Young Children’s Playful Media Literacy in the 21st Century

Beskrivelse

The paper will show what playful media literacy looks like from a children’s perspective. The overall question is: How can play research contribute to an understanding of young children’s media literacy when the field of research is young children’s play with digital media? Young children’s playful media literacy must be understood in a children’s perspective because we must insist on taking children’s media rich everyday lives and media use as a starting point for the educational work with media literacy. Therefor a rich and broad understanding of play is useful to frame young children’s media literacy. The investigation is based on an ethnographic fieldwork, where children´s perspectives on media literacy is in the center of the research design. Inspired by a phenomelogical approach interviews based on previous observations of is the key method (Corsaro, 2003; Gulløv & Højlund, 2006; Gulløv & Skreland, 2016; Kampmann & Børnerådet, 1998; Winther, 2016). The interviews have been carried out with a specific focus on children’s play with digital media and is organized according to the basic trichotomy of media literacy: access, understanding and a creative expressive productive level (Carlsson, 2013; Drotner & Erstad, 2012; Erstad & Amdam, 2013). The ethnographic fieldwork is carried out on a Danish public school among 75 pre-school children in 2014/15. The paper is situated in the field of childhood studies and Nordic studies of child culture (Corsaro, 1997; James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998; Juncker, 1998, 2013; Mouritsen, 2002; Toft & Knudsen, 2016a, 2016b). Play is conceptualized as valuable in it itself (Bogost, 2016; Huizinga, 1963 [1938]; Jessen, 2008; Karoff, 2013; Skovbjerg, 2017; Sutton-Smith, 1997; Øksnes & Sundsdal, 2014), and the approach to media literacy is there for grounded on sociocultural studies (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Burnett, Merchant, Pahl, & Rowsell, 2014; Erstad, 2013, 2015; Jenkins, 2009; Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). The main contribution of the paper is to underline the importance of the relation between media use and playful practices. While acknowledging that relation the paper shed light on how children perceive ‘access’ to digital media, how they grasp the representation/reality level and how the creative, expressive and productive level of media literacy is carried out in a playful manner. As a result, perceiving media literacy as a play practice takes its starting point in the child’s perspective and points at a need to create elbowroom (spielraum), where digital media is both direct and indirectly present in children’s everyday school life.

Periode	7 mar. 2019 → 8 mar. 2019
Begivenhedstitel	Reconceptualising Early Childhood Literacies: An International Conference
Begivenhedstype	Konference
Placering	Manchester, StorbritannienVis på kort
Grad af anerkendelse	International