Digital storymaking – a powerful pedagogic approach in the Swedish preschool class

• Children in Western society are frequent users of digital devices and Web resources and thereby encounter a textual landscape where symbolic systems, sounds, and images are woven together in new dynamic ways, which offer interactive possibilities for meaning-making (Burnett & Daniels, 2016; Chaudron et al., 2018; Neumann et al., 2017). Experiences with such texts contribute to position children as capable users and producers of new modal combinations (Erstad et al., 2019). Nordic research shows, however, when children enter formal education, they commonly meet a pedagogy that does not regularly build on these experiences but emphasises academic content and methods (for discussion about the Swedish preschool class1 see Ackesjö & Persson, 2019). Especially in literacy practices, conventional skills-oriented reading and writing instruction dominates (Hagtvet, 2017), regardless of the use of print or screen-based technology (Andersson & Sofkova Hashemi, 2016). Such teaching, which tends to reduce children’s opportunities to learn through experience-based interaction (Botö et al., 2018), is likely maintained by the political discourse that values measurable learning outcomes (Sefton-Green et al., 2016). The question is whether skills-oriented approaches are sustainable given the digitalisation of society, which places increasing demands on citizens’ literacy competences. Research indicates that teachers face challenges in meeting the curriculum standardisation and simultaneously providing children with opportunities to develop so-called twenty-first-century skills (Neumann et al., 2017; Oakley et al., 2018) suitable for participation in modern society, such as communicating, problem-solving, creativity, critical thinking, and digital literacies (Sefton-Green et al., 2016). A balanced pedagogy is needed, which in parallel to conventional literacy cultivates such skills. However, to date, there is limited research on how such pedagogy can be designed. In this chapter, we present a detailed analysis of storymaking activities embedded in a Swedish preschool class, where the teacher’s balanced approach enables the children to involve multiple uses of semiotic means and thereby displaying how digital storymaking can be powerful for supporting emergent literacy and twenty-first-century skills.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Pedagogik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Pedagogy (hsv//eng)

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