Digital Technologies in Early Childhood Art: Enabling Playful Experiences

Description

Through art children make sense of their experiences and the world around them. Drawing, painting, collage and modelling are open-ended and playful processes through which children engage in physical exploration, aesthetic decision-making, identity construction and social understanding. As digital technologies become increasingly prevalent in the lives of young children, there is a pressing need to understand how digital technologies shape important experiences in early childhood, including early childhood art. Mona Sakr shows the need to consider how particular dimensions of the art-making process are changed by the use of digital technologies and what can be done by parents, practitioners and designers to enable children to adopt playful and creative practices in their interactions with digital technologies. Incorporating different theoretical perspectives, including social semiotics and posthumanism, and drawing on various research studies, this book highlights how children engage with different facets of art-making with digital technologies including: remix and mash-up; distributed ownership; imagined audiences and changed sensory and social interactions.

Mona Sakr is Lecturer in Education and Early Childhood at Middlesex University, UK.

Sakr's detailed case studies are not only thoroughly grounded in an appreciation of classroom practice and a knowledge of the academic literature but challenge both in ways that require reevaluation. * Paul Duncum, Professor of Art Education, University of Illinois Champaign, USA * Far more than just a how-to guide, Sakr provides a clear explanation of contemporary sociocultural and developmental theories, and then uses them to reveal children's digital art making in a whole new light. Her observational research shows how playful, creative, and interactive children can be when they engage with digital media. This book reveals the unexpected depth of sensory and social engagement that young children experience when they make digital art, and provides practitioners a lens for seeing what and how children are learning in the process. * Heather Malin, Director of Research, Stanford Center on Adolescence, Stanford University, USA * This makes for an interesting read. * International Journal of Education through Art *