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Communities of Practice: Art, Play, and Aesthetics in Early Childhood pp 133–151Cite as

Digital Aesthetics and Multidimensional Play in Early Childhood

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Part of the book series: Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education ((LAAE,volume 21))

Abstract

Digital imagery saturates contemporary life. A rapid growth in affordable technologies calls for investigation into the impact of media on young children, particularly as the explosion of smartphone and tablet technologies mean that even very young children easily access digital media and imagery. The enthusiastic way children engage with digital imagery suggests a contemporary childhood lived through digital aesthetics and through intermingling ‘imaginary’, ‘experienced’, and ‘actual’ dimensionalities. Young children also experience digital tablet and computer technologies in their learning environments so these multidimensionalities include the routines, activities and events that occur daily in kindergartens. As a basic question, how do kindergartens become multidimensional? In considering this question digital and non-digital art and play help reconceptualise early childhood learning environments as aesthetically rich, as spatially and temporally fluid and as a space where ideas and concepts can be explored and troubled by adults and young children. Drawing on a research project that took iPads into kindergarten sites in Queensland, Australia, I propose how tablet technologies in daily art and play routines contest aesthetic conventions and destabilise the fixed physicalities and temporalities of early childhood sites and the children that attend them.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Early childhood education is referred to here in the Australian context and represents accredited full day-care centres for children aged 0–5 years, as well as the elementary school classrooms dedicated to children attending their first year of formal schooling. In Australia this first school year is variously named kindergarten (kindy) or preschool (prep), depending on the State or Territory. All Australian schools will eventually drop the terms kindy and prep and adopt the term foundation, to reflect the language of the national Australian Curriculum.

  2. 2.

    In this chapter aesthetics refers to the affective and sensational in art, and multidimensionalities refers to the combination of the physical, digital object coupled with the virtual spaces created by programs and apps seen on-screen.

  3. 3.

    Although a kindergarten is usually a built structure such as a classroom or a center, the activities, people, staff, equipment come and go in and out, thus the edges of a kindergarten are not absolute but are permeable.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Early Childhood, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

    Linda Knight

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  1. Linda Knight
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Correspondence to Linda Knight .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, USA

    Christopher M. Schulte

  2. The Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, USA

    Christine Marmé Thompson

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Knight, L. (2018). Digital Aesthetics and Multidimensional Play in Early Childhood. In: Schulte, C., Thompson, C. (eds) Communities of Practice: Art, Play, and Aesthetics in Early Childhood. Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70644-3_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70644-3_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-70644-3

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