Percolating spaces: Creative ways of using digital technologies to connect young children's school and home lives

• Published in: British journal of educational technology Vol. 49; no. 5; pp. 834 - 846
• Main Authors: Gillen, Julia, Kucirkova, Natalia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Coventry Wiley-Blackwell 01-09-2018; Blackwell Publishing Ltd
• Subjects: Children; Children & youth; Cooperation; Data acquisition; Educational Technology; Entanglement; Family Environment; Family School Relationship; Learning; Multimedia; Multimedia Instruction; Parents; Percolation; School Policy; Teaching Methods; Technology Integration; Technology Uses in Education; Young Children
• ISSN: 0007-1013; 1467-8535
• DOI: 10.1111/bjet.12666

Contemporary research suggests there are many missed opportunities for home and school to work together to define and promote effective practices with digital technologies, especially in early years. This study outlines ways in which one Early Years classroom creatively promoted bidirectional connections between children's learning with technologies at home and in school. Nested in a posthumanist perspective on space and classroomness (Burnett, 2014), the study illuminates the complex spatial entanglement among home, school and technologies in the form of enhanced vignettes. As a space‐based interpretive case study that emerged from a larger project, the data collection methods revolved around a set of two visits by each researcher, one year apart, plus analyses of school documentation and online interactions. We integrate diverse data sources to argue that innovative, multimodal practices of teaching, learning and assessment can be designed and implemented imaginatively, deploying a range of digital technologies to connect with children's and parents' home lives. Use of multimedia affordances of technologies, attention to children's physical and material interactions with resources and strategic school policy made it possible for influences to percolate between home and school, to the enhancement of children's learning in the moment.