YOUNG CHILDREN’S DIGITAL PLAY IN THE DAYCARE CENTER: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC CASE STUDY OF YOUNG KOREAN CHILDREN’S MEANING-MAKING
Open Access
- Author:
- Dong, Pool Ip
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- October 05, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Allison S. Henward, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
James E. Johnson, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Jacqueline J. Reid-Walsh, Committee Member
Christopher M. Schulte, Committee Member
Christine Marmé Thompson, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Digital play
Young children
Play
Digital technology
Ethnographic case study - Abstract:
- This ethnographic case study is about young Korean children’s meaning-making in digital play at a daycare center located in a middle-class South Korean community. Digital play refers to children’s play with digital devices and the complex sociocultural practices that take place around young children and digital technology; this study refers to the complex hybrid educational and sociocultural place of intra-actions between children, teachers, parents, digital technologies, non-digital materials, social discourse, and both local and global cultures. Drawing upon Actor Network Theory (Latour, 1996, 2005), poststructuralists’ theories, and Bakhtinian perspectives (Bakhtin 1981, 1990; Volosinov 1976), this study aims to better understand children’s play with digital devices. This includes the consideration of multiple, dynamic, and complicated views; their agency, subjectivity, and meaning-making; and their social cultures, tensions, concerns, social forces, and anxieties within the South Korean context. The participants in this ethnographic case study are 21 young Korean children (aged four to five years), two teachers, and the parents of a middle-class daycare center. I facilitated six digital play projects over four months. Using multiple ethnographic methods and multiple and flexible roles (including co-player, assistant teacher, and researcher), I observed how young Korean children intra-act with their peers, digital technology, time, place, social discourse, toys, and other materials and environments, and how children and their teachers formed different understandings of digital play in their everyday lives. My findings show that as a social site for young Korean children’s power negotiations, digital play was utilized by children to establish their power, social status, and sense of belonging in their peer cultures. Digital play also both directly and indirectly reflected larger social tensions among young Korean children and their teachers, which revealed South Korean’s neoliberalism, hyper-capitalism, and social and ECE discourses. Furthermore, as young Korean children’s iii iv creative and rhizomic learning places, their digital play process shows their creativity and knowledge construction. During their digital play projects, these young Korean children showed skillful interpretations of digital video texts and demonstrated multimodal literacies, technological skills, new knowledge, and embodied literacies. Further, children recreated new and emerging play with physical or imagined digital objects through the diverse assemblage of actants (e.g., peers, the playground, outdoor play times, and digital game experiences) around them. This finding can challenge certain pervasive ideological concerns (e.g., passive viewing and isolation) around young children’s use of digital technology in South Korean social and cultural contexts. This study argues that the unpredictability and innumerable possibility of digital play suggests a rich, layered, and in-depth complex understanding of young children’s digital play. In this sense, this study urges readers to recognize actants’ (including humans and nonhumans) entangled intra-active engagement in terms of place, time, social discourse, and the materials around digital play. As an important, complex, and hybridized educational, and cultural site for modern young Korean children, this study suggests listening to the voices, play styles, cultures, and meaning-creation that children express via their intra-active digital play. Through this, we are able to find novel possibilities for young children, learning, and digital play in the digital age.