Professor Susan Nichols

Children’s Digital Lives: Participatory Inquiry and Creative Engagement

This collaborative project will generate insights into the networked digital engagement of primary school children living in the Northeast of England, and engage practitioners in translating findings into recommendations for working with children. Drawing on the How Do You Connect approach, successfully implemented in Australia, child participants will be invited to explore their digitally mediated interactions by creating and discussing network diagrams during interviews.

A series of workshops will then be held in which children will engage in collaborative inquiry, co-design, and production, supported by practitioners and researchers. Analysis of interviews, network diagrams, and workshop documentation will yield findings regarding how children use digital tools when interacting with others, learning, recreating, and exercising selfexpression, and what children value in their digital lives. The collaboration will draw from and extend the research of host researcher Liz Todd, whose Voices project has indicated a need to further understand children's digital engagement.