Abstract
Isabel Froés’ book Young children's play practices with digital tablets focuses on children's digital practices in the digital era by paying particular attention to children's positionality, agency, and experience. How children and young people navigate an increasingly digital world is an essential but understudied topic across the world. Furthermore, much of the research on children's and young people's relationships with the media and, specifically, digital media rarely take a child- or youth-centered approach. A child-centered approach is based on the new sociology of childhood research tradition that invites young participants to be active participants in research with autonomy and agency.
The book charts how “young children defy and discover digital universes through their magic wands” (p. xv), or the various ways in which the notion of play intersects, collides, and cooperates with children's digital competencies at school, at home, and other spaces. The book opens with a critical chapter focusing on tracing the progression of communication devices since the turn of the industrial revolution—from typewriters to tablets. Although tablets and mobile media have received growing research attention, less inquiry has aimed at understanding how children's use of tablets opens up the opportunity for learning, play, and literacy. This bold monograph by Froés, an early career scholar, fills this crucial gap. Its staunch devotion to unearthing the role of digital play in young children's educational and everyday lives is reflected in a well-structured ethnography on pre-schoolers in Denmark and Japan aged four to six that is geared towards redefining digital literacy.
The study employed a bricolage of ethnographic methods such as observation, informal conversations, participatory action research, visualization, and structured play. Froés demonstrates a high degree of mindfulness as she reflects on, discusses, and presents the ethical and methodological processes involving children in her work. She has also skillfully woven in and adapted from diverse theoretical frames—for example, digital literacies, play literacy, digital anthropology, media literacy, and visual literacy—to enrich the analysis.
This work's theoretical contribution revolves around the proposition of two main concepts—“digital penmanship” and “multimodal hyper-intertextuality.” The former is defined as the tactile skill and knowledge which emerges and develops through interactions with touch-sensitive digital devices. The latter refers to the wide array of media and modes of use constituting the play experience with digital devices. Together, digital penmanship and multimodal hyper-intertextuality give rise to the overarching concept of “playful literacy.” This stance views children not just as consumers of digital media, but also as producers of content, data, and knowledge as digital players in the course of their development. Froés' book has positioned itself among a growing archive of empirical research on children and young people's digital worlds which gives credence to Bailur et al.'s (2015) description of young people as “digital repertoires,” or active participants in their own digital lives with voices and viewpoints that truly matter. That being said, perhaps the author could have discussed in more detail other forms of technology that the studied children use besides tablets. Also overlooked are the parents’ and instructors’ perspectives as key socialization agents for the children's interaction with mobile media. Notwithstanding these shortcomings, this book makes a strong case for just how tablets are fulfilling a symbolic and cultural purpose as a “negotiated third space” (pp. 33, 92), thereby enabling children's embodied, discursive, and communicative abilities to imagine and create.