The connected child: tracing digital literacy from school to leisure

Abstract

This article directs attention to how young students make sense of the connections and disconnections of digital practices between school and leisure. By using New Literacy Studies as a frame of reference, we study how students’ conceptions of digital literacies and their positional identities are defined across school and home. In contrast to most other studies of similar issues, we study children in the age range from 9 to 13 years old. The methods used are qualitative interviews and video observations of these students at three Norwegian primary schools. The analysis shows how various digital practices in the classroom become meaningful in the translation to leisure time. We discuss how digital practices initiated in the classroom may be relevant to students’ out-of-school worlds, based on how they get opportunities to unite and translate practices between these two contexts. This has to do with how school’s digital practices may be important in connecting identities across contexts. We argue that the issue of identity must be understood as connected to digital literacy. Our main thesis is that the school context plays a prominent role in introducing youngsters to new digital practices that might be important in developing their digital literacies.