Journal of Early Childhood Literacy

Many museums have begun to integrate digital technologies as a way of providing opportunities for children to play, explore, and make meaning of artworks. However, little is known about the specific ways children interact with digital artworks in museum spaces. This paper presents findings from a study that explored young children’s interactions with digital artworks at the Beings by Universal Everything exhibition, held at ACMI (formerly known as the Australian Centre for the Moving Image) in Melbourne, Victoria. Data was collected from 22 Years one and two children, aged 6–8 years, from a primary school located in regional Victoria. Qualitative data were generated from video recordings of children’s verbal and non-verbal interactions as they engaged with the digital artworks, researcher observations, and focus groups with the children after the exhibition. Transcripts of children's interactions were deductively coded for pretend play abilities and play elements. Three main themes were identified in relation to the contexts in which the children interacted with the artworks: (1) as individuals, (2) with their peers about the artwork, and (3) as characters within the artwork. Findings showed the different play elements and pretend play abilities evident as the children interacted with the selected artworks. The findings highlight the unique ways to observe, document and analyse children’s interactions and meaning making as they participate in museum spaces, and adds insights into the growing body of research around the affordances of digital museum spaces in fostering children’s learning through play, particularly pretend play.

This article explores immersive learning experiences for young learners in a planetarium setting. These experiences open new learning possibilities and ignite children’s inquiry and imagination. The authors describe a naturalistic observational study that examines two immersive planetarium programs for young children. Data was collected as observational reflections that captured children’s interactions and questions. By analyzing reflections alongside our observations, insights were revealed about expansive literacy process associated with immersive learning. Implications surface the benefits and drawbacks of immersive learning experiences in planetariums and offer design considerations museum for programming specifically aimed at young children in all ages museums and science centers.

This paper shares an account of our wonderings, happenings, and learnings emerging from encounters between children, iPads, digital microscopes and found natural materials (and bugs!) in a series of workshops at a children’s museum. Our intention is to build on and disrupt established theories about children’s museums by thinking differently and creatively about new ways of seeing, knowing, and understanding children’s literate practices in these spaces. We have written before about children’s interactions as social practices where material (human and non-human), discursive, and spatial resources come together through physical and virtual interactions. Building on that work, we consider the complex interplay between the emerging identity of the place, the children’s engagement with the experiences, and the connections the children made through their play. The playgroups at this children’s museum have offered us new perspectives on and learnings about young children’s literate practices through digital experiences and the unique opportunities for playing, learning and connecting with technologies.

Using a feminist-new materialist lens, this paper attends to child-digital interactions in fostering Indigenous literacies, by focusing on the Quantum Sandbox exhibit in the Digital Immersion Lab at a Canadian children’s science museum. Analytically, this paper explores how a digital exhibit (Quantum Sandbox) creates a space for young learners to engage with both quantum science concepts and Indigenous worldviews through a combination of digital technologies, storytelling, and interactive play, emphasizing the entanglements of human and nonhuman agents in the co-creation of knowledge.

This manuscript examines how the Children’s Creativity Museum (CCM) in San Francisco supports the development of multimodal literacy and creative confidence through the Build the Change exhibit. Multimodal literacy emphasizes children’s ability to communicate across visual, spatial, tactile, oral, and digital modes, while creative confidence reflects dispositions of risk-taking, persistence, and valuing one’s ideas. The manuscript uses a vignette-based qualitative design to analyze children’s engagement during self-directed drop-in visits and structured field trips (N = 709 students across 30 visits). Data sources included archival artifacts, participation records, and educator interviews. Four illustrative vignettes show how CCM’s open-ended environment fosters multimodal expression and creative confidence through hands-on building, collaborative design, sustained focus, and cross-exhibit integration. Findings suggest that children’s museums uniquely support meaning-making and creative risk-taking by combining engaging spaces, manipulable materials, open-ended facilitation, and autonomy in movement and choice. Within its defined scope, this manuscript contributes to scholarship on how informal learning environments cultivate the skills and dispositions children need to navigate and shape their futures.

This study explores how mapmaking, as an arts-based and culturally responsive pedagogical practice, supports young children’s voice, agency, and identity construction within classroom and public gallery contexts. We focus on 22 children (ages 6–7) in the early years of primary school, situated within the early childhood education life phase, whose multimodal mapping activities culminated in a curated exhibition at The Rooms—Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincial art gallery. Data included video transcripts of children’s narrative map sharing, teacher interviews, and field observations. Using reflexive thematic analysis informed by sociomaterial and multimodal literacy frameworks, we found that children’s maps functioned as cultural texts, expressing personal geographies through images, spatial arrangement, gesture and narration. Public exhibition recontextualized these artifacts as civic texts, validating children’s knowledge and affirming cultural identities—particularly for newcomer families. This study contributes to early childhood literacies and public pedagogy scholarship, illustrating how gallery curation can foster cultural affirmation, relational pedagogy, and civic participation within early education.

