Transformations of Digital to Analogue – Children Bringing Popular Culture Artefacts and Media into Swedish School-Age Educare
Lars Wallner,* Magnus Jansson**
IJREE – International Journal for Research on Extended Education, Issue 1-2024, pp. 59-71
Abstract: This article explores children’s use of digital popular culture as boundary objects, and the transmedial boundary work done in Swedish school-age educare (SAEC) centres. As children bring their experiences of digital media into everyday SAEC practices, they influence, and are influenced by, others around them, children as well as adults. Through field observations conducted in a Swedish SAEC centre in southern Sweden, we collected ethnographic field data, together with two groups of children in Years 2–3 (aged 8–9) and staff. In total, 47 children and 7 staff members took part in the study. Using Star and Griesemer’s (1989) theory on boundary objects, we analyse how children’s digital popular-cultural interests are brought into, and made relevant to, SAEC practice. The results show that children’s use of digital media is transformed in SAEC activities into analogue content – drawing, dancing, etc. – and that these activities are ways for children to establish social relations by displaying and sharing their interests. These results have impact for the continued development of extended education, the use of digital media and its value for SAEC, as well as teachers’ ongoing practice.
Keywords: boundary object, childhood, extended education, Fortnite, leisure, TikTok
Introduction
Working in Swedish school-age educare (SAEC) centres means working with a variety of materials and activities, with large child groups, in an institution that advocates children’s own interests and initiatives. Children’s interests revolvemainly aroundmass or popular culture such as music, film, social media, and TV – mainly digital media delivered through devices such as laptops, televisions or smartphones (Jansson & Wallner, 2023; Persson, 2000; Swedish Media Council [SMC], 2019). Popular culture is the culture of themasses, produced for, and consumed by, the majority population – although it is hardly homogenous (Ganetz, 2000; Persson, 2000). For young people,
popular culture generates capital, popcultural capital, that has value within the friend group. Limits are traversed. Children from all cultural, linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds share interests, understanding, images, icons, texts. The value of capital is set by children in the encounter with other children. (Fast, 2007, p. 128, our translation)
The way children spend their free time is more digitalised today than ever before (SMC, 2019), making it necessary for extended school institutions and SAEC centres to negotiate the relation between children’s online and offline activities (Lindqvist Bergander, 2015), and how institutional free time should be spent. Many SAEC institutions make digital devices available for children to use for different purposes (Klerfelt, 2007; Stenliden et al., 2022), but many cannot provide one-to-one solutions, meaning that children must sometimes choose other types of activities, share digital devices, and otherwise adapt after the circumstances. Other institutions choose instead to emphasise non-digital activities, e.g., to reduce the amount of time children spend in front of screens. Often, children are left to their own (digital) devices in SAEC, and many utilise entertainment websites, such as YouTube or Y8, something that can cause friction between children and teachers, as well as conflicts between children ( Jansson & Wallner, 2023). In this article, we explore the use of digital popular cultural media and artefacts and how children interact around this in Swedish SAEC.
Almost half a million Swedish children ages 6–12 attend SAEC every week – roughly half of all children of that age – and this figure has been increasing steadily over the past ten years (Swedish National Agency for Education [SNAE], 2020). SAEC should “stimulate the pupils’ development and learning, as well as offer the pupils meaningful leisure time […] based on the pupils’ needs, interests and experiences, while ensuring that the pupils are continuously challenged, by inspiring them to make new discoveries” (SNAE, 2011, p. 23). Thus, communication, creativity and different forms of expression are central components for SAEC (SNAE, 2011), and popular culture can play a key role in this. One important facet of children’s use of popular culture is that children, regardless of background, can, and do, share experiences of popular culture with each other (Falkner & Ludvigsson, 2016). Therefore, we are interested in children’s cultural capital, their knowledge of (popular) culture and (popular) cultural ability, and how this capital is managed by children (cf. Bourdieu, 1993). SAEC centres are cultural arenas where children use, and learn about, media, and different children use media differently. Thus, media use has the power to influence how children treat and view the world (Martínez & Olsson, 2021). Children’s media use in educational settings can be a source of conflict when adults and children do not share the same cultural arenas (Dunkels, 2005). Ågren (2015) argues that adults often set terms for children’s media culture based on adult’s ideas about what childhood should be, without taking into account children’s own views. As a result, adults may not view children’s media use as meaningful within the framework of the aims of SAEC (Dahl, 2014; Dunkels, 2005). For example, Martínez and Olsson (2021) point out that children are frequently forbidden from using their smartphones during school hours, including during SAEC, relegating the phone to home use.
