Secret Lives of Children in the Digital Age : Disruptive Devices and Resourceful Learners

Secret Lives of Children in the Digital Age: Disruptive Devices and Resourceful Learners offers an examination of the impact on children, their families and their teachers, as digital technologies and new literacy practices have rapidly transformed how children learn, play and communicate. While ease of access to enormous knowledge bases presents many benefits and advantages, mobile screen technologies are often perceived by parents and teachers as disruptive and worrisome. Developed from a wide range of the authors’ research over the past decade to an examination of remote learning during the COVID 19 pandemic, this book posits that while teachers, parents and governments are focused on protecting children, what is often neglected is children’s own agency and capacity to engage with mobile technologies in ways that support them in pursuing their own interests, pleasures and learning. This text works to disrupt boundaries in research, policy and practice, between home and school, and across virtual and actual worlds, positioning children as both users of media texts and coproducers of digitally mediated knowledge, with peers, family and teachers.

Secret Lives of Children in the Digital Age brings together over a decade of shared research, conversations, writing and friendships across diverse geographies. Over the past decade, digital technologies have rapidly transformed how children learn, play and communicate. Tablet devices such as iPads are now ubiquitous in the lives of many children. Such devices are easy to use and provide multimodal options (i.e. operable via touch, speech, and icons, as well as conventional text). Users do not need to be conventionally literate to have access to powerful search engines, social media platforms, a range of ‘apps’ and games, or to be able to share their own creations on publication venues such as YouTube, TikTok and more. While such ease of access can present many benefits and advantages when positioned in relation to children’s use, but this access is not without concern, since mobile screen technologies are often perceived by parents and teachers as disruptive and worrisome, with popular media ramping up fears via publication of sensational articles.

Secret Lives of Children in the Digital Age contributes to research on digital literacies, and offers a pedagogical examination of digital possibilities for bringing playfulness and innovation into learning.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Literacy Research | Qualitative Research Methods | Early Literacy | Research Methods in Language and Literacy | Introduction to Qualitative Research | New and Digital Literacies | Digital Media Education | Theories of Language and Literacy

Linda Laidlaw is a Professor working in the area of early literacy in Language and Literacy Education at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Alberta. She teaches courses at the graduate and undergraduate level in early literacy, drama education, writing, literacy for the elementary years, and research methods. Formerly a classroom teacher, her research focuses on digital and mobile technologies in primary education, diversity, and the relationships between children’s digital practices at home and their experiences at school. Her research takes up case study, auto-ethnographic and microethnographic methods and is informed by complexity thinking and frames from literacy theory. Her latest projects are two international collaborative studies: Reimagining Literacy Education: Being Literate in the Twenty First Century, which aims to develop new frames and strategies for literacy education in a changing world; and Making Literacy Through Maker Literacies: Building Learning Opportunities in Early Childhood, which investigates ‘making’ strategies and pedagogical frames through working with teachers, parents and children.

Joanne O’Mara is an Associate Professor of Language and Literature Education and Chair of English teaching method at Deakin University. An experienced secondary English and Drama teacher, she has continued to work with young people and schools through her university research. She particularly values the opportunity to work with students to develop their confidence and self-belief. She considers herself extremely lucky to have the opportunity to work with wonderful colleagues on a series of projects that are valuable. This research includes reading for pleasure, literacies and new textual practices; digital play and games; literacy pedagogies and gratitude and secondary English and drama pedagogy.

Suzanna So Har Wong has two primary research areas. One is understanding young children’s home digital literacy practices. The other is the connections between literacy learning and makerspaces in elementary classrooms. In addition, she is interested in studying children’s engagement with critical literacy, equity, and social justice in- and out-of-school settings. She has worked with researchers in Canada, Australia and United Kingdom during her Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta from 2017 to 2019. Currently, she is an adjunct professor and assistant lecturer in Elementary Education, Language and Literacy, at the University of Alberta.