Digital and multimodal childhoods: exploration of spaces and places from pedagogy and practice

Childhood has been changed by the accessibility of digital devices. Many children, especially in the wealthy world, are of a generation who have never known a life without digital technologies (e.g. Chaudron et al., 2015). Research demonstrates that children engage with technologies from birth in the home (O’Connor, 2017) and acquire appropriate skills to navigate new platforms by being immersed in the digital world. Consequently, children have evolved to transition between physical and virtual worlds fluidly (Marsh et al., 2016).

Children’s spaces and places for play and learning have similarly been transformed as innovative digital technologies provide mechanisms to bridge digital and non-digital worlds (Arnott et al., 2019; Fleer, 2019). Children’s play across their physical location, with artefacts and resources and during relational, social and cultural spaces shape the integration of technologies into early childhood pedagogy and daily life. The physical environment, the connected environment and the social culture are intertwined, and it is the dynamic interaction of new artefacts with cultural and pedagogical ways of being that result in a more holistic understanding of play experiences.