Special issue Children under three at home: The place of digital media in their literacy practices

The journey that took us towards the topic of this special issue began with our involvement in the European COST Action The Digital Literacy and Multimodal Practices of Young Children (DigiLitEY 2015–2019), funded by the EU Commission under Horizon 2020 (see http://digilitey.eu/). This Action brought together scholars, early childhood practitioners, policymakers and the digital industry to question what ‘growing up immersed in digital devices and forms of communication … [means] for everyday life, for learning, for families and for the future’ (Sefton-Green et al., 2016). At the end of the Action, the Chair, Jackie Marsh (2020), summarised five challenges the network had tackled, but which remain rich fields for further research:

Exploration of the ubiquity of digital technologies in society, where even if some young children do not participate themselves they will still be in a technologically permeated environment and possess a digital footprint.

Working under this extensive umbrella, some of us began to focus our attention on an under-researched area of profound interest – the influence of digital media in the home on very young children’s early literacy. This was accomplished under the supportive framework of DigiLitEY’s Working Group 1: Digital Literacy in Homes and Communities, originally chaired by Kristiina Kumpulainen and Helle Strandgaard Jensen, subsequently by Kristiina Kumpulainen and Julia Gillen. Equally important were the activities of DigiLitEY’s Working Group 5: Methodologies, chaired by Rosie Flewitt and David Poveda. Inflecting research on young children’s authentic engagements with digital media at home with deep reflection on methodology and ethics has been a challenging and fruitful multidisciplinary and international endeavour. Members have sought to take their reflections and experiences into diverse fields beyond education. For example, Helena Sandberg, working with Ana Jorge, spearheaded an initiative to demonstrate to media and communication scholars the importance of participatory research methods with young children about their digital media use at home (Sandberg and Jorge, 2018).

Our call for contributions to this special issue on the place of digital media in the literacy practices of children aged under three years marked an important step on our journey – a place to pause for thought and survey the landscape of emerging research in this comparatively new field. We received many fine submissions and are very pleased with the final selection of papers that include the work of colleagues from the DigiLitEY network and beyond.

Our first paper, Porous boundaries: reconceptualising the home literacy environment as a digitally-networked space for 0-3-year olds, is by Rosie Flewitt and Alison Clark. The authors point out that the concept of the Home Literacy Environment requires rethinking in contemporary times. Digital media do not just pervade the home in evolutions of technological gadgets but also extend the space of the home through digital networks that enable the participation of physically distanced others in the social life of the immediate family. The mother of a one-year-old girl studied here describes the home environment as “low-tech”, yet both this little girl and the two-year-old boy reported on in a different family are shown to engage in a range of digitally-mediated activities that expand their digital literacy skills and enhance their relationships with immediate and extended family, as well as friends beyond the home. Imagination, inventiveness and affect shine through these children’s digital encounters, serving as a key challenge to pessimistic discourses of digital technologies as threatening to young children’s agentiveness, learning and safety.

Our second paper, Young children’s digital literacy practices in the sociocultural contexts of their homes, is by Kristiina Kumpulainen, Heidi Sairenen and Alexandra Nordström. As in the first paper, this empirical investigation also made use of the digital day in the life method (Gillen et al., 2019). Focusing on two case studies in Finland, the paper explores how digital technologies and media inform the daily lives of children in their homes, and how operational, cultural, critical and creative dimensions of children’s digital literacy practices are mediated in the sociocultural context of home. This paper is particularly lucid and helpful in describing its methods, embedded in an ethnographic sensibility. Findings illustrate the complex multimodality of the children’s digital literacy practices and how these are connected to the everyday rhythms and routines of the families. The paper also shows how ‘rules’ can be negotiated with very young children to promote safe use of media in ways that may be purposeful and yet allow plenty of space for openness to creativity. Finally, the paper points to the value for early childhood educators of learning more about young children’s digital media use in the home.

