Young Children’s Play Practices with Digital Tablets

Playful Literacy

Isabel Fróes

Emerald

This book can be opened with

Paperback / softback

9781787567061

29 July 2019

£20.99

eBook (PDF)

9781787567054

29 July 2019

£0.00

Open Access

eBook (ePub)

9781787567078

29 July 2019

£0.00

Open Access

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Description
Contents
Reviews
About
Open Access

The ebook version of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and is freely available to read online.

This book presents how young children's current practices when playing with tablets inform digital experiences in Denmark and Japan. Through an interdisciplinary lens and a grounded theory approach, Fróes identifies and maps these practices, which compose the taxonomy of tablet play and proposes a series of theoretical concepts that complement recent theories related to play and digital literacy studies.

Tablet devices bring with them not only a multitude of options, but they also help create notions of digital space and environments defining emerging territories in young children's play experiences. Young children play with these devices and have fun indulging in digital worlds, while discovering and problem-solving with a variety of narratives and interfaces encountered on these digital playgrounds. A set of tablet play characteristics, such as multimodal applications (apps) combined with tablets' physical and digital affordances shape children's digital play.

The data collected through observations informed some noteworthy aspects, including how children's hands gain and perform an embodied knowledge of digital spaces. This embodied knowledge develops through digital play interactions, defining what is proposed as digital penmanship. Complementary to the penmanship, several symbols and a range of modes of use shape a rich multimodal semiotic vocabulary in children's digital play experiences. These early digital experiences set the rules for the playgrounds and assert digital tablets as twenty-first-century toys, shaping young children's playful literacy.

Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. Play, Leg and Asobu: How the Concept of Play is Defined in Danish and Japanese Contexts Chapter 3. Literacies, Play and Experience: The Need to Bridge Distinct Disciplines Chapter 4. Making Sense of Play: Transforming Actions into Words Chapter 5. The Digital Play Experience Taxonomy: Mapping and Categorising the Digital Play Experience Chapter 6. Penmanship and Hyper-Intertextuality Shaping Playful Literacy Chapter 7. Conclusion

The author examines young children's play practices with digital tablets, focusing on tablet play among 84 preschoolers and how it redefines concepts of digital literacy practices in Denmark and Japan. She discusses cultural characteristics of play in these countries; aspects of play, disciplines for researching children and emerging technologies, and theories on digital literacy and play; a taxonomy for understanding tablet play, focusing on vocabulary, design, play, interaction, and attachment; and the concepts of digital penmanship, multimodal hyper-intertextuality, and playful literacy.
- Copyright 2019

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.
- Chikezie E. Uzuegbunam Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town, South Africa

Isabel Fróes is a Postdoc at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.