potential to improve the standards of pupils’ school education, and they have invested accordingly. Since the 1980s, when the BBC microcomputer was introduced, through to the National Grid for Learning in the 1990s and the Home Access scheme, which launched in England in 2009, children are seen as needing to be prepared for working in the knowledge economy – a metaphor which implicitly associates brain work with technology and its economic benefits. There has been heavy investment in the Home Access scheme to promote the educational benefits of home computer and internet access (Becta 2008) as part of the strategy to ease the transition to a knowledge-based economy. As it will be 15 years until most three- and four-year-olds enter the labour market, policy interest has not focused on technology for this age group until comparatively recently. Interest surfaced around the turn of the millennium and is driven by a desire to prepare children of all ages for what is seen as an increasingly complex and technological world. For instance, the Digital Britain report, produced by two government departments, states that ‘in education and training for digital life skills, we need a step change in approach, starting with the youngest’ (BERR/DCMS 2009: 64). It is now widely accepted by policy makers that the pattern for success in later life is established in the preschool years. For example, the Early Years Framework refers to the first years of a child’s life as laying the foundations of skills for learning, life and work and having a major bearing on wider outcomes, including employment (Scottish Government 2008a: 7). Similar aspirations are found in the No Child Left Behind legislation, which was introduced by the government of the United States in 2002. The primary goal of part D, ‘Enhancing Education Through Technology’, is to improve student attainment through technology, with the additional goal:

to assist every student in crossing the digital divide by ensuring that every student is technologically literate by the time the student finishes the eighth grade, regardless of the student’s race, ethnicity, gender, family income, geographic location, or disability.

(U.S. Department of Education 2002: Section 2042)

Developing the early years curriculum with reference to information and communication technology (ICT) has therefore been a fairly recent phenomenon, and the countries of the UK and elsewhere are at different stages of implementation. Research in this area is still limited compared to the enormous amount of literature on ICT in schools. While it is widely accepted that the opportunities and challenges brought by technologies should be addressed for the years of compulsory schooling, especially for older children who will enter employment more imminently, there has, so far, been less attention to the period before children start school. Introducing ICT into preschools is not simply a matter of adapting policies that have been developed for schools or of translating findings from schools-based research because there are fundamental differences between these phases of education, as outlined in Chapters 3 and 4. Compared to the years of compulsory education in schools, preschool settings have a distinct culture in terms of different norms of professional practice with reference to adult-directed teaching, emphasis on learning through play, less prescriptive curriculum and concepts of assessment. The notion of computers having a role in driving up standards, as stated in No Child Left Behind, is beginning to emerge, but it does not have the high profile it has in schools.

Over the years that we have been engaged in research about preschool children and technology, we have seen many changes: computers have become more commonplace in the playroom, practitioners’ confidence has increased and there has been more political interest in the value of home learning. However, the pace of change has not kept up with the technological changes in society and their influence on how we communicate or spend our leisure time: many nurseries continue to think of ICT as being primarily concerned with desktop computers, it is unusual to find activities involving the internet in the playroom and practitioners still find it a challenge to adapt their pedagogy to include technology. This slow pace of change is highlighted by a recent report published for Becta, an English government agency which promotes the use of technology in learning. The report refers to ICT in schools rather than preschools, and states:

[T]he development of new pedagogies can be a substantial professional challenge: teachers must learn new skills and rethink and refashion the teacher–learner relationship. Developing pedagogical approaches of active learner engagement, facilitating and scaffolding learning rather than transmitting knowledge, using new, more open, questioning techniques, and undertaking assessment for learning all provide significant challenges to a teacher’s role and identity. A lack of time, willingness or the resources to develop new pedagogical approaches is a major barrier to fully exploiting the educational potential of digital technology.

(Chowcat, Phillips, Popham and Jones 2008: 20)

This analysis refers to the need for teachers to rethink pedagogy and learn new skills as key challenges for using technology to drive educational change. These are topics that we examine in a preschool context in Chapters 4 and 5. But educational change can be slow. This description of the need for change is being reported more than 20 years after computers were first introduced in schools and in the wake of repeated major capital investments: in his speech to the BETT conference in January 2009, Jim Knight, the Minister for Schools and Learners, announced that more than £5 billion has been spent on ICT for schools in England and Wales over the last decade. Preschool education does not share this history. The urgency to equip playrooms with technology has been mainly absent until the last few years. As an example, the title of our first research report on preschools and ICT is Come back in two years! Based on fieldwork carried out in 2002, in the first paragraph we say:

‘Come back in two years!’ is a quote from a preschool practitioner as she waved goodbye at the end of a research visit to her playgroup. The implied continuation of the sentence was ‘…and then we’ll have something to show you’. Like most of our other interviewees, she was enthusiastic about ICTs and had a strong belief in their value, but she was aware that the situation in her playgroup fell short of some undefined notion of ‘best practice’. She felt confident that we would see a great transformation if we were to return in two years’ time and we often heard comments from other practitioners such as ‘it’s just a matter of time’.

(Stephen and Plowman 2003a: 2)

Given that attention turned to young children in nurseries long after it was given those aged five to 16 in schools, it is not surprising that changes in preschool pedagogy for integrating ICT are still emerging. In the endnote to the same report we provide the following summary of the analysis we have presented:

Some aspects of this report may, on first reading, seem to present a fairly gloomy scenario of the use of ICT in preschool settings. We report a lack of training, a lack of explicit pedagogy, wide variation in levels of resources and a fairly low level of practitioner skills. However, the underlying tone of this report is optimistic. Practitioners are looking into the future, as our use of the phrase ‘Come back in two years!’ as the title for this report emphasizes.