Being unable to communicate on the same cultural arenas can cause friction in institutions such as SAEC centres, where teaching is primarily supposed to extend from children’s own interests (cf. Martínez & Olsson, 2021). With this in mind, there is good reason to explore whether, and how, children’s different cultures meet, and, possibly, what tools are used to facilitate these meetings. In the current study, we show how experiences of popular culture (Ganetz, 2000; Persson, 2000) taking place in the home are something that children also bring to the SAEC centres through transformations of experiences, from one social environment to another, and how popular culture becomes a boundary-crossing object carried by children and adults between different social arenas (Star & Griesemer, 1989). To limit the scope of this article, we will focus on children’s ways of constructing digital popular culture together with other children in an SAEC centre. With SAEC centres limiting children’s access to computers, tablets and smartphones (see, e. g., Jansson & Wallner, 2023), we were also interested in studying the relation between digital and analogue practices at the SAEC.
Research questions
To achieve these aims, we explore the following two questions:
– What role(s) do digital popular cultural media have in children’s interactions during SAEC?
– What is the relation between digital and analogue activity during SAEC? Research on Swedish SAEC is so far limited (Falkner & Ludvigsson, 2016; Swedish Council for Educational Research, 2021), making this study a valuable contribution to knowledge on SAEC pedagogy, social relations in SAEC, the importance of (popular) culture for these relations, and digital and analogue activity in SAEC. The study contributes to an ongoing debate on the value of popular culture and children’s culture for educational purposes (see, e. g., Jansson & Wallner, 2023; Martinsson, 2018; Persson, 2000; Wallner, 2017), and demonstrates how popular culture can contribute to giving children and young people meaningful free time.
Review of the literature
Access to, and competency in, digital tools, and use of popular culture in SAEC create learning opportunities for children, and enable them to position themselves in social groups, connecting online practices and offline practices as a form of digital literacy and sociocultural practice (Dahl, 2014; Lindqvist Bergander, 2015). In a study based on the digital storytelling of two children in SAEC, Klerfelt (2006) explores how children create digital narratives, intertextuality and expressions of children’s voices. She emphasises the importance of considering what narratives are on offer in the institution, as limiting children’s access to a certain set of perspectives “could result in limiting stereotypes where traditional sex roles are conserved and restricted” (Klerfelt, 2006, p. 198). In her dissertation, Sparrman (2002) explores children’s popular cultural media practices, childhood, and children’s culture. Among other things, she demonstrates how a video game character such as Sonic the Hedgehog is made important to children, and is used as an intertextual knowledge base and as cultural capital in children’s interaction (Sparrman, 2002).
Lindqvist Bergander (2015) further demonstrates how children aged 10–13 utilise digital media in their free time to establish and maintain social relations and hobbies, as well as critically evaluate online media. Part of Jansson&Wallner’s (2023) study of children’s use of popular culture in SAEC demonstrates how children’s experiences of social media become topics of focus in everyday interaction at the SAEC centre, where children and teachers discuss relationships and the possible dangers of online communication. In this way, children’s experiences of digital popular cultural expressions create informal learning opportunities at the SAEC centre, experiences that would otherwise risk being marginalised or ignored completely (see, e. g., Hantson & Van de Velde, 2011; Jansson et al., 2016).
* Corresponding Author: Linköping University, lars.wallner@liu.se
** Linköping University
* * *
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