Our third paper, Space and practices: Engagement of children under 3 with tablets and TVs in homes in Spain, Sweden and England, is by David Poveda, Mitsuko Matsumoto, Ebba Sundin, Helena Sandberg, Cristina Aliagas and Julia Gillen. Here, the authors focus on the intimate geographies of young children's digital literacies at home and explore the tensions and contradictions in parental discourses around digital technologies. They draw on these two prisms and case studies in the three countries to understand how children engage with tablet devices and television at home. This paper draws attention to the richness, diversity and agency in young children’s practices and proposes the concept of living-room assemblage as an analytical metaphor to understand the macrohabitats of young children's multi-layered and creative digital literacies practices. The authors also reflect on the challenges encountered by parents as they navigate tensions and contradictions in their children’s digital media activities, which are embedded in everyday family life.

Our fourth paper, Negotiating screen time: A mother’s struggle of ‘no screentime’ with her infant son, is by Laura Teichart. This article is a US-based autoethnographic study of how digital media technologies are entangled in the everyday life in the home of the author during her son’s first 18 months of life. Teichart identifies a tension between cognitive and experimental research that leads to caution about the possible harmful effects of screen time on young children’s learning, informing the recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics 2016, and qualitative studies that have been more likely to embrace current realities of engagement and identify benefits in early childhood uses of digital technology. The autoethnographic and phenomenological approach of this study maps out in rich empirical detail the lived experiences, the challenges for a first-time parent to navigate between these points, balancing the societal norms and expectations on parenthood with the everyday realities.

Our final paper, Use of touchscreen technology by 0-3-year-old children: Parents’ practices and perspectives in Norway, Portugal and Japan, is by the international team of Maria Dardenou, Torstein Unstad, Rita Brito, Patricia Dias, Olga Fotakopoulou and Jane O’Connor. This paper focuses on parent reports of their young children’s use of touchscreen technologies, as generated through an online survey in Norway, Portugal and Japan. The authors report on parental accounts and perspectives in relation to wider cultural discourses around early childhood in the participant countries. There are important and coherent messages here regarding parental beliefs about the place of touchscreen technologies in children’s home lives, and a resounding appeal by parents for guidance regarding technology use, and better communication with early education and care centres.

Besides the high quality of the debates in the papers themselves, the contributions in this Special Issue will introduce readers to a lot of other salient research and ideas through their references. However, citations alone do not always convey all the sources of inspiration, some of them indirect, that beneficially affect a specific domain of scholarship. So, in addition to the works you will be (re)introduced to in this Special Issue, we take the opportunity to recommend the following institutions. We profoundly apologise for the brevity of this list and its absences; we have particularly decided to name here several sources of considerable influence on the COST network that we recommend to you.

Young Children (0-8) and Digital Technology – A qualitative study across Europe, Chaudron (2015); Chaudron et al. (2018).

The Digital Media Research Centre: http://www.digitisingearlychildhood.com/

EU Kids Online http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/research/research-projects/eu-kids-online

Global Kids Online http://globalkidsonline.net/

Finally, we recommend sources of information emanating from DigiLitEY:

The Routledge Handbook of Digital Literacies in Early Childhood (Erstad et al., 2020). This book, which is aimed at all researchers, early childhood educators and policymakers interested in young children’s digital and multimodal literacy practices, encompasses six areas:

Theoretical, methodological and ethical approaches in this research field;

There are freely accessible resources for academics, children’s media industry, parents, educators and policymakers on the DigiLitEY website http://digilitey.eu/. These include, amongst many resources: outcomes of the COST Action’s five Working Groups; an interactive Ethics Toolkit to guide research with young children (http://digilitey.eu/ethics/); a DigiLitEY ‘Methods Corner’ with a unique collection of audio and video podcasts on the latest research methods used to research young children’s digital literacy lives (https://digiliteymethodscorner.wordpress.com/); an extensive resource of publications and reports associated with the COST Action (http://digilitey.eu/publications/); and a policy brief written in cooperation with the Digital Childhoods SIG of the European Early Childhood Education Research Association (Gillen et al., 2018).