Young children in an education context : apps, cultural agency and expanding communicative repertoires

This chapter examines video recorded interactions of children’s engagement with touchscreens in an early education setting. The extracts are taken from an ethnographic research study that explored children’s expanding repertoires for meaning-making as these emerged throughout their first year of school. The episodes presented in this chapter draw on observations of children’s spontaneous interactions with and around two iPad apps. The findings reveal how children’s engagement with iPads has the potential to simultaneously confer children’s cultural agency and further expand children’s repertoires for meaning-making. The discussion provides nuanced interpretations of how touchscreens might contribute positively to young children’s early learning and play experiences.