POSTPONED
Date: Thursday March 19, 2020
Time: 1:00-2:30 pm
Location: Neville Scarfe Library Block, Room 278
Speaker: Kristiina Kumpulainen (PhD)
Visiting Scholar in Human Development, Learning, and Culture (HDLC)
Playful Learning Center, Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki
Abstract
The global sustainability crisis makes it necessary to rethink how we interact, experience and develop relationships with the natural world. Reports about children having fewer opportunities to be in “touch” with natural environments, such as forests, and about the pervasiveness of “touch technologies and screen time” in children’s lives raise interesting issues across both academia and the public sphere. In this talk, I address current debates between the proliferation of mobile, digital technologies in children’s lives and their environmental engagement and learning. I contend that rather than viewing new technologies as the simple cause of a perceived “nature deficit disorder,” we need to take a critical and adaptive approach to consider the affordances and constraints of incorporating technologies in the service of children’s environmental learning. By describing some promising adaptations of novel technological tools and their limitations in children’s environmental engagement and learning, I highlight how together, adults and children can construct a more informed understanding about the relation between people, planet and the technologies that we humans are developing.
Bio
Kristiina Kumpulainen is Professor of Education and Scientific Director of the Playful Learning Center at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. She also leads the Learning, Culture and Interventions (LECI) expert research group in her faculty. In 2019, she was nominated to become a fellow of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. Kristiina has led numerous research projects and published widely on socioculturally informed studies on children’s and teachers’ agency and learning across early years and primary education, cultural institutions, and homes. Her research has addressed pedagogies and learning environments that create opportunities for creative, playful, and participatory learning. Her ongoing research projects include The Joy of Learning Multiliteracies funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture and Learning by Making: The Educational Potential of School-based Makerspaces for Young Learners’ Digital Competencies funded by the Academy of Finland, and Digital mediation of children’s interactions with the more than human world funded by Australian Research Council. At present, she also leads the Nordic Research Network on Digitalising Childhoods funded by the NOS HS program funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers.
For more information: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/kristiina-kumpulainen