Teknologimedierede aktiviteter i børns overgang fra dagtilbud til skole: Et sociokulturelt informeret og design-baseret studie

The study investigates the interactions occurring in the dialogue that took place between children, kindergarten teachers and researchers during a design-based collaboration, where different technology-mediated activities (such as multimodal books, digital postcards and photo collages) were tried out in the children’s transition between kindergarten and school. The researcher wishes to investigate the opportunities and challenges that exist in the use of technology-mediated activities, which the children themselves have helped to design, in the transition between kindergarten and school. The three research questions are: 1) How can a socioculturally informed and design-based study be part of a collaborative practice involving transitional activities in children’s transition from kindergarten to school? 2) What type of situated and technology-mediating activities can the study’s design experiments generate in children’s transition from kindergarten to school? 3)How can these situated and technology-based activities be analysed a) within the framework of sociocultural theory? b) as transitional practices, where children’s perspectives and paths of participation are brought into focus?

The researcher believes that the design-based experiment did not lead to a restructuring of the environments that already existed in the kindergartens and schools, but instead contributed as a structuring resource in facilitating the children’s transition between kindergarten and school. According to the researcher, the experiment served as a resource that enabled something that was not already there. At the same time, she emphasises that such a project can only succeed if the participants make it their own. Especially the activities involving digital images and multimodal books were the ones that worked best among children and teachers. According to the researcher, the project, through joint experimentation, generated several activities that were useful in the transition between school and kindergarten.

The study is designed as an experimental collaborative project that focuses on the transition from school to kindergarten, between the researcher, four kindergartens and two schools in a Danish municipality. The collaboration took the form of an open and exploratory process, where the participants jointly developed a number of different technology-mediated activities that were tried out and further developed in collaboration with the children. The activities included images, photo collages, multimodal books and digital postcards. The study took place over two transitional processes between kindergarten and school in 2017 and 2018. A total of 87 children and 12 kindergarten teachers and school teachers participated.

Odgaard, A. B. (2019). ”Teknologimedierede aktiviteter i børns overgang fra dagtilbud til skole: Et sociokulturelt informeret og design-baseret studie”. Akademisk avhandling. Syddansk Universitet.