Early childhood and smartphone. Family interaction order, learning processes and cooperation

B05 - Early childhood and smartphone. Family interaction order, learning processes and cooperation

Principal Investigators:

Prof. Dr. Jutta Wiesemann

Researchers:

Bina Elisabeth Mohn (PhD)

Pip Hare (MA)

Astrid Vogelpohl (Diplom cultural education)

Student Assistants:

Valentino D'Aloia

Former Researchers:

Clemens Eisenmann (PhD)

Inka Fürtig (Dipl.-Soz.)

Jochen Lange (Junior Prof. Dr.)

Our ongoing research is a long-term study in which we continue to work with our observations from the first phase (2016 – 2019).

What characterises childhood in the age of digital media? Since our project’s launch in 2016, we have been observing how infants and (young) children are involved in their families’ everyday media practices. Our objective is to identify and make visible transformations in everyday life and in children’s early learning processes. The observations we have made so far suggest that today’s children, together with their parents, are establishing new ways of appropriating their worlds. Our project focuses on children’s digitally enacted practices in order to empirically study the forms of learning that they entail. We are developing a performative concept of learning that facilitates analysis of how everyday practices involving media are changing.

We study digital media practices in families by means of the digital research practices of camera ethnography (Mohn): ethnographic showing. This includes further development of a self-reflexive concept of co-operation (Goodwin) in research, as well as the application of Wittgenstein’s notion of “perspicuous representation” (übersichtliche Darstellung) in creating arrangements of video fragments, which are digitally linked in open net-like structures. In the course of the second phase, we will undertake four cyclical research phases with fieldwork in diverse family settings. We produce audio-visual miniatures that make practices observable as “bundles of practices and material arrangements” (Schatzki). These miniatures then become the building blocks of micro-analyses and arrangements that structure research material showing media practices as learning. We invite diverse audiences into “looking laboratories” (Blicklaboratorien), bringing together research and public discourse.

Current Publications

P. Hare, B. E. Mohn, A. Vogelpohl, J. Wiesemann
Face to Face - Face to Screen
Early Childhood and Media. 24 camera ethnographic miniatures
Series: Camera Ethnography
Bd. 1, 2019, 88 S., 29.90 EUR, 29.90 CHF, gb., ISBN 978-3-643-14299-3

With 24 short films, this catalogue and accompanying DVD offers insights into the fundamental ways that media practices in early childhood shape the development of self- and family identity and of children's relationships to people, objects, and their surroundings. The filmic miniatures and concise texts result from camera ethnographic observation and thick depiction undertaken by the authors in 14 families of different nationalities since 2016 as part of the collaborative research centre Media of Cooperation (University of Siegen). Viewers are invited to research for themselves the films that are grouped into four chapters.

Exhibition „Das bist du!“ Early childhood digital

Results from the camera ethnography were digitally shown publicly in the form of the exhibition „Das bist Du!“ Frühe Kindheit digital (Siegerlandmuseum, Siegen, 16.09.2018 to 06.01.2019). The video installations of this exhibition also make it possible for a broader public to observe how digital media practices in early childhood constitute self-references, reference to others, factual relationships and family life.

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