This book takes a radically new approach to the well-worn topic of children's relationship with the media, avoiding the "risks and benefits" paradigm while examining very young children's interactions with film and television. Bazalgette proposes a refocus on the learning processes that children must go through in order to understand what they are watching on televisions, phones, or iPads. To demonstrate this, she offers unique insight from research done with her twin grandchildren starting from just before they were two years old, with analysis drawn from the field of embodied cognition to help identify minute behaviours and expressions as signals of emotions and thought processes. The book makes the case that all inquiry into early childhood movie-viewing should be based on the premise that learning–usually self-driven–is taking place throughout.

This book takes a radically new approach to the well-worn topic of children's relationship with the media, avoiding the "risks and benefits" paradigm while examining very young children's interactions with film and television. Bazalgette proposes a refocus on the learning processes that children must go through in order to understand what they are watching on televisions, phones, or iPads. To demonstrate this, she offers unique insight from research done with her twin grandchildren starting from just before they were two years old, with analysis drawn from the field of embodied cognition to help identify minute behaviours and expressions as signals of emotions and thought processes. The book makes the case that all inquiry into early childhood movie-viewing should be based on the premise that learning-usually self-driven-is taking place throughout. Cary Bazalgette is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Culture, Communication, and Media at the UCL Institute of Education, UK. Previously, she was Head of Education at the British Film Institute. .

The easy interface of touchscreen technologies like tablets and smartphones has enabled children to access the digital world from a very young age. But while some commentators are enthusiastic about how this can open a new world for fun, learning, and developing digital skills, others see the dangers of yet more screens, inauthentic play, and time spent isolated with electronic babysitters that detract from interaction with parents and learning social skills. Taking five as the age when children transition into formal education, this book draws on a three-year research project examining the realities of under six-year-olds' experiences of these technologies in the UK and Australia. With a theoretical context including Vygotsky, Bruner, Bronfenbrenner and Flewitt, the book examines how parents of young children evaluate the opportunities and risks of children's digital media use in the context of other significant influences such as children's time with grandparents, early childhood care and education. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 22 families, and rich ethnographic data from observation and exchanges with their 29 children, aged four months to five years, the book reveals how digital technologies complement and challenge important aspects of daily life for infants, toddlers and preschoolers.

This handbook showcases how educators and practitioners around the world adapted their routine media pedagogies to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, which often led to significant social, economic, and cultural hardships. Combining an innovative mix of traditional chapters, autoethnography, case studies, and dialogue within an intercultural framework, the handbook focuses on the future of media education and provides a deeper understanding of the challenges and affordances of media education as we move forward. Topics range from fighting disinformation, how vulnerable communities coped with disadvantages using media, transforming educational TV or YouTube to reach larger audiences, supporting students’ wellbeing through various online strategies, examining early childhood, parents, and media mentoring using digital tools, reflecting on educators’ intersectionality on video platforms, youth-produced media to fight injustice, teaching remotely and providing low-tech solutions to address the digital divide, search for solutions collaboratively using social media, and many more. Offering a unique and broad multicultural perspective on how we can learn from the challenges of addressing varied pedagogical issues that have arisen in the context of the pandemic, this handbook will allow researchers, educators, practitioners, institution leaders, and graduate students to explore how media education evolved during 2020 and 2021, and how these experiences can shape the future direction of media education.

This companion presents the newest research in this important area, showcasing the huge diversity in children’s relationships with digital media around the globe, and exploring the benefits, challenges, history, and emerging developments in the field. Children are finding novel ways to express their passions and priorities through innovative uses of digital communication tools. This collection investigates and critiques the dynamism of children's lives online with contributions fielding both global and hyper-local issues, and bridging the wide spectrum of connected media created for and by children. From education to children's rights to cyberbullying and youth in challenging circumstances, the interdisciplinary approach ensures a careful, nuanced, multi-dimensional exploration of children’s relationships with digital media. Featuring a highly international range of case studies, perspectives, and socio-cultural contexts, The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children is the perfect reference tool for students and researchers of media and communication, family and technology studies, psychology, education, anthropology, and sociology, as well as interested teachers, policy makers, and parents.

As fast-evolving technologies transform everyday communication and literacy practices, many young children find themselves immersed in multiple digital media from birth. Such rapid technological change has consequences for the development of early literacy, and the ways in which parents and educators are able to equip today’s young citizens for a digital future. This seminal Handbook fulfils an urgent need to consider how digital technologies are impacting the lives and learning of young children; and how childhood experiences of using digital resources can serve as the foundation for present and future development. Considering children aged 0–8 years, chapters explore the diversity of young children’s literacy skills, practices and expertise across digital tools, technologies and media, in varied contexts, settings and countries. The Handbook explores six significant areas: Part I presents an overview of research into young children’s digital literacy practices, touching on a range of theoretical, methodological and ethical approaches. Part II considers young children’s reading, writing and meaning-making when using digital media at home and in the wider community. Part III offers an overview of key challenges for early childhood education presented by digital literacy, and discusses political positioning and curricula. Part IV focuses on the multimodal and multi-sensory textual landscape of contemporary literary practices, and how children learn to read and write with and across media. Part V considers how digital technologies both influence and are influenced by children’s online and offline social relationships. Part VI draws together themes from across the Handbook, to propose an agenda for future research into digital literacies in early childhood. A timely resource identifying and exploring pedagogies designed to bolster young children’s digital and multimodal literacy practices, this key text will be of interest to early childhood educators, researchers and policy-makers.