Alone-Together: Exploring children’s material / digital / analogue engagements through intergenerational research during lockdown

The 2020 pandemic forced teachers around the world to dramatically change how they organize pedagogical spaces for children. With a sudden movement online, children not only grappled with the precarity and uncertainty of COVID-19, but also, they adapted in short order to digital spaces and virtual learning. In these uncertain times, as researchers, we recognised a need to find ways to help children make sense of a world “already out of control” (Somerville & Powell, 2019).

Observing, documenting, thinking, and writing together across two contexts, we observed how children are entangled with objects and modes with little adult input other than occasional chats, reinforcements, and inquiries. In this year four classroom, Shillitoe has transformed his primary teaching context into a space where “serendipitous concurrences” (Burnett et al, 2020) happen, spark, and take flight. With the twists and turns into and out of lockdowns, as a primary educator, he moved from online teaching, back into the classroom, back online, and a return to ‘everyday’ in his classroom.

From February until May 2021, we found new ways to observe these steady unfoldings as sparks, flows, and pulses when children came to grips with what has taken place over a year. For this seminar talk, Rowsell will frame this exploratory and experimental research study within socio-material theory followed by a dialogic presentation between Hand and Shillitoe about our research creation activities and their implications for the notion of ‘the digital child.’