Peer Pedagogies On Digital Platforms

How a popular entertainment genre on YouTube--Let's Play videos created by Minecraft players--offers opportunities for children to learn from their peers. Every day millions of children around the world watch video gameplay on YouTube in the form of a popular entertainment genre known as Let's Play videos. These videos, which present a player's gameplay and commentary, offer children opportunities for interaction and learning not available in traditional television viewing or solo video gameplay. In this book, Michael Dezuanni examines why Let's Play videos are so appealing to children, looking in particular at videos of Minecraft gameplay. He finds that a significant aspect of the popularity of these videos is the opportunity for knowledge and skill exchange.

Multiliteracies and Early Years Innovation: Perspectives from Finland and Beyond brings together internationally renowned scholars to investigate and reflect upon the significance of introducing multiliteracies in the education of children (0–8 years old) and the challenge of enhancing professional development opportunities of early years practitioners. The book brings together curriculum innovation and reform and the changing media ecology of young children's learning lives in a single volume. It provides insights into Finnish early years education in terms of policy, practice, and research with a specific focus on the enhancement of children’s multiliteracies. Case studies from around the world explore co-developing practices between researchers and teachers, the development of communities and the ways in which different classroom interventions draw on new kinds of teacher knowledge. This book will appeal to academics, researchers, and postgraduate students with an interest in early years education, literacy education, the sociology of digital culture, school reform, teacher education, and comparative education.

This book approaches English instruction through the lens of “fi gured worlds,” which recognizes and spotlights how students are actively engaged in constructing their own school, peer group, extracurricular, and community worlds. Teachers’ ability not only to engage with students’ experiences and interests in and outside of school but also to build connections between students’ worlds and their teaching is essential for promoting student agency, engagement, and meaningful learning. Beach and Caraballo provide an accessible framework for working with students to use critical discourse, narratives, media, genres, and more to support their identity development through addressing topics that are meaningful for them— their families, social issues, virtual worlds, and more. Through extensive activities and examples of students writing about their participation in these worlds, this text allows educators to recognize how students’ experiences in the classroom aff ect and shape their identities and to connect such an understanding to successful classroom practice. With chapters featuring eff ective instructional activities, this book is necessary reading for ELA methods courses and for all English teachers.

This book adds to the international research literature on contemporary Nordic childhoods in the context of fast-evolving technologies. It draws on the workshop program of the Nordic Research Network on Digital Childhoods funded by the Joint Committee for Nordic research councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS) during the years 2019–2021. Bringing together researchers from Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland, the book addresses pressing issues around children’s communication, learning and education in the digital age. The volume sheds light on cultural values, educational policies and conceptions of children and childhood, and child–media relationships inherent in Nordic societies. The book argues for the importance of understanding local cultures, values and communication practices that make up contemporary digital childhoods and extends current discourses on children’s screen time to bring in new insights about the nature of children’s digital engagement. This book will appeal to researchers, graduate students, educators and policy makers in the fields of childhood education, educational technology and communication. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a forceful reminder that education plays an important role in delivering not just academic learning, but also in supporting physical and emotional well-being. Balancing traditional “book learning” with broader social and personal development means new roles for schools and education more generally.

How children engage with technology at each stage of development, from toddler to twentysomething, and how they can best be supported. What happens to the little ones, the tweens, and the teenagers, when technology—ubiquitous in the world they inhabit—becomes a critical part of their lives? This timely book Technology's Child brings much-needed clarity to what we know about technology’s role in child development. Better yet, it provides guidance on how to use what we know to help children of all ages make the most of their digital experiences. From toddlers who are exploring their immediate environment to twentysomethings who are exploring their place in society, technology inevitably and profoundly affects their development. Drawing on her expertise in developmental science and design research, Katie Davis describes what happens when child development and technology design interact, and how this interaction is complicated by children’s individual characteristics and social and cultural contexts. Critically, she explains how a self-directed experience of technology—one initiated, sustained, and ended voluntarily—supports healthy child development, especially when it takes place within the context of community support. Children’s experiences with technology—their “screen time” and digital social relationships—have become an inescapable aspect of growing up. This book, for the first time, identifies the qualitative distinctions between different ages and stages of this engagement, and offers invaluable guidance for parents and teachers navigating the digital landscape, and for technology designers charting the way.

This book investigates young children’s everyday digital practices, embodied digital play, and digital media products – such as mobile applications, digital games, and software tools. The book provides a critical and collective perspective on the ways young children’s mobile media culture is currently being reshaped. The chapters draw on research that extends from the household to social media platforms and public spaces. Moving across these interconnected sites, this book explores how young children are currently configured as consumers, users, and subjects of mobile media technologies. These arrangements of media use are analysed through a conceptual lens of digital dexterity, which locates children’s capacities to use mobile media interfaces and digital products not simply in terms of physical skills or developmental capacities, but importantly, through the design and affordances of mobile technologies and touch-based interfaces, cultures of interactive play and digital parenting, and economies of digital platforms and technology product design.