We build on a Danish/Nordic tradition of children's culture by asking what children's concrete engagements with digital technologies call for today. This applies both within and across arenas such as schools, leisure institutions, informal learning environments, and in the leisure life that unfolds outside institutional contexts.
What attention from teachers, educators, parents, opinion leaders, decision-makers, and legislators do children's lived and experienced engagements with digital technologies call for?
We ask how children concretely appropriate digital technologies in different contexts, under what conditions this appropriation unfolds, and whether or how children themselves experience being able to master the technologies. Through this, we aim to nuance understandings of digital technologies in children's lives, both in the pedagogical debate and in the broader societal debate.
Naughty Technologies
Our mission is to bring children's voices into play, and we will take an activist approach. Child power is a starting point we take seriously, and we want to counter the tendency to talk about children's practices with digital technologies by instead focusing on talking with the children. We will give them the microphone and, together with them, explore how technologies can be used to gain even more power.
This could involve projects like "how to train your algorithm" or "how to get the chatbot to do your homework." Projects driven by demand from children, where play – especially risky play – is brought into play. Digital technologies, platforms, and the internet are often portrayed as very risky places.
We hypothesize that activist or risky play with digital technologies can lead to greater awareness of the underlying mechanisms. About the nature of algorithms. About surveillance, platformization, and datafication. Perhaps it can even lead to an interest in encrypted messaging services or fediverses among children? If we genuinely seek children's perspectives on the technologies they are often warned against, they might themselves figure out why and how to avoid or use them with care and reflection.
Well-behaved Technologies
Just as we focus on children's risky play with technologies and their perspectives and meaning-making in relation to this, we are also interested in the technologies that children are directed to use in school and other contexts in their daily lives. We focus on the social situations where learning, communication, and assessment technologies are involved. And we ask about the conditions for children to master these technologies here – and to master the world through these technologies. Here, too, we orient ourselves towards children's perspectives and engagements, trying to see with the children. This also means that we are interested in the relationship between intended institutional technology use and children's actualized technology use, including the purposes that technology use serves for the actors, including the children. Here, too, we take an activist approach and explore the possibilities of institutional technology use in relation to children's empowerment.
Power
We work with an inductive approach to power. Child power signals an empirical standpoint that refers to research curiosity about concrete children's actions in the world. We want to see with the children – to follow concrete children's perspectives and action possibilities in relation to the digital. But we are also aware of the diversity of power positions and powerful actors in situated practices. What conditions do children have to be empowered in different contexts and agency constellations? And is child power in school a matter of reciprocity rather than unilateral dominance in the relationship between children, technologies, and professionals? We will investigate this in concrete situations where children's initiatives, wonder, and logics are highlighted in the analysis.
Focus Area Leaders
- Associate Professor, Thomas Enemark Lundtofte, SDU
- Senior Lecturer, Ane Bjerre Odgaard, UC SYD
Participants
- PhD Student, Lucas Cone, Aarhus University
- Associate Professor, Stine Liv Johansen, Aarhus University
- Senior Lecturer, Helle Hovgaard Jørgensen, UCL