Editorial

In contemporary post-industrial communities, young children’s encounters with digital technologies are increasingly considered to be a significant feature of their experiences at home and in their educational settings. In this context, this special edition of Early Years, dedicated to Digital Play and Technologies in the Early Years, is a welcome and timely contribution to the field. The term ‘special edition’ is an apt label for this focus on digital play and technologies. The level of interest that digital technologies generate is indeed special among research and practice areas in the early years. Contrast the attention in popular media, policy and practice guidance given to iPads, computers and mobile phones with writing about small world play resources, construction equipment or creative materials and activities.

Digital play and technologies generate strongly held and polarised positions among parents, practitioners, policy-makers and social commentators. For many, digital technologies offer the promise of new and enhanced ways of learning and sharing knowledge. Others are opposed to children’s engagement with digital resources, fearing that they detract from more developmentally appropriate activities, are associated with restricted physical activity and underdeveloped social skills. Parents evaluate the opportunity for their children to engage with digital technologies positively and negatively. Some are persuaded of the value of a more ‘natural’ and certainly less technological childhood, while others see digital resources as a way to promote their child’s educational and employment prospects. Policy-makers are keen to capitalise on the apparent potential for developing new skills and the enhanced knowledge capacity which investment in educational digital technologies seems to offer. Additionally, manufacturers and designers argue that their digital products can motivate hard to engage children and accelerate learning.

Nevertheless, despite the doubts expressed by some researchers and commentators and repeated in blogs and newspaper articles, even a brief period spent observing contemporary everyday life makes it clear that children are clearly exposed to parents using mobile phones, enjoy opportunities to take photographs and enthusiastically play with apps on phones and tablets passed to them by adults. A look at the shelves of a supermarket or toy shop will make it obvious that there is a very considerable market for screen-based and interactive toys and games for children from birth to teens. It is hard to resist Kalaš’s (2010, 16) conclusion in his report for UNESCO that

it is not necessary any more to prove that ICT matters in early childhood education. New digital technologies have entered every aspect of our reality, including families and the lives of young people.

This special edition of Early Years draws together research about this pervasive feature of contemporary life from the perspective of young children and those who care for and educate them. We need to know more about this special topic of digital play and technologies if we are to advance the debate about the benefits and threats of children’s engagement with digital resources, even if a resolution of the conflicting claims seems unlikely in the short term. Of course, the contrast in perspectives is made more acute because of the interaction of views on new technology use with other ‘bigger picture’ positions about conceptions of an ideal childhood, moral panics about contemporary parental practices, valued forms of activity for young children, the impact of experience on neurological development and broader cultural and social expectations.

In the light of the level of popular and policy interest in children’s interactions with digital technologies, the extent of published research seems surprisingly limited. Some writers draw conclusions for all children from studies of the activities of older children, failing to recognise the distinctiveness of the interests, competencies and ways of engaging that are characteristic of children in their early years. There is a growing body of literature about the technological activities of three- to five-year olds but it typically reports either on large-scale surveys of children’s use of technologies or much smaller scale explorations, sometimes using before and after models of enquiry to measure specific outcomes. There is some growth in work that investigates pedagogy, the mixing of traditional and digital play and resources and the influence of the context in which technological activities occur. But there is more to understand and ample scope for methodological innovation and theoretical and conceptual developments. Attention to the technological experiences of children under three years of age is even more limited and writing in this area can be uncritical, with assertions of benefits not justified by reference to rigorous, supporting evidence.

From the perspective of a researcher, there are two particular aspects of the growing literature on empirical studies of young children’s use of digital technologies that are puzzling. Firstly, the concern on both sides of the debate and research about the value of technological play seems to be with the relationship between engaging with digital media and development (whether positive or negative), rather than the kinds of play afforded or the ways in which digital resources are incorporated into family life and educational practices. The belief in the value of ‘learning through play’ has led to a burgeoning of attempts to validate ‘playing with computer games’ as therefore educational and playing with interactive toys as a way of accelerating development has become a familiar marketing device. But what notions of play, learning and education are asserted in these instances? Claims about play and educational value become blurred around technological resources and should challenge us to clarify our thinking about the ways in which we conceptualise play and learning and the relationship between the two in the early years.

The second striking aspect of much of the existing research and writing about the pros and cons of young children engaging with digital technologies is the focus on screen-based technologies in general and computers in particular – technologies where the user and resource are typically static and any activity is entirely virtual. Concentrating on computers seems to ignore the availability of many digital and interactive resources that are more likely to afford creativity and possibly adventure.

