Exploring enactments of the big screen and the small screen in a Norwegian early childhood education and care setting

Abstract

While much has been written about how to implement digital tools for learning and play in early childhood education and care, using a sociomaterial perspective this article seeks to explore what types of activities can be the outcome of appropriating different digital tools, and who or what defines these activities. Employing a sociomaterial perspective traditionally means a move from seeing the world merely as socially constructed to including the material artefacts in the construction of that world. However, herein there is a danger of overemphasizing what things do to humans and forgetting what humans do in the relationship. Through a sociomaterial lens, digital tools, children and adults all equally exist – but do they exist equally? In the case of digital tools in early childhood education and care, it is not merely a case of how digital tools are inscribed that defines what these activities may look like. Rather, it is necessary to account for how these activities are enacted by adults and/or children as free play or as part of a more institutionalized agenda, in addition to the objects themselves. Drawing on actor-network theory and using video ethnographic data from an early childhood education and care facility that has a strong information and communications technology profile, the focus is on how the digital tools, tablets and interactive whiteboards are enacted as different types of activities depending on the actors in the assemblage. Nuancing between different types of digital tools, as well as being sensitive to how both human and non-human actors influence an activity, can be useful for researchers and practitioners alike.