This paper explores how museums can serve as transformative spaces for early childhood literacy, identity formation, and belonging, particularly for racialized immigrant children. Moving beyond print-centric definitions of literacy, it positions museums as multimodal environments where young learners engage with language, sound, image, and movement to make meaning. Drawing on a personal vignette of visiting the Royal Ontario Museum with my children, I illustrate how these encounters become acts of literacy, cultural affirmation, and identity negotiation. For children navigating multiple languages and cultures, museums offer spaces of imaginative play and embodied learning that resist deficit narratives and assimilationist expectations. Through a social justice lens, this paper frames museums as pedagogical counterspaces that center the cultural and linguistic assets of marginalized communities. It highlights the power of everyday museum interactions to support intergenerational connection, affirm cultural identities, and foster agency. By recognizing racialized immigrant children as active meaning-makers and co-creators of knowledge, museums can evolve into relational spaces that reflect and respond to the diverse communities they serve. This work calls for a reimagining of early childhood literacy education, one that honors the lived experiences, cultural wealth, and epistemologies of racialized immigrant families.

Children’s museums are delightful, whimsical, and joyful places, but they are undertheorized. This limits our capacity to fully leverage children’s museums as spaces for expansive visions of literacy learning. It also limits our examination of the potential harms enacted by children’s museums. To theorize the children’s museum, I take Ash’s framework for reculturing museums as a starting point. Using Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) plus critiques of neoliberalism and deficit logics, I argue that children’s museums are complex activity systems that aim to negotiate the literacy-related objectives of families, schools, and other sites of learning. Neoliberal ideologies and deficit logics inform these negotiations. I analyze two contradictions: (1) between the mediational means of play and the objective of learning, and (2) between the rules/norms of children’s museums and the diverse communities they serve. To close, I reflect on potential pathways for reculturing children’s museums toward more justice-oriented practices.

As digital transformation reshapes early childhood education, Science Discovery Children’s Museums (SDCMs) emerge as uniquely positioned spaces to foster rich, multimodal learning environments that extend early literacy learning beyond the museum walls through family engagement. This paper presents a case study of an 8-week transmedia program co-designed with an Australian SDCM to foster young children’s multimodal literacy development through STEM-based family interactions across physical and digital contexts. The entry-level transmedia approach layered curated digital content and home-based activities onto an existing STEM exhibition, combining online activities, hands-on problem-solving, and museum visits. A total of 76 families, including 85 children aged five to nine, participated. Data sources included individual semi-structured interviews with 20 children and 16 adults from 15 families, along with 12 SDCM staff involved in program development and implementation, as well as digital platform analytics and social media interactions. Four narrative vignettes illustrate outcomes. Through analysis, themes were constructed to illustrate how children applied literacy practices across modalities such as gesture, image, text, speech, and material exploration, supported by parental scaffolding and collaborative reflection. The program fostered multimodal literacy development, intergenerational learning, and sustained engagement through STEM contexts. Framed within a multimodal view of literacy, computational thinking was conceptualised as a literacy practice involving the purposeful use of symbolic systems to make meaning, solve problems, communicate ideas, and construct knowledge. Children demonstrated computational thinking as a literacy practice through decomposition, pattern recognition, and algorithmic reasoning while developing scientific identities through playful inquiry. Parents became co-learners, creating reciprocal exchanges that strengthened family connections. Findings position SDCMs as transformative early childhood literacy learning environments and offer practical strategies for equitable, accessible digital engagement. This study contributes to understanding literacy as a socially situated, multimodal practice and provides a replicable, resource-efficient approach for cultural institutions seeking to extend multimodal literacy learning beyond physical boundaries.

This paper describes a research collaboration with Humber Museums Partnership, which explored family museum visiting and early language. Drawing from ethnographic observations and continuous audio recordings, this article examines how very young children make sense in museum spaces. We activate Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the refrain (originally expressed in French as ritournelle, a little return) to analyse vignettes of children’s vocalisations and interactions across galleries, gardens, and play spaces. Counter to the dominant view of early language as relying on a linear “serve and return” between adult and child, we argue that refrains create fragile, rhythmic, and emplaced territories of sense making that exceed conventional meaning and representation. We propose that museums can foster an attention to these affective, embodied dimensions of expression as an important aspect of young children’s museum literacies.