Chapter 1 provides an overview of screen time concerns reported in the media and research, with consideration of relevant learning and interaction theories which indicate that face-to-face social interaction, talk and play are essential for the linguistic and cognitive development of children. This chapter also revisits the fundamental multimodality of face-to-face interaction. The shift from face-to-face to online multimodal interaction therefore requires users to make complex linguistic and interactional adaptations to be able to achieve understanding and affiliation with interlocutors in online contexts, as occurred with the advent of the telephone. This is especially true of the most common form of online interaction, text chat, which is a unique hybrid form of social written interaction, with its own specific affordances and constraints for children’s social and linguistic development. This chapter presents key interactional differences between face-to-face and written online interaction, based on conversational resources available (or unavailable) to users in either setting, including videogame settings. This discussion provides a necessary basis for investigation of children’s written interaction in subsequent chapters.

Yasser Khan reminds us that race, simply put, is made. It is the consequence of painstaking and deliberate work, whether in the meticulous anthropological taxonomies offered by Kant and Blumenbach, or in the line of poetry, or, as Khan argues, in the representation of racial differences on the Romantic-era stage. Drawing on the notion of “racecraft,” which “foregrounds racism as a reality that produces ‘race’ to rationalize the dispossession of wealth, power, and rights,” Khan shows how stagecraft in John Fawcett’s Obi; or Three-Finger’d Jack (1800) establishes the terms by which racialized subjects come to be understood as fundamentally exploitable.

Videogames once seemed like they would have a part to play in the future of the book – the natural evolution of literary practice onto more expressly interactive digital platforms. Today, despite numerous compelling examples of videogames that support literary engagement, the comparison can seem strange, clichéd, banal, and beside the point. This chapter attempts to reset the comparison of videogames and literature for the present moment of digital culture. First, it presents a brief history of critical perspectives on videogames as literature. Second, it reflects on the contemporary status of and challenges to videogaming’s literary aspirations following recent shifts in the industry’s design priorities and monetization practices. This chapter does not present an argument regarding the status of games as literature. Rather, its goal is to describe the urgent work of literary studies in continuing to rethink digital gaming in the unfolding digital age.

How do composers discover new sounds with old instruments? This chapter looks at the relationship between composers and instruments, and explores how responding to instrument design and experiementing with performing techniques and physical materials can create radical and exciting new sounds and ideas.

This chapter reports on the results of the coding scheme designed to assess collaborative learning activities during early elementary school described in Chapter 7. The scheme measures dialogic, activity-based, and nonverbal intersubjectivity and collaborative engagement. Three video-recorded, teacher-facilitated pedagogical activities are used for the analysis. These activities reflect findings from the play-based pedagogy literature in that they involve a mixture of teacher and child contributions. Teachers scaffold the engagement and understanding of a small group while following the children’s lead. Each activity includes open-ended exploration of a material by the children. The findings show that two different videos with the same teacher used similar forms of exploratory talk most often, whereas the other teacher used other forms of dialogue most often. In addition, intersubjectivity and collaborative