Things Worth Knowing

This lecture considers participatory research with children that is designed to uncover their engagement with the past, present and future of media cultures and play. It will explore how mixed research methods have contributed to understanding the detail of children’s lived experience through qualitative enquiry. Its premise is the idea of uncovering ‘things worth knowing’ about the details of children’s lives, dispositions and ways of being in the world. Working within the paradigm of the new sociology of childhood, seeing children as being and not simply becoming, it places their experience at the heart of research and theory building. The projects outlined in the talk take place in a ‘third space’ in which attempts are made to flatten traditional hierarchies and see children as co-producers of research about their lives. In the era of platformisation, AI, and datafication, this research, which draws on multimodality, cultural studies and postdigital theory, contributes rich descriptions of children’s lives past, present, and emergent, which speak back to quantitative, reductive, and performative datasets.

Professor John Potter

John Potter is Professor of Media in Education at IOE. His research, teaching and publications are in the field of new literacies, media education, play on and offscreen, curation and agency in social media. His most recent books have been collaborations with Prof Julian McDougall and Dr Pete Bennet, ‘The Uses of Media Literacy’ (2020), and with Julian on ‘Digital Media, Culture and Education: Theorising Third Space Literacies’ (2017). He is co-editor of the journal ‘Learning, Media and Technology’. He is director of ReMAP (Researching Education, Media, Arts and Play), a research collaborative based in the Department of Culture, Communication and Media at the UCL Knowledge Lab, and at UCL East. He directed the ESRC funded ‘National Observatory of Children’s Play Experiences during COVID-19’, a collaboration with colleagues in the School of Education at Sheffield University and the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. Before working in Higher Education John was a primary school teacher, mainly in Tower Hamlets in East London.

Professor Jennifer Rowsell

Jennifer Rowsell is Professor of Digital Literacy at the School of Education, University of Sheffield. She is an interdisciplinary researcher who started out her scholarly career studying literacy from an ethnographic-multimodal lens that continues today. Having conducted many research studies for over 20 years with a range in ages from young children and their parents all the way to older adults, she investigates the ways that people engage in literacy practices across all aspects of their lives. She has had the privilege of researching in many primary and secondary schools in Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom and across a range of informal and formal contexts such as art galleries, addiction outreach centres, malls and shopping centres, churches, and pop-up makerspaces. For over a decade, she has focused more on digital literacy and , most recently on the notion of the post-digital. At the heart of her work is an enduring curiosity and passion for people’s stories about their lived literacy practices.

Professor Li Wei

Director and Dean at IOE

Li Wei's research covers many aspects of bilingualism and multilingualism, including language acquisition in childhood, education policy and practice regarding bilingual and multilingual learners of minoritized and transnational backgrounds, and the cognitive benefits of language learning. He is editor of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and the Applied Linguistics Review. He has won the British Association of Applied Linguistics Book Prize twice, for the Blackwell Guide to Research Methods in Bilingualism and Multilingualism (with Melissa Moyer) and Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education (with Ofelia Garcia). He is a fellow of the British Academy, Academy of Social Sciences, UK, and Academia Europaea.

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, 20 Bedford Way, London, United Kingdom