”Digital dannelse i barnehagen. Barnehagebarns meningsskaping i arbeid med multimodal fortelling”.

The overall purpose of this study is to improve understanding of the digital skills of children at daycare centres ("barnehage"). What happens when children at daycare centres and early childhood educators together create a narrative that mixes different modalities such as words, images and sounds, otherwise known as multimodal products, on the basis of encounters with art. The study produces knowledge about how children create meaning in work to produce multimodal media products using digital technology. Moreover, the objective is to examine how interaction between children and early childhood educators, and the way they establish meaning in their encounter with, and production of, a digital cultural product (cultural expression), can help develop children’s digital skills.

Children create meaning in many situations in their interactions with early childhood educators. Children create meaning through categories which act as links between the individual child and the world, and thereby the child’s understanding of the world. Meaning-making implies “the world opens up for the child”, and “the child opens up for world”. In this context, pedagogical reflections are about how to make it easier for the child to develop categories that make it possible for the child to experience the world and act in it. The challenge for early childhood educators is to use digital technology in this meaning-making and thereby contribute to the child’s digital skills.

The study shows that when digital technology is used to produce various art products, the process also contributes to developing the child’s digital skills. This requires that early childhood educators recognise different forms of learning, e.g. the art, and thereby also the different linguistic expressions for learning.

The study also shows that art and art pedagogics can be an important entry to the use of technology in pedagogical practice, such as understanding media products and producing them. When children themselves create digital media products, they acquire experience with the digital technology in the creation process itself. This means that use of the technology becomes a tool and not a goal in itself. However, it is important that early childhood educators take part in the children’s interaction with the digital technology, because a space for reflection and meaning-making arises in this interaction, linked to shape, content and technology.

The study is a qualitative, ethnographic study with 15 participants from the same daycare centre: 13 children and two early childhood educators who work with these children. Data was collected through observation of participants, field notes, video footage, interviews/reflection conversations, and photographs. The analysis of the empirical material has a hermeneutic point of departure and a cultural-theoretical perspective. Theories applied in the dissertation are: socio-cultural theory, design for learning, multimodal theory and the theory of categorial learning

Letnes, M. (2014). ”Digital dannelse i barnehagen. Barnehagebarns meningsskaping i arbeid med multimodal fortelling”. Avhandling for graden philosophiae doktor, Trondheim: Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet (NTNU).