Emergent Media Literacy: Digital Animation in Early Childhood

This paper outlines a research project in which three- and four-year-old children in one nursery engaged with editing software to create short animated films. Research questions were related to the knowledge and understanding of multimodal texts that the children developed in the activity, the skills they demonstrated in undertaking the animation work and the implications for curriculum development. Qualitative data were collected over the period of an academic year as children were observed (using fieldnotes and video camera) planning and producing the films. This paper analyses some of the knowledge and understanding of multimodal texts developed throughout the project and suggests that early childhood educators need to understand the nature of new authorial practices if they are to provide appropriate scaffolding for children’s learning in the new media age.