DigiLitEY summer school 2017 : collaborative/participatory methodologies and the digital practices of young children

Abstract

This Summer School was organized under the DigiLitEY Cost Action (http://digilitey.eu/) and, continuing the work of the first summer school celebrated in 2016, focused on exploring the place of collaborative and participatory methodologies in the study of the digital literacies and multimodal practices of young children. The 2017 Summer School took place between 11-13th June 2017 in La Cristalera (www.lacristalera.com) a residential research facility run by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) in the mountain outskirts of Madrid and was coorganized by Spanish members of the COST Action and the UAM research group "Infancia Contemporanea" (www.infanciacontemporanea.com). The 2017 DigiLitEY training event was aimed at postgraduate students and emergent researchers who are interested in understanding children’s digital practices through participatory/qualitative/ethnographic research and hoped to help participants develop further their understanding of how to design/carry out feasible and ethically grounded research with young children around their digital literacies, practices and experiences. The Summer School also was an opportunity for the COST Action, particularly in connection to the interests of WG5 (focused on research methods and ethics) to take stock of emergent methodological and ethical concerns among researchers and professionals working with young children and digital technologies. The organization of the summer school in a residential facility allowed for many moments of informal discussion among all participants and we hope was a first step in an emergent network among a heterogeneous group of early career researchers in Europe. The summer school placed special emphasis on hands-on and interactive sessions (which we call "Workshops") around particular research themes. The event was structured around three workshops in which trainees had to take a leading role in developing and presenting ideas and solutions to the problems posed by the workshop coordinators. Our work format fostered peer-collaboration, oral and visual thinking as key tools for the generation of collective knowledge. The summer school included two keynote talks which helped frame the workshops, given by Kim Kullman (The Open University) and Rosie Flewitt (Institute of Education, UCL), a roundtable session with professionals and practitioners working on digital media and childhood, an interactive role-playing activity and a field-visit to MediaLab Prado in downtown Madrid. In addition, the summer school materials and conversations were expanded via digital media through an on-line course course created by the summer school organizers in the on-line learning platform Perusall, a Facebook group created by trainees, a Twitter timeline around the hashtag #digiliteyst2017 and collaborative documents created by participants in the summer school. This first report is a summary of the development of the three workshops collaboratively written by the sixteen trainees who completed the summer school and the four trainers in charge of the design and coordination of the workshops.