Turn-taking and sense making: children and professionals co-producing and revisiting multimodal books during transition from day-care to school

This study contributes to current research on technological tools in early childhood education. The activities studied were part of a larger, socioculturally informed and design-based study conducted by the researcher in collaboration with professionals and children in Denmark. Activities are examined where children and professionals use tablets and interactive whiteboards for co-producing and dialogically revisiting multimodal books during transition from day-care to school. Findings show how children, professionals, hardware, software, and institutional practices co-constitute a turn-taking infrastructure that shapes activities. Children are thus allocated rights and obligations to contribute sequentially with photos, audios, and texts to single pages in the common books. In addition, they are attributed ownership to the multimodal records they produced. Through examination of activities over time, the study traces children's sense making of multimodal records as trajectories across time and contexts. It is shown how the joint activities rely on participants' initiation and maintenance of shared understanding, accomplished partly through turn-taking procedures, partly through utterances of sense making. It is discussed how a dynamic tension, sometimes a contradiction, between sequential structure and multi-voiced sense making unfolds dialectically. This points to insights regarding technological tools mediating young children's communicative agency within early childhood educational settings.