Although one of the participants in the study said that positive change was ‘just a matter of time’, transforming this optimism into practice that will have a positive impact on children has many resource implications. It will require greatly enhanced training opportunities … It will also require more guidance in the form of a national strategy for the use of ICT in preschool settings. This will give practitioners the impetus to address the changes in practice that will bring about enhanced learning opportunities for children.

(Stephen and Plowman 2003a: 33)

In drawing attention to pedagogy, resources and training, our commentary echoes the diagnosis on the use of ICT in schools provided by the Becta report mentioned above. Whether in schools or in playrooms, the challenges seem to be enduring. Simply investing in technology or offering training in the mechanics of using equipment will not lead to the sought-after changes; these changes are more likely to be brought about by supporting practitioners across sectors, helping them to feel confident about developing their pedagogy. In the descriptions of our research in the following chapters, we show that there is a role for technology in early years education. However, using it to create learning opportunities depends not only on changes in practice, but also on engaging educators in discussions about the value and desirability of very young children using computers.

The shift in interest to informal education settings is partly the result of a greater appreciation of the kinds of learning and knowledge that can be developed in the home. Typically, this is different from the curricular knowledge found in formal education settings as it is more contingent, more fluid and more grounded in everyday life. As such, it has not been the primary focus of researchers’ or education professionals’ attention. The recent attempts to make the curriculum less prescriptive and more flexible and responsive build on greater cognizance of the opportunities for learning in the home, particularly in the early years. Having a better understanding of the skills, knowledge and concepts associated with children’s experiences at home is central to the ways in which children’s learning can be extended in preschool settings; this has been usual practice in the case of literacy and numeracy for a number of years, but children’s learning about and with technologies at home has not been valued or even noticed. This means that children’s learning on entry to primary school can be focused on operational aspects, such as how to control a mouse or open a file, and does not extend beyond technology for work and study, such as the PC or interactive whiteboard. This book is an attempt to shift the balance in favour of greater understanding of children’s everyday activities with a range of technologies at home and to relate this to their experiences at preschool. The aim is not to assist formal education in its colonization of the home, but to enable parents and practitioners to gain a deeper understanding of what children do and can do. We are neither advocates for technology, nor among its detractors. Rather, we describe what we have learnt from our studies and come to some conclusions about the ways in which technology can enhance learning in the right circumstances.

Researching children and technology

From an educational researcher’s point of view, the preschool years are a particularly interesting time for investigating children’s learning with technology: nurseries and homes offer opportunities to observe the relationship between formal and informal learning, the balance between child-centred and adult-directed activities and the relationship of these technologies to a media environment which encompasses television, DVDs, books and magazines. This book’s foundation in empirical research means that its illustrations of practice (through vignettes, extracts from interviews, field notes and photographs) necessarily focus on the technologies that we saw in use. Accordingly, Growing Up with Technology is not intended to be a manual for how to introduce technology into preschool settings and it does not present tried and tested activities for practitioners to implement within a particular curriculum. It does not provide a source of advice for parents on what constitutes the right approach to living with technology at home. Rather, we bring insights from a range of perspectives – education, cultural psychology and social studies – to describe and discuss general principles that are likely to be relevant even as the technologies change. Too much focus on the technology would suggest that this book determines practice as well as risk the content becoming outdated. Our focus is as much on interactions between children, their peers and adults as it is on interactions between children and technology so our observations will outlive particular toys or devices.

The research took place over a number of years, originally located in preschool settings and with a focus on enhancing practice and informing policy. An acknowledgement that the role of ICT in early childhood education was not being fully explored or exploited led to a commission to inform the development of the Scottish government’s policy. Our review of the literature (Stephen and Plowman 2002) pointed to the paucity of good evidence-based writing on the subject. Indeed, despite claims about the powerful contribution that ICT could make to young children’s learning and development, we were drawn to the conclusion that there were more questions than answers about that contribution, so we embarked on the observational study of existing practice mentioned earlier, Come back in two years!

This was followed by looking at the strategies that could be adopted by practitioners to enhance learning with ICT, and we later moved to examining experiences in the home. This transition from developing policy to examining practice to taking a broader view of the place of technology in the lives of young children mirrors the evolving areas of focus for policy makers – particularly how children’s experiences with technology at home can contribute to their education. During the period spanned by our research, early years practitioners have been increasingly encouraged to value home learning, but they have not necessarily been aware of how children’s experiences with technology at home can contribute to activities in the playroom and the early years of primary school. The research reported here describes the competences, knowledge and understanding that children develop at home by playing with technology and by being part of a family in which using technologies for domestic tasks, leisure, work or study are just everyday activities.

All of the participants in our research projects lived in Scotland’s central belt. This area includes Edinburgh and Glasgow and comprises small towns with an industrial past, former mining villages and communities in rural and semi-rural settings. While some parts of the central belt have successfully made the transition from mining or manufacturing to service industr...

Indice dei contenuti

• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Growing up with technology
• Chapter 2 The technologization of childhood?
• Chapter 3 Young children learning
• Chapter 4 Curriculum, pedagogy and technology in preschool
• Chapter 5 Support for learning with technology in preschool
• Chapter 6 The home as a learning environment
• Chapter 7 Learning with technology in the home
• Chapter 8 Guided interaction at home and preschool
• Chapter 9 Young children learning in a digital age
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1 The research projects
• Appendix 2 Guided enquiry
• Appendix 3 Conducting research with young children
• Bibliography
• Index