Research about children’s encounters with new technologies and digital play happens in the context of rapid expansion in the reach and range of digital resources. The advent of tablets and smartphones is perhaps the most significant change in the resources available to young children. This technological advance has influenced resourcing in early years settings and made a difference to the accessibility of digital resources for play and learning for even the youngest children. Along with all these developments come claims of positive outcomes for learning and changes in the ways in which children and adults react to the technology and to each other when engaged with digital resources. Early years researchers are investigating the efficacy of particular apps and the ways in which they are used at home and in educational settings, but there remains scope to extend our thinking about these digital tools to the bigger question of the contribution of digital encounters to learning and play.

Of course it is not just the material features and interface characteristics of children’s encounters with digital technologies that make a difference to their experiences. The social context of family life and peer groups and the educational context, influenced by policy and practice guidance and practitioners’ perspectives, all impact on children’s everyday experience of learning at home and in preschool settings. We have begun to tackle questions about pedagogy and explore methods which reflect this ecological framing of digital play and activities. A body of international evidence about the impact of practitioners’ attitudes, personal engagement with digital technologies and opportunities for professional development is accumulating and has implications for other aspects of the early years field. For instance, it would be interesting to pose some of the questions raised about practice and pedagogy with digital technologies in the context of more traditional preschool activities such as water play or construction.

An inescapable feature of digital technology in the twenty-first century is innovation and change. The rapid pace of technological change means that parents and educators have not had the same experience of growing up with digital technologies as their children. Contemporary technologies and their applications for work, learning, communication and leisure are significantly different from those available when parents and practitioners were young. Practitioners making cautious progress towards digital competencies can be in awe of the apparent ease with which children ‘pick up’ these skills. Nevertheless, children do need adult support and guidance to have positive encounters with digital technologies and there are important questions still to be addressed about the nature of adult–child relationships, knowledge and learning in encounters with digital play and technologies.

The papers in this special edition have been selected because of the contribution they make to gaps in our existing understandings and the quality of the research activity in the field. Each of the papers tackles more than one ‘issue’ of course, reflecting the interconnected nature of children’s experience of the world in which they are growing up. The papers are clearly located in the context of early years experiences across a range of national contexts, including Australia, England and Estonia. They focus on children, parents and practitioners, on the how and why of encounters with digital technologies, the nature of digital play and questions about practice and practitioners.

Elyna Nevski and Andra Siibak make a welcome contribution to the literature on the digital experiences of children from birth to three years old and advance our understanding of the nuances of parents’ perspectives on and practices with very young children and smart technologies. The paper by Jackie Marsh and colleagues which follows is also concerned with children’s everyday experiences at home. Its focus is on the nature of digital play. Employing a particular framework to characterise play, this paper extends our knowledge about the play potential of the apps with which children interact and contributes to our thinking about the nature of digital play and its relationship with play with traditional resources.

Helen Knauf’s contribution moves us from digital encounters at home to integrating technology in a kindergarten class, exploring the opportunities for communication afforded by new technologies and the impact that these innovations in practice had for all participants in what she conceptualised as the social world of the setting. Knauf’s paper raises questions about the reciprocal relationships between the material and the personal and between digital communities and the experiences of young children. Lorna Arnott’s contribution employs a different conceptual framework to explore how children play with the digital technologies present in their educational setting. Adopting an ecological framework, Arnott demonstrates how it is necessary to take account of the affordances of technologies, the context of the playroom and the social behaviours of the children to understand their experience with digital technologies in the playroom.

Leif Marklund and Elza Dunkels report on an exploration of the discussions among practitioners about the ways in which digital play can develop children’s literacy. Their study extended the existing evidence on computer activity and literacy development to the use of tablets. They examined the impact that the practitioners’ perspective about their roles and responsibilities had on their practices and priorities for children’s digital activities and the ways in which they evaluated the digital tools at their disposal. Like Marklund and Dunkels, Ioanna Palaiologou is interested in the personal and professional digital practices of early years practitioners. Her work also demonstrates that the affordances of digital technologies and practitioners’ understandings of their role and appropriate practice can interact to create dissonance between the need to provide digital resources for learning and the desire to maintain a particular conception of play-based pedagogy.

The final paper in this special edition by Edwards and colleagues again relates to the early years educational setting but this contribution is concerned with the development of a tool which practitioners can employ to judge children’s current understandings of the internet and cyber-safety and to plan educative interventions. As they report on the development of this tool, the researchers discuss the value of a sociocultural theoretical framework to underpin their exploration of children’s thinking about the internet and the practices that they associate with Internet use. Here again we are offered glimpses of the gaps between the ways in which adults and children construe digital play and technologies.

Together these papers offer new understandings and point to theoretical insights but they also raise further questions and point to the need for more empirical work and conceptual endeavours if we are to go beyond the increasingly polarised and sterile debate ‘for or against’ children having opportunities for digital play and learning opportunities with digital technologies.

Christine Stephen
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK