Abstract
Educational practices are built around supporting children’s knowledge construction. Children’s displays of knowledge, as well as their prior experiences and interests, are resources for teachers to draw on to facilitate opportunities for children to build new knowledge across curriculum and social aspects of classroom life. Children bring to the classroom their experiences from everyday life from both outside and within the classroom, and they display varying knowledge of and skills in Web searching and other digital technologies. The practices of digital technologies present a relatively new pedagogical space for early childhood teachers who are faced with decisions about how to integrate them in ways that align with the key tenets of early childhood education. This chapter investigates a single episode where two young children and their teacher conduct a Web search. We consider how social interactions facilitate children’s knowledge building when engaged in Web searching. The analysis shows that the teacher draws upon a range of interactional resources to (1) provide children with opportunities to display their knowledge, and (2) incorporate this displayed knowledge into the unfolding interaction to promote opportunities to engage with new knowledge about the search topic, and the process of performing a Web search. This chapter aims to support teachers’ understanding of the interactional strategies that build on children’s displayed knowledge in order to provide opportunities to engage with new knowledge.
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Acknowledgments
This Queensland University of Technology study entitled Kids and the Internet (KNET) (2010) (Ethical clearance # 0700000725) was supported by QUT funding (Spink and Danby), and an Australian Research Council Discovery (Project ID: DP1114227) (Danby, Thorpe and Davidson). We thank the children, parents and teachers who took part in this study. We also wish to acknowledge Amanda Spink for her suggestions on an early draft of the manuscript.
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Houen, S., Danby, S., Farrell, A., Thorpe, K. (2017). Web Searching as a Context to Build on Young Children’s Displayed Knowledge. In: Bateman, A., Church, A. (eds) Children’s Knowledge-in-Interaction. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1703-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1703-2_4
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