Digital collaboratory

Abstract

ABSTRACT Storying their work with educators and young children at a Canadian early years learning centre, the co-authors puzzle over the means, affects and embodiments of digital collaboratories, proposing the latter as spaces of chimeric organic and non-organic configurations. This exploratory and experimental piece draws out opportunities for thinking complexly about the everyday encounters with the digital in early childhood education. In following the circulation of human and more-than-human digital/material events, the compositions of Franken-Tree and Franken-Sound are used to trace how common everyday interactions with digital are implicated in the enactment of pedagogical practices and, more broadly, in the making of place. Within spaces of early childhood classrooms, digital manipulations allow for multiple place-events to unravel in a non-linear enmeshing of outside and inside, of here and somewhere, of now, then and who-knows-when. Because digital enters childhood spaces with ease, educators are compelled to consider both its transgressive possibilities and disciplining powers, and to question the seemingly endless ability of algorithms to hide the layers of damage behind the layers of saturated surfaces.