Facetiming common worlds: exchanging digital place stories and crafting pedagogical contact zones

ABSTRACT

Children, educators, and researchers at a child care center in Victoria, Canada and Melbourne, Australia have been collaborating on an early childhood education pedagogical inquiry project that grapples with children’s relations with place and technologies. Resisting narratives of environmental stewardship and instrumental digital education that dominate in the settler colonial contexts of contemporary Canadian and Australian early childhood education, this article shares stories, practices, questions, and tensions generated within the inquiry. After outlining how we think with Facetime on iPhone within a common worlds pedagogies framework, we detail two practices generated in the inquiry: (1) exchanging digital place stories and (2) crafting pedagogical contact zones with place and technologies. These practices, we argue, make visible how our collaboration reconfigures children’s relationships with place and technologies in consequential ways, and risks generating uneasy, unfamiliar, and tentative pedagogies that respond to messy entanglements within digital, more-than-human common worlds.

KEYWORDS:

• Common worlds
• early childhood education
• place stories
• lively stories
• pedagogical contact zone
• Facetime

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Catherine Hamm http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9357-8439

Notes

1 We use the language ‘we’ to refer to the children, families, researcher-educators, and researchers who participated in this research. As the authors of this article, we intentionally utilize ‘we’ to show how our inquiry questions and concerns emerge from collaborations between children, researchers, technologies, and more-than-human others. While there are multiple layers of pedagogical dialogue involved in our inquiry (amongst researchers, amongst researchers and children, amongst children), these conversations thread through one another as we shape our everyday inquiry practices together.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Association of Graduates in Early Childhood Studies.