Developing teacher understandings of digital play in the early years of schooling

Digital play is a pedagogical construct used to explain children’s engagement with digital technologies. Much of the digital play literature draws upon theories of play derived from a time of pre-digitality in which play is understood as a central mode of learning. A more recent, but under-used, theoretical construct in digital play literature is that of technical code from critical constructivism. Technical code explains how alternative knowledge sources can be used to expand digital understandings in practice. Expanded knowledge in practice is represented within cultural-historical thinking as new cultural formations – or ways of thinking and doing. While digital play remains a dominant pedagogical construct, it is unclear how digital learning is understood by teachers, beyond a reliance on theories of play. This paper reports on a two-year collaborative project conducted with teachers working in the early years of schooling alongside three university-based researchers. Teachers and researchers used philosophy of technology, focusing on critical constructivism, as an alternative knowledge source to theories of play to expand digital play as a technical code. Findings showed that the teachers generated three new cultural formations related to the ‘digital’ aspect of digital play, including (1) cyber-safety; (2) networked technologies; and (3) creativity.