Emergent digital authoring: Playful tinkering with mode, media, and technology

ABSTRACT

This article utilizes the term “digital authoring” in order to explore the ways in which children create multi-modal, digital media texts. Drawing on the notion of “emergent literacy” we share vignettes from different pedagogical and research contexts where children use media to tell stories in different forms with different technologies. These accounts demonstrate the value to children of opportunities to make volitional choices about the mode, media, and form of their own texts. We reflect on moments of authoring in our vignettes which provide insights into the intrinsic pedagogic affordances of cultural practices such as vlogging and video diaries situated as they are, in wider socio-cultural practices. In doing so, we draw on the notion of “playful tinkering” as a key pedagogical approach which recognizes the value of children’s volitional engagements with digital media, to their emerging skills and dispositions as authors of digital media texts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional Resources

1. Burnett, C., & Merchant, G. (2018). New media in the classroom: rethinking primary literacy. Sage.

The rise of new media technologies has changed the ways in which children engage with texts and this has implications for literacy provision in schools. Drawing on research exploring new media practices within and outside school, this book explains and encourages classroom activity that makes purposeful and appropriate use of these literacies and is underpinned by a set of guiding pedagogical principles for teaching literacy in contemporary times.

2. Mackey, M. (2019). The role of moving images in young children’s literacy practices. In (ed) Erstad, O; Flewitt, R. Kümmerling-Meibauer, B. Pires Pereira, I. S., The Routledge Handbook of Digital Literacies in Early Childhood (pp. 295–307). Routledge.

Mackey points out that in a world of moving images, children need to learn to make sense of cuts and edits and other elements of moving image composition. To investigate how children might grapple with this challenge in the context of their early engagements with early apps and games, Mackey uses a pedagogical concept arising from the new universe of Makerspaces - the idea of tinkering. The full chapter uses this concept in a way which pushes the field to recognize the different processes of meaning-making and the different questions that arise in low-risk, open-ended activities that do not begin from the idea of a fixed destination. In her analysis of a range of digital texts, Mackey draws on Atkins (2006) demonstrating the value of making the distinction between the old narrative question, “What happens next?” with the gamer’s newer question: “What happens next if I … ?”

3. Rebecca Parry, Frances Howard & Louisa Penfold (2020) Negotiated, contested and political: the disruptive Third Spaces of youth media production, Learning, Media and Technology,DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2020.1754238

Traditionally media production with young people has been characterized by an aspiration to “give voice” or “empower youth,” but this core value is identified in the paper as being under threat from a new focus on enabling young people to acquire digital skills to serve the needs of rapidly changing creative industries. In this paper, qualitative data are shared from a young people’s media production project run in libraries in a city in the United Kingdom where participants were invited to create videogames/stories using Twine. Potter and McDougall’s notion of Third Spaces as negotiated, contested, and political is adopted in order to identify the ways in which pedagogical choices of setting, software, and style of facilitation combined to support young people’s critical and creative engagement with digital media and society. The notion of a third space is reframed as productively disruptive and a new set of pedagogical principles are presented which also propose pedagogies which primarily build on existing meaning-making practices.

Notes

1. Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrQxvUcg4q4&list=PLBy0QPRqxzHaaonfs19ov63tRfAcz-2XS&index=25&t=0s.

2. This is Ethan’s Vlogger Identity.

3. CTAP Project Report: https://www.legofoundation.com/en/learn-how/knowledge-base/children-tech-play/.

4. Funded by the Lego Foundation.

5. Link to Chol’s Imaginary Community Project: https://wearechol.co.uk/imaginary-communities/imaginary-communities-projects/.

6. Link to the open-source site for downloading Twine: https://twinery.org/.

7. Example of a Twine Game/Story: https://acgodliman.itch.io/a-bucket-filled-with-sand.