Arts based methods

The mass availability of digital media in homes and educational sites across the globe has offered new possibilities for play, and for learning. Digital media appears in many of the spaces children inhabit, including formal learning spaces such as schools, kindergartens and day-care centres. For children who have access, digital media can come to form a large part of their daily activity, especially when schooling embeds digital media use in teaching and learning activities. This new vision of childhood is both exciting and terrifying, and full of possibility for researchers to assess the impacts and effects of children’s access and use of digital media in their everyday lives. Children’s digital media use is a new and growing area of research, and researchers are keen to examine its use by young children in different contexts. Researchers are also keen to use innovative and creative methods and procedures for undertaking their investigations to allow for more nuanced data types, and more nuanced findings and outputs. This chapter examines the potential of arts-based methods for researching the uses of digital media by young children. The chapter asserts the difference between research that looks at children’s digital art, and research that uses arts-based methods to investigate a wide range of topics.