Dr Sumin Zhao, The Hundred Languages of Children on the Move: Digital technologies & transnational childhoods
Friday 29th March, 12-1.30pm Paterson's Land room 1.18, Moray House School of Education, Holyrood Road, EH88AQ
There are a growing number of young children around the globe whose lives now move across the boundaries between nations, languages and cultures. This new phenomenon – childhood on the move – is shaped by the interaction of two types of mobility, population and technologies (mobile devices and applications). The literacy practices of these typically multilingual children often transgress the traditional boundaries of time and space and take place in multiple transnational sites. In this talk, I explore the role mobile technologies play in the literacy practices of young children from immigrant and expatriate families, drawing on two projects I have worked on in the past four years. The first project explored the use of social media apps (WeChat) for heritage language learning by children from Chinese-speaking families in London, while the second looked at the use of book apps for English language learning by multilingual children in an international school in provincial Denmark. The talk is organised loosely into two parts. In the first part, I will illustrate the “semiotic resourcefulness” (Mavers, 2009) of young children—the creative way in which children explore various multimodal resources available in the technological interface in their learning and communication. I will then contrast children’s “semiotic resourcefulness” with the paradoxical lack of digital resources in their education, highlighting the gaps between the design and the distribution of apps, the school curriculum and classroom practices, and the everyday reality of migrant children. Throughout the talk, I will also discuss the methodological challenges for researching children on the move.
Details and link to sign up: https://www.de.ed.ac.uk/event/seminar-dr-sumin-zhao-hundred-languages-children-move-digital-technologies-transnational