In a Swedish municipality a preschool development project was started up in autumn 2015. The aim was to expand the preschool teachers´ and the children´s digital literacy. Six preschools with children in the ages of four to six years old, attended the project. A media-pedagogue and filmmaker, Sara, was engaged during the autumn 2015 with the mission to educate and inspire the preschool teachers to work with cameras, iPads and computers in preschool every-day work.

The school board managed to arrange a co-operation with The Swedish Film Institute and Karlstad University and thereby I was engaged to do the research, a pilot study, at two of the attending preschools.

The aim of the pilot study was to explore if, and in that case in what way, the design for learning and the orchestration of the learning settings and learning situations changed in the preschool during the implementation phase of the project.

Background

The technological changes in the 21^st Century have had a significant impact on young people´s lives. Erstad (2011) states that this first generation born into a world of Internet, cell phones, and iPads- now are pupils in preschools and schools. Kress (2003) describes how anyone who does not possess digital literacy, that is, the communicative, ethic and technological competences linked to digital devices, runs the risk of impending social exclusion. Digital divides can be linked to factors such as gender, ethnicity, class, generation, and geographical localization, but also to dichotomies in the possibilities of learning in a digitalized milieu (Buckingham 2009; Drotner & Livingstone, 2008; Tapscott 1998). These conditions do not only lead to discussions about tools and resources, but will challenge critical thinking about the texts that shape identity, culture and life (Johnson, Levine & Smith, 2009). In terms of education, it is important to study how the implementation of both thinking and acting in relation to issues of digital literacy is managed in preschoolers´ daily lives (Erstad 2011).

Theoretical perspective

Design for learning could be described as the design of teaching and learning processes (Andreasen 2008; Selander 2007). Designs for learning include several actors, which allow teachers as well as children to be designers (Gynther 2010). The design can in this perspective become a resource for a creative and productive learning (Dreier, 2003; Edwards & Mackenzie, 2005). ”…the design of social practices in which learners, teachers and (social and material) resources are configured and re-configured in activities that make knowledge domains and knowledge advancement visible” (Lund & Hauge, p. 264, 2011).

Research performed from a design theoretical perspective shows that the teachers´ designs for learning create the institutional settings and the possibilities and the conditions for the children’s´ learning (Jewitt 2009). From this perspective the teacher and the child are agents, or didactic designers, according to researchers as Meyer (2011), Holm Sörensen and Audon and Levinsen (2010).

Research question

In what way becomes the design for learning in the preschool an affordance, a challenge or a hindrance for the children’s development of digital literacy?

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