Unpacking Digital Educational Experiment in the Home Setting: Crisis, Relational Proximity and Distal Participation in the Times of COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

AbstractThere are methodological challenges of studying children’s development in-motion, these challenges were further accentuated in the times of COVID-19 pandemic. The challenge demanded novel thinking from researchers in responding to the crisis and also preparing for new realities post-pandemic. This section has chapters that extends this discourse and further theorises the role of digital tools in capturing children’s development as a dynamic and dialectical process. The methodological argument presented here shows how educational experiment were conducted via digital tools to create motivating condition for children’s STEM concept formation in the home setting in Australia. This chapter especially reports on the methodological aspects of developing digital educational experiments and the changing ‘role of researcher’ as a distal participant. During the pandemic our object of inquiry, children’s home practices underwent a transformative change. In these changing material conditions digital educational experiments were developed as a methodology to work in collaboration with families so that we can continue to offer children in early years a new motivating condition for learning. While working with families a number of digital tools were used to build common knowledge that was used to develop a responsive and relational pedagogy for children in early years.