Toward a digitally mediated, transgenerational negotiation of verbal and non-verbal concepts in daycare

How to develop conceptual knowledge on digital media together with young and in particular daycare children? And why is this of relevance to child-oriented practice research more generally? Recent contextual developmental psychology as well as cultural-relational ethnographic work within New Childhood Studies emphasize the importance of following children’s everyday engagements in order to develop concepts and thus knowledge that helps with relating to children’s experiences and actions, among others with digital media technology, in more meaningful ways. Meanwhile, the question of how exactly an adult researcher’s research problem and her/his conceptual knowledge of the child-adult-digital media interaction are able to do justice to what the children actually intend to communicate about their experiences and actions, both verbally and non-verbally, by and large remains little explored. The conference presentation will suggest that, beyond understanding children as mere informants to a researcher’s problem and conceptual knowledge, problems and thereby also concepts could be collaboratively prototyped and developed together with young children as well as the adults they primarily conduct their everyday life together with. This collaborative prototyping process should explicitly draw on and integrate digital media technology present in both the daycare and the child-adult everyday life outside the daycare. It looks at CHAT’s most recent transformative developmental projects with young children and studies the researcher’s as well as digital media’s concrete role in this setup. Based on this analysis and an ethnographically inspired pilot study in a Danish daycare institution, it presents some first suggestions on how this child-adult-digital media collaborative process can be conceptualized and how it could be purposefully implemented in a daycare institution together with caregivers, parents and in particular the children.