"That's how much I can do!": Children's agency in digital tablet activities in a Swedish preschool environment

This study explores children’s agency in respect to the relations constituted between the participants’ interaction and the design affordances of digital tablets. The findings underscore the importance of taking into account how the participants’ interaction interplays with the affordances of the touch screen, the portability of the tablet, and the use of pictorial modes within applications, that in turn contributed to children’s agency within the digital tablet activities. The findings highlight both children’s agentive use of multimodally organized resources and how an understanding of children’s agency may be expanded, through the use of multimodal approaches including the Design for Learning framework.

"[T]he emerging affordances of the digital tablet and the different applications, as well as the teacher’s setting, [showed themselves] to be important factors in enabling or undermining children’s agency.... [T]he study shows how an understanding of children’s agency may be expanded, through the use of multimodal approaches, including the Design for Learning approach, by recognizing how children as designers make use of the affordances of the digital tablets as they act in new, embodied, material, and agentive ways." (Author, 155, 166)