The Toy Brick as a Communicative Device for Amplifying Children’s Voices in Research

• Published in: M/C journal Vol. 26; no. 3
• Main Authors: Stevenson, Kylie Justine, Jayakumar, Emma, See, Harrison
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 27.06.2023
• ISSN: 1441-2616; 1441-2616
• DOI: 10.5204/mcj.2957

Introduction This article arises from recent industry-partner research between the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, the LEGO Group, and Edith Cowan University (ECU), examining new ways of communicating children’s perspectives of digital citizenship to policy makers and industry in a project called Digital Safety and Citizenship Roundtables: Using Consultation and Creativity to Engage Stakeholders (Children, Policy Influencers, Industry) in Best Practice in India, South Korea, and Australia. We posed the research question: What are children’s everyday experiences of digital citizenship in these countries, and how might these contribute to digital citizenship policy and practice? In research roundtables, we immersed children aged 3 to 13 in a three-pronged child-centred multimodal methodology that included drawing, show-and-tell discussion, and a block building activity. It is this third block-related method that this article investigates: the project’s adoption of an activity using the LEGO® brick whereby the children expressed their views about their everyday digital worlds via brick toy constructions. In this article, we explain how such toy play can be used as a communicative strategy to give children agency so that they can creatively interject their voices into ongoing discussions about children’s digital citizenship. Such an approach takes a children’s rights perspective and considers the ethics of research with children, whereby “young children have rights; [and] they are agents and active constructors of their social worlds” (Sun et al.). The project was also subject to a rigorous human ethics approval process at ECU. This article highlights the benefits of the brick toy as a communicative device for amplifying children’s voices about their everyday experiences of media and digital cultures and ends by illustrating some of the children’s views depicted in their brick toy creations. Rationale Taking a child-centred approach using play-based participatory methods provides a window into children’s everyday media and digital cultures that may not be accessed through traditional qualitative techniques. Gennaro and Miller (xxxi) argue that “the impact of technology upon children remains so complicated to grasp, assessing the extent to which digital – and specifically social media – plays a role in the lives of youth is still a prerequisite for our discourse”. This provided an imperative for our research to find a child-centred method to grasp this complication. Furthermore, asking children about their experiences of media and digital cultures is a key aim of the Centre for the Digital Child researchers who led this project. It is also emphasised as a research imperative by the ‘Growing Up in a Connected World’ study conducted for UNICEF and the Global Kids Online team led by Sonia Livingstone in 2019. They identify that, if we are going to understand children’s media and digital cultures, we need to ask children about this: The starting point must be children themselves – asking about the barriers they face in accessing the internet, the opportunities they are discovering online and the digital skills they are acquiring. Children can also report on the online risks they have encountered and the possible harms, as well as on the support and protection they receive from family, friends, teachers, and wider society. (UNICEF 7) The Project: What We Did In 2022, ECU and Digital Child researchers conducted a series of research roundtables with a total of 45 children in India, the Republic of Korea, and Australia with the intention of gathering children’s perspectives of digital safety and citizenship. Subsequent adult roundtables were held in which the children’s views along with findings from a deep literature review were conveyed to the adult policy, education, and academic stakeholders. In the research, children were positioned as key stakeholders in conversations about their digital citizenship. Three children’s roundtables were held in each country: one for pre-primary school children (3-5 years of age), one for early primary school children (6-10 years of age), and one for late primary school children (10-13 year of age). The roundtables included three activities: first, the use of ten image cards depicting digital activities as icebreakers and as prompts for a drawing activity; second, a talking activity in which children explained their drawings and then talked about their experiences of digital citizenship; and third, a toy play activity in which children had access to a table of LEGO brick toys where they were asked to make a construction that showed the roundtable participants and facilitators something about their existing knowledges and comprehension of digital citizenship. It is the latter activity with brick toys that this article will explore. Multiple Play-Based, Child-Friendly Participatory Methods Play-based participatory methods such as visual prompts, drawing, and toy play, unlike a traditional qualitative focus group that centres on discussion, establish a less formal atmosphere for the children more akin to their recreational play activities. Not only do these methods build rapport, but they also elicit a more authentic reflective response from children. (For a review of participatory research with children, see Montreuil et al.) As Literat (88) argues about child-friendly methods, “unlike in interviews or focus group sessions where an instantaneous response is expected, the research participants are given time to reflect on their responses, which encourages active conceptualization and contemplation”. This additional time for reflection through multiple modes of communication – drawing, show and tell, talking, block play – also gives the child participants an opportunity to craft a more complete depiction of their digital lives, with the added advantage of more easily navigating age-defined literacy, language, and cultural boundaries. The variation and combination of three visual play-based activities along with the children’s verbal explanations of their creations attended to how “visual images and the verbal exchanges are central to the children’s meaning making process” (Tay-Lim and Lim 65). This approach aided in amplifying the children’s authentic voices in the research data gathered in the roundtables. The LEGO brick toy proved to be particularly effective as a mechanism for the children to communicate their views, as it had done in a preceding context, because it gave them a visual mode of expressing tacit experiences of media and digital cultures that had become embedded in their everyday lives. The Precedent of the Brick Toy to Communicate Children’s Views The inspiration for employing LEGO brick toys to communicate children’s views in the digital citizenship roundtables project came from work done by the LEGO Group itself. In 2021, the LEGO Group collated workshop feedback and survey data concerning climate change from over 6,000 children aged 8–18. The resulting ten requests depicted through brick constructions were conceptualised as Building Instructions for a Better World and were presented to climate and government policymakers who attended the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021 (LEGO, Children Call; Building Instructions). Affirming our project’s adoption in January 2022 of LEGO toy play for children to communicate important perspectives of digital citizenship to adult stakeholders, LEGO subsequently developed their COP26 approach into the more general Build the Change strategy: “a powerful way for children to express their hopes and dreams for the future with LEGO bricks and other creative materials, plus their own imagination” (LEGO, Building the Change). This child-led and play-based pedagogical approach exemplifies the LEGO group’s ongoing remit for social good via its child-led brand framework and how the company is conscious of the leadership role it possesses in regard to education and its environmental footprint (Wood). It also demonstrated to the researchers of the Digital Safety and Citizenship Roundtables research project, though not concerning climate change activism, how the LEGO brick toy is a highly effective communicative tool through which children aged 3 to 13 can express their views about their digital lives to adults. Thus, we employed a LEGO brick toy building activity in our project’s play-based participatory research methods. As a creative visual method, such a way to capture a range of children’s views also aligned with the international research network, Global Kids Online, which advocates in its ‘Method Guide 8’ that creative visual methods are “useful for engaging children in joint knowledge production, as literacy is not required, and such methods are less associated with formal settings such as school” (Kleine et al. 9). Toy Play as a Research Method When children symbolise their experiences of digital contexts in brick toys, this is a form of symbolic play, a foundational element of children’s developing meaning-making (Vygotsky). The children’s representation of their lives in such play involves three things, as discussed by Bruner in his analysis of culture and education: thought and emotion enacted through physical action; expression through imagery; and the construction of symbols. LEGO brick toy play as a research method in the children’s digital citizenship project involves all three of these: firstly, children are actively enacting their thoughts about their digital lives through physical toy play; secondly, they create visual images via brick toy constructions as representations of their digital experiences; and thirdly, they are using the brick toys to symbolically express their inner worlds. In discussing their similar use of small world toys, which are “scaled down items for children to create and play with small-scale scenarios or world, typically toy animals and people”, Gripton and Vincent (226) identified th