Children increasingly have access to digital technologies at home from a young age. Despite differing views on the affordances of technology use by young children, research has found that children aged two to six years of age are spending on average 25.9 hours a week using screen-based media, and just over a third of preschool aged children ‘own’ a smartphone or tablet device (Rhodes, 2017). Further research indicates that parents believe technology can be a useful tool for learning, although they generally equated learning with traditional subject areas relating to numeracy and literacy (Huber, Highfield, & Kaufman, 2018). While in education settings, technology is yet to reach a point of integrated ubiquity, the boundaries of digital and analogue are often blurred when it comes to technologies in the lives of children (Edwards, 2016).

This study is situated in the notion that children live in post digital times, where digital technology and media and the worlds they create are not separate, to but are rather part of, our everyday lives (Jandrić et al., 2018). The aim of this research is to investigate family perspectives on learning with digital technologies at home. The research question ‘What are parent/caregiver’s and children’s perspectives on learning with digital technologies at home?’ seeks to address the nuanced ways both parents/caregivers and children understand learning with digital technologies, and explore how perspectives within the same family may converge and diverge.

For this study's purposes, we will not define the terms learning or technologies for families. Instead, we will be led by parents/caregivers and children. As researchers, we recognise that our own understandings of learning and digital technologies may be different to the study's participants. We aim to explore families' understandings of these concepts, noting that this will likely look different between and among family members and families.

This research is founded in sociomaterial perspectives (e.g., Burnett & Merchant, 2020; Fenwick & Edwards, 2010). What kinds of perspectives on learning and how they are stabilised or disrupted in the home are of interest. The relationship between the ‘things’ within the home space and how these shape understandings of learning and digital technology is brought into focus, which as Fenwick and Edwards (2011) contend, can invite, exclude and/or regulate participation. ‘Things’ in the home can include people, technologies, space but also extends to things such as technology guidelines or recommendations.  

This paper focuses on the research design and methodology. Early findings from selected cases will be presented to highlight initial thinking and how this contributes to the international perspectives of learning at home with digital technologies.

A case study methodology will be utilised in this research project. Six studies of diverse families with at least one child aged 4-8 years will be conducted. The context of each case will be unique and will offer various insights into the research question. Parent/caregiver perspectives Semi-structured interviews and cultural probes will be conducted over two home visits. Parents/caregivers will determine the types of technologies we discuss and be asked to share their perspectives on what learning means and looks like in their home context. Cultural probes (Wyeth & Diercke, 2006) will be used as a design method to gather insights into cultural groups in an unobtrusive way (Gaver, Boucher, Pennington, & Walker, 2004). Cultural probes are useful tools in that they can be deployed without needing a researcher present, providing ownership to how participants represent themselves in a particular context, through a range of activities such as drawings, photos and storytelling. Children’s perspectives Two home visits will be conducted at times negotiated with families to observe the child/ren using digital technologies for learning. During Home Visit 1, researchers will observe children using digital technologies for learning. Images and detailed field notes will be taken. Alongside this, a short semi-structured interview will take place as children play or after, depending on the preference of the child. Researchers will ask questions about what kind of learning they are doing as they engage with digital technologies. Home Visit 2 will involve the child taking the researcher on a child-led ‘tour’ to show the researchers the type of technology they have in their home and explain how they use those technologies (Plowman & Stevenson, 2013; Scott, 2022). Data analysis The data will be analysed using a sociomaterial perspective (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010; Burnett & Merchant, 2010) to question how materials, both human and non-human, come together. For this study, we will consider how and why materials come together in intra-actions (Fenwick, 2015), intentionally or unintentionally, to consolidate or challenge common understandings of what it means to learn with digital technologies in the home. Each case study will be bounded and analysed separately although once all case studies have been collected, findings from across the cases will be synthesised to consider how materials in home settings produce particular notions around learning and digital technologies. As this is an ECR paper, we will share initial findings from the data analysis undertaken from one or two case studies.

Preliminary case study findings from one or two case studies will be presented at the conference. We expect to find different perspectives, both within families and across the cases, of what it means to learn at home with digital technologies. We expect perspectives among adults and children to converge and diverge at different times. Adults and children within the same family might have different understandings about learning and also about what constitutes digital technology. Examination of the data from sociomaterial perspectives will offer understandings of how materials in each case impact the perspectives of both caregivers and children. Additionally, we anticipate that there will be opportunities to examine the unexpected translations that occur as materials are used in unforeseen or disruptive ways. This examination will likely offer a range of findings, including a) how notions of learning and technology are stable between caregivers and children as the materials come into relation, b) how notions of learning and technology are disrupted by families and most interestingly, c) where within the same family, materials both stabilise and disrupt notions of learning and technology by different parties. For example, caregivers may have a set of apps children are allowed to use that are specifically for learning, but children only use the chat function to talk with their friends online. These findings will inform future research in this field.

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