DESIGNING WITH MULTIPLE TOOLS – SUPPORTING YOUNG CHILDREN AGENCY IN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

Abstract

Children's rights to participate designing their everyday activities and environments have been widely declared in international regulations. The practical implementation of these rights has also been advocated in educational research to support children’s agency development. However, reported challenges such as young children’s difficulties verbalising their thoughts, may discourage researchers to carry out investigations with children in early childhood education (ECE) environments. Tackling this issue, we present our exploratory work in Finland involving young children (9 girls, 5 boys, ages 4-6 years) designing a greenhouse space in their day-care using multiple tools. The design activity was carried out as part of the children’s environmental education curriculum and was implemented through a participatory design (PD) framework to support and foster children’s agency during the research. We gave the children low-tech tools (coloured pencils, paper) as well as with high-tech tools (drawing and augmented reality (AR) apps) to complete the design of their ideal greenhouse during four PD workshops: 2 workshops using an AR app, 1 workshop using a drawing app and 1 workshop using pencils and paper to draw. We explained the low-tech and high-tech tools to be used at the beginning of each workshop, allowing children to familiarise with them, if needed. Data were gathered through observations, videos, interviews and researchers’ notes. Children had the freedom to spend as much time as they needed in the design activity and the ECE personnel accompanied two researchers with the children to provide familiarity and support. The workshops ended with a group interview where children were invited to describe their designs. Here we present how each tool type supported the children differently in their design activities by engaging and offering them suitable mechanisms to express their views and wishes, encouraging verbal expressions and interactions, and thus, fostering children’s agency as well as assisting the researchers’ work. Furthermore, the different affordances of the tools encouraged the production of diverse results through which children could record their “construction of meaning” during the design activities. Based on our experiences during this exploratory work, we advocate the use of multiple tools, particularly when carrying out participatory design activities with young children. Due to their different affordances, the provision of high-and low-tech tools for supporting young children’s design can reflect better the children’s individual skills, agency and interests and, therefore, offer researchers and designers a more efficient communication channel and a more holistic understanding of the design outcomes.