Description
This paper draws on findings from a PhD, Visualising Younger Children’s Perspectives on Digital Technology and Ethical Decision-Making (Watson, 2023), which adopted a multimodal, storytelling research design, exploring nine five-year-olds experiences of digital technology and ethical decision-making within research. Despite younger children’s increased digital engagement over the last twenty years (Davidson et al., 2021; Eichen et al., 2021; Laidlaw et al., 2021; Vidal-Hall et al., 2020), their voices are still underrepresented in academic literature that explores their perspectives on their digital lives. Underpinned by Goffman’s (1959) concept of Impression Management, this research explores the presentation of the self and how younger children use their ‘different languages’ (Clark & Moss, 2017) to articulate their voices surrounding their engagement with digital technology. Adopting a phenomenological and multimodal perspective, video-based conversation analysis of 20 video-recorded storytelling sessions recognised and explored younger children’s perspectives on digital technology. The study was underpinned by the British Educational Research Association (BERA, 2018) and the Ethical Code for Early Childhood Researchers (ECCERA) (Bertram et al., 2015) ethical guidelines. An age-appropriate relational ethics approach was adopted, recognising the importance of facilitating the actual ongoing ethical decision-making of younger children (Ellis, 2007; Watson, 2023). This paper examines how interrogating Goffman’s (1959) notion of Impression Management, combined with multimodal VCA approaches, reveals more about younger children’s perspectives on their digital identity. By facilitating and listening to younger children’s multimodal ‘different languages’ (Clark & Moss, 2017), the research introduces the term ‘desired digital self’, exploring how younger children see their digital and peer selves. Findings demonstrate that younger children’s voices are a valuable addition to the contemporary debates surrounding digital technology, framing them as experts in their own digital lives (Laidlaw et al., 2021).| Period | 11 Sep 2024 |
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| Event title | British Educational Research Association Annual Conference / World Educational Research Association Focal Meeting 2024 |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Manchester, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | National |