Building Sustainable Digital Practices in Kindergarten Literacy and Arts Programmes (DigiSus)

DigiSus is a bottom up competence project involving kindergartens in two municipalities, pre-service kindergarten teacher programmes and a research environment. The main objective of the project is to develop and establish a competence framework for kindergarten staff and teacher educators connected to evaluation and implementation of sustainable digital practices (SDPs) in kindergartens supporting playing and learning in literacy and arts practices.

Newer research findings suggest that small children’s use of mobile screen technologies may prevent the development of crucial pre-academic abilities such as self-regulation, empathy, social competence and problem solutions (Radesky, Schumacher & Zuckerman 2014). This critique suggest to us that the introduction of digital practices need to be less screen based and more balanced in order to deserve to persist and become sustainable in kindergarten environments for play and learning. The DigiSus project will introduce and explore a balanced environment for play and learning in kindergartens where non-screen based technology will be used along with existing screen based technologies in moveable experience labs, e.g in the shape of aesthetic interaction rooms (1- 3 years), and language exploration rooms (3-5 years). The interaction rooms will be designed in collaboration between kindergarten teachers and researchers and implemented in kindergartens.

The overall research design of the project is inspired by action and educational design research and is structured around four key research phases: