Young Children's Creativity in Digital Possibility Spaces What Might Posthumanism Reveal?

• Published in: The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children pp. 75 - 86
• Main Author: Stevenson, Kylie J.
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2021
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Virtual Play; Young Children's Creativity; Young Man; Possibility Spaces; Posthuman Perspective; Posthuman Child; Possibility Thinking; Digital Play; Posthuman Approach; Vice Versa; Anna Craft; Child's Imaginative Play; LCC; Violate; Children's Possibility; Pre-sleep Arousal; Parental Mediation Practices; Young Children's Play; Children's Digital Literacy; UN; EU Kid Online Project; Digital Contexts; Children's Engagement; Digital Literacy
• ISBN: 9780367559069; 1138544345; 9781138544345; 0367559064
• DOI: 10.4324/9781351004107-7

Taking a broad literature review approach, this chapter explores young children's creativity in digital contexts, making a connection between Craft's (2001) notion of little c creativity and young children's possibility thinking enacted in a digital (and postdigital) world. It suggests what the concept of the posthuman possibility space may entail, and how young children's posthuman digital play may be envisioned. Research about very young children's play in the digital contexts of apps, the Internet of Toys, and makerspaces is briefly investigated to reveal the digital child research field as poised for the application of a posthuman lens. This chapter explores the nature of young children's creativity in digital contexts. Taking a broad literature review approach, it draws on creativity theory, in particular the work of Anna Craft on possibility thinking, to investigate the notion of digital spaces as possibility spaces in which very young children enact Craft's notion of small c creativity. The British creativity researcher Anna Craft proposed the notion of children as "digital possibility thinkers", building upon her earlier work about possibility spaces for young children's creativity. Some fields of possibilities for children's dynamic entanglements with digital touchscreen technologies can be found in the examples of 0-5-year-olds' play with iPads in the Toddlers and Tables study, children's creative play with internet-connected toys, and virtual/nonvirtual entanglements in makerspaces, all three of which are addressed in this chapter. It is important to acknowledge that the contemporary childhood experience is one in which the human child and the technological are inherently entangled.