Design-based research and digital childhoods in the early years

This seminar will examine the use of design-based research methods in collaboration with children and adult educators for understanding digital childhoods. The seminar will feature two presentations, one each from two PhD Candidates. An overview and introduction to the seminar will be provided by Professor Susan Edwards, Director of the Early Childhood Futures research program.

The first presentation explores how design-based research principles are currently being used to methodologically frame a PhD study that aims to inform adults about optimizing the developmental conditions for children who engage in online forms of play. Underpinned by the long-established qualitative research tradition of transcendental phenomenology, the methodology of this study draws on a flexibly structured design-based research model to guide the systematic implementation of child-centered, participatory research methods with children aged 8-12 years. The method is orientated towards gaining insight into young children’s motives for online sociodramatic play relative to adult conceptions of the value or otherwise of such play for young children.

The second presentation looks at participatory co-design as a methodological approach to exploring educator identified learning outcomes arising from tinkering with unplugged technologies in an ECEC setting. Guided by a post-qualitative philosophical worldview, inspired by posthumanism and by extension Actor-Network Theory this research aims to explore how young children’s experiences of the digital are interwoven and enmeshed in their everyday actions and interactions with both technologies and other material and non-material actants.