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Children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) are multimodal communicators. However, in classroom interactions involving children and staff, achieving mutual understanding and accomplishing task-oriented goals by attending to the child's unaided AAC can be challenging. This study draws on excerpts of video recordings of interactions in a classroom for 6-9-year-old children who used AAC to explore how three child participants used the range of multimodal resources available to them - vocal, movement-based, and gestural, technological, temporal - to shape (and to some degree, co-control) classroom interactions. Our research was concerned with examining achievements and problems in establishing a sense of common ground and the realization of child agency. Through detailed multimodal analysis, this paper renders visible different types of practices rejecting a request for clarification, drawing new parties into a conversation, disrupting whole-class teacher talk-through which the children in the study voiced themselves in persuasive ways. It concludes by suggesting that multimodal accounts paint a more nuanced picture of children's resourcefulness and conversational asymmetry that highlights children's agency amidst material, semiotic, and institutional constraints.

Public historians have recently directed significant attention toward video games as a media form for engaging diverse audiences with participatory historical representations and arguments. Yet despite the availability of easy-to-use game creation tools, historians have been slow to adopt game development. I developed a video game, Ab Uno Sanguine, based on my PhD research to assess the practicality of game design as a venue for public history practice. This article reflects on my experiences in historical game development along the ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate) process of game production. This paper connects game studies, historical game studies, and digital public history scholarship to demonstrate how historians can become historian-developers to disseminate their research without a large budget or a professional game design team. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital literacy games can be beneficial for children with reading difficulties as a supplement to classroom instruction and an important feature of these games are the instructional supports, such as feedback. To be effective, feedback needs to build on prior instruction and match a learner's level of prior knowledge. However, there is limited research around the relationship between prior knowledge, instruction and feedback in the context of learning games. This paper presents an empirical study exploring the influence of prior knowledge on response to feedback, in two conditions: with or without instruction. Thirty‐six primary children (age 8–11) with reading difficulties participated: each child was assessed for their prior knowledge of two suffix types—noun and adjective suffixes. They subsequently received additional instruction for one suffix type and then played two rounds of a literacy game—one round for each suffix type. Our analysis shows that prior knowledge predicted initial success rates and performance after a verbal hint differently, depending on whether instruction was provided. These results are discussed with regards to learning game feedback design and the impact on different types of knowledge involved in gameplay, as well as other game design elements that might support knowledge building during gameplay. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topicInstructional supports, such as elaborative feedback, are a key feature of learning games.To be effective, feedback needs to build on prior instruction and match a learner's level of prior knowledge.Prior knowledge is an important moderator to consider in the context of elaborative feedback.What this paper addsProviding additional instruction (eg, pre‐training) may act as a knowledge enhancer building on children's existing disciplinary expertise, whereas the inclusion of elaborative feedback (eg, a hint) could be seen as a knowledge equaliser enabling children regardless of their prior knowledge to use the pre‐training within their gameplay.Highlights the importance of children's preferred learning strategies within the design of pre‐training and feedback to ensure children are able to use the instructional support provided within the game.Possible implications for pre‐training and feedback design within literacy games, as well as highlighting areas for further research.Implications for practice and/or policyPre‐training for literacy games should highlight key features of the learning content and explicitly make connections with the target learning objective as well as elaborative feedback.Pre‐training should be combined with different types of in‐game feedback for different types of learners (eg, level of prior knowledge) or depending on the type of knowledge that designers want to build (eg, metalinguistic vs. epilinguistic).Modality, content and timing of the feedback should be considered carefully to match the specific needs of the intended target audience and the interaction between them given the primary goal of the game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The article is devoted to the problem of involving children of preschool and primary school age in the sphere of media education. How does the consumption of media content affect the formation of a reading culture and the related interest of 7-12 year old children in knowledge? This aspect, in our opinion, requires careful study and reflection. In the existing studies of media preferences of the new audience, as a rule, the focus is on the age segment from 12 to 20 years and older. The peculiarities of content consumption by younger children remain practically unexplored, while practice shows that “immersion” in the media environment and contact with gadgets in a child begins much earlier – even at an unconscious age, that is, from one and a half years. Particular attention in this article is paid to such a resource of media education as children's magazines that offer new, entertaining, popular science content and a special digital reading model. This article presents the results of a study whose purpose was to determine the key characteristics of the functioning of popular science magazines for children in the digital environment, taking into account the changed practices of media education and media consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various topics within the issue, including dementia, the agency and activism of people with disabilities, and the support needed by mothers with disabled children in South India.

Background: Approaches to teacher professional development, such as learning designs (LDs), can facilitate primary school teachers' appropriation of literacy technology in the classroom. LDs are detailed learning activities and interventions designed by teachers to plan their use of technology. Methods: Using a creative design methodology to carry out a series of LD workshops with teachers, we aimed to understand how primary school teachers envision learning and teaching with two distinct technologies designed to support children's reading skills: a game and an e‐reader. Employing systematic qualitative content analysis, we compared LDs developed by teachers for each technology. Results: Our study shows that while principles of teacher instruction are consistently incorporated across the LDs, the design of each technology plays an important role in how teachers plan their students' learning and focal reading skills. Further, teachers' perception of the technology is as important as the features of the design. Compared with the e‐reader, the game is perceived as an individual practice activity with less opportunities to learn with peers. Finally, across both technologies, teachers envision supporting additional literacy skills, beyond those designed in the technology, highlighting the importance of explicitly facilitating LDs intended to foster within‐subject learning. Conclusions: These findings raise a new set of considerations on how to support teachers to design literacy learning and teaching activities with technology, and also offer a new methodological approach to facilitate LDs in future research and teacher training. Highlights: What is already known about this topicProfessional development supports teachers to appropriate literacy technologies in the classroom.The learning design approach has been shown to facilitate professional development by placing teachers in the role of the designer.The learning design approach can support and complement existing pedagogical approaches in the classroom, as well as to foster socio‐constructivist learning. What this paper addsIn the context of literacy, teachers rely on the learning aims of the technology and its pedagogical approach to determine how and what their students will learn.Teachers embed learning with peers when the technology aligns with existing social practice in the classroom.Teachers reappropriate literacy technology designed to support reading skills to extend into other literacy skills, such as writing and oral language. Implications for theory, policy or practiceThe paper offers a learning design methodology to support teachers in creating activities that integrate literacy technologies in the classroom.The methodology includes strategies that support teachers to embed learning with peers alongside reflecting a broad coverage of literacy learning objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital games for primary education are often designed to foster children’s learning through motivated practice with core subjects, such as literacy and math. Over the years, and accelerated by the pandemic, these games have become an embedded part of the primary school classroom. Many of them rely on AI and thus automation to adapt children’s learning game tasks and personalize the learning to the child’s learning needs. While removing the requirement for the teacher to plan what students do with the technology, children’s engagement with digital learning tasks, and the digital reports generated as a result have also been proposed to be a critical way to help teachers deliver targeted and time-efficient teaching interventions to those who need them the most ,. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigating voice in research that involves children with disabilities is highly challenging. Very few studies have problematised voice for the purposes of designing new technologies for and with children who have disabilities. We embarked on qualitative fieldwork with children who have severe speech and physical impairments with the view to motivate designers to consider new child-centred perspectives for conceptualising new communication technologies. In this article, we use reflexivity as a tool to critically examine how empowering our methodological decisions were for children with disabilities, in advancing child-centred accounts of their communication experiences. We propose four considerations that can be useful for researchers and practitioners when undertaking participatory work involving children with disabilities. These are: 1.Theoretical lenses guiding data collection, analysis and interpretation; 2. Developing credible accounts through strong and prominent ideas; 3. Children's ways of participating evidencing their voices, and; 4. Methods hindering the promotion of child centred accounts. Children with severe speech and physical impairments are rarely involved in designing new technologies for supporting communication. It can be challenging to study what children with severe speech and physical impairments express as important about their communication. This article examines the ways in which researchers made decisions about how they worked with children. We studied communication by focusing on the child during their interactions. Our goal was to understand what children expressed as important for communication. We found that researcher beliefs, the use of different methods, and observing children's ways of participating all influenced the findings. The findings identify that it is important for researchers to be clear to others about the perspectives and different data sources that influence their decisions. Some data collection methods, such as taking photos, can be less empowering for children as they can focus on how the researcher sees the situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, video footage of Franchón Crews-Dezurn's weave being forcibly removed from her head during a championship boxing match went viral on social media. A month later Deontay Wilder became an internet meme on account of the excuse he gave (the weight of his ring walk costume) for his first professional loss. In response to the incidents, Crews-Dezurn reclaimed ownership of the viral moment, patenting the hashtag associated with the clip and building a merchandising and branding campaign focused on challenging gendered narratives about Black female bodies and hair. A month after his incident, Wilder collaborated with AFROPOLiTAiN magazine in a photoshoot depicting him as an African king. We apply a reading of social avatars and futurism to these case studies. We argue perceptions of social avatars, as they pertain to both boxers, queer the hegemonic readings of their gendered and racial bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the table of contents for this issue of the publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]