Digital literacy practices in children's everyday life.: Participating in on-screen and off-screen activities

This chapter focuses on young children’s use of digital technologies and on participation in situated digital literacy practices within and across activities and institutional settings. First, we present a review of research focusing on digital literacy as embedded in children’s everyday lives and on multimodal engagements with and around digital technologies together with peers, siblings and adults. Second, we explore three mundane activities involving different participant constellations, technologies and settings, using an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach in order to discuss theoretical challenges related to the idea that digital literacies are situated.

"EMCA [ethnomethodology and conversation analysis] is a promising approach to the study of situated literacy practices with the capacity of contributing with a theoretical and analytical focus on the interactional organization of everyday literacy activities and on how participants, as they build action in concert with each other, draw upon past experiences and the material environment (e.g. digital technologies), in ways that surpass the local contingencies of the situation at hand.... The detailed analyses show how children act on texts and how these ways of acting are related to and rely upon the children’s previous experiences and knowledge of digital technologies. As the children display familiarity with, and knowledge of how to handle the technologies (hardware and software) within the particular activities, we have demonstrated how knowledge and experience transgress the local and situated activity.... The literacy activities can be understood as multi-layered, where the activities are intertwined with institutional norms and rules that, for example, attribute ‘ownership’ and the right to decide how to use an iPad for a restricted time to one child at a time, or hold a child accountable for answering a teacher’s question in public and being able to develop an explanation for an answer.The multi-layeredness can also be seen in how situated actions are related to social practices ‘outside’ the situation at hand. By paying analytic attention to what the participants make relevant when solving a problem we are thus able to see how they relate to and use their social and material surroundings, such as mobilizing a parent’s email address in order to solve a problem at the afterschool centre. In short, it could be argued that the situated is multi-layered, which can be seen through the participants’ orientations to previous activities, other places and institutional norms and rules that influence the accomplishment of the digital literacy activity." (Authors, 387-388)