Digital media and aesthetical learning in day care education.

Digital media and aesthetical learning in day care education. The digital media is one of the major subjects that are to be included in everyday life in the Danish day care. This is a strategy from the Danish government, who view it as a necessary step in educating children for the future. In 2013 I conducted 6 interviews with pedagogs on their view on using I pads, in everyday life in day care institutions.
Several of the interviewed mentioned that children using I pads seemed to forget their surroundings, their body’s and got so involved and taken by the media that they forgot themselves while using the I pad. This corresponds with the Kelner research from 2009, where one of the major concerns involving using I pads in day care was “it is as if their mind is elsewhere and they have forgotten their bodies.” This paper will look into an approach of using digital media as an education tool from a aesthetic view wherein the digital media can be used as a resource for the child to learn about body awareness and better understanding and remembrance of their own subjectivity, while still gaining the knowledge education the Danish system demands. In this paper I will use an existential phenomenological approach. This approach seeks to educate the user of digital medias in having, what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger calls Sorge. Sorge in this
context means concern for the subjects self. It is comparable with what Deleuze call awareness of the body without organs. This approach means that the child should no longer be seen as a user with an ipad, but instead should the ipad while in use be seen as an extension of the users subject. The importance comes in how the pedagog helps the user not to lose awareness of the body while this takes place, but instead let the user experience both the body and the media as working in unity. The Norwegian philosopher Karin Martinsen calls this kind of aesthetical education “a mastership in seeing.” which will be futher unfolded in the paper.