Arts-based methods

The mass availability of digital media in homes and educational sites across the globe has offered new possibilities for play, and for learning. Digital media appears in many of the spaces children inhabit, including formal learning spaces such as schools, kindergartens, day-care centres. Very young children learn basic skills such as reading, writing, music, drawing, numeracy and science concepts through digitally-based educational toys, they participate in digital media play and learning sessions, and young children learn coding through robotics tasks. For children who have access, digital media can come to form a large part of their daily activity, especially when schooling embeds digital media use in teaching and learning activities. This new vision of childhood is both exciting and terrifying, and full of possibility for researchers to assess the impacts and effects of children’s access and use of digital media in their everyday lives. The rapid change that digital media and technologies more broadly have brought to childrens' lives in a very short time, mean there is uncertainty about the many impacts this exposure may have and how they will emerge in the long term. Research into digital media in early childhood recognises that ‘digital technologies have a role to play in developing children’s identity as effective learners in the classroom’ (Flewitt et al. 2015, p. 305) however more research is needed to understand the impact digital media use is having on young children across their lives and learning. Children’s digital media use is a new and growing area of research, and researchers are keen to examine its use by young children in different contexts. Researchers are also keen to use innovative and creative methods and procedures for undertaking their investigations to allow for more nuanced data types, and more nuanced findings and outputs.  This chapter examines the potential of arts-based methods for researching the uses of digital media by young children. The chapter will assert the difference between research that looks at children’s digital art, and research that uses arts-based methods to investigate a wide range of topics. Recent research into children’s digital media use is initially discussed to highlight some of the main issues and phenomena researchers focus on, and the methods that are commonly used. This is followed by one articulation of how a research project might extend on the usual methods and employ arts-based methods in digital media research, and how arts-based research can produce useful and meaningful data that can be used singly, or in combination with other forms of data.