Developmentally appropriate New Media Literacies: Supporting cultural competencies and social skills in early childhood education

Abstract

Young children explore their world through manipulatives, playing with ‘technology’ that may or may not be digital. To this end, I offer an exploration into how the existing framework of the New Media Literacies (NMLs) paradigm set forth by Henry Jenkins (2006) in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century might be applicable to early childhood education. For the purposes of this paper, I focus on three of the twelve NML skills ( play, distributed cognition and transmedia navigation) and how they might each be reflected in the interplay between digital and non-digital media within Reggio Emilia-inspired teaching and learning. Aligning the discussion of young children's media use with NMLs might allow for greater examination of the potential positive benefits of digital and non-digital media and technology.