Digital Technologies in Early Childhood Art: Enabling Playful Experiences

Digital Technologies in Early Childhood Art: Enabling Playful Experiences Sakr, M. (2017). Digital Technologies in Early Childhood Art: Enabling Playful Experiences. London, England: Bloomsbury Academic. 198 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4742-7189-9.Mona Sakr's book makes important contributions, challenging not only some widely shared assumptions among practitioners, but also assumptions of the academic literature. Its structure is elegantly simple. It begins by establishing the author's familiarity with relevant literature and debates and the theoretical assumptions and methodological approaches employed thereafter. Sakr then draws from interviews with early childhood practitioners their concerns regarding making art with digital technologies. These concerns include reduced opportunities for componential representation and expressiveness because of the use of ready-made images, reduced sensory stimulation, a reduced sense of ownership and intentionality, and reduced opportunities for social interaction. Each subsequent chapter deals with one or more of these concerns. These chapters offer more details from the relevant literature and Sakr's own micro studies from which she consistently pulls nuanced observations that permit both practical and theoretical reconsideration of digital technologies in the classroom.Sakr draws on social semiotics; affordance theory; affect theory; Deleuze and Guattari's notions of rhizomes, lines of flight, and smooth spaces; and Shusteman's somaesthetics. In doing so, she firmly rejects a causal epistemology in favor of a contextualist understanding of knowledge. Specifically, she rejects questions about the effect of digital technology on children, arguing that children and digital technology are now so intertwined it is nonsensical to consider them independently constituted. Throughout, she focuses on children in the act of making, which, using the concept of empty and/or floating signifiers, she understands as not even necessarily an act of making meaning. Countering the common semiotic-influenced approaches that construct children's artmaking as a form of intentional communication and signification, which positions children as agents of cultural production, she stresses the importance of experimentation in media. She extends this argument beyond digital media to young children's artmaking in general. Hers is a through-going post-development, wholly in the moment, approach. This is again consistent with her contextualist epistemology in rejecting a teleological, idealist epistemology that conceives of knowledge as a matter of eventual outcomes. While this grounding in just one epistemology refuses insights that can be offered from other positions, she is at least entirely consistent.The notion of child agendas is used to consider the often quite diverse intentions that children bring to making images. Sometimes children are interested in aesthetic impact, and/ or making conversation and/or schematic representation and/or narrative building, but they also are often interested in experimentation.The discussion of practitioners' grounded theories helps to bring out not only different traditions of thought about children's art and technology, but also the internal contradictions often held by practitioners who unknowingly draw on often-contradictory theories. Sakr examines both art educational literature and classroom practice. She is aware that early childhood art education's allegiance to romantic ideals of childhood innocence and creativity as an internal, personal process, even as they are contradicted by other cultural views, tends to lag behind general art education theorizing and practice. She is respectful of practitioners, although not shy of stating clearly where she believes their thoughts are tangled or their knowledge and practice is limited. This is consistent with her primary aim: to better inform and improve classroom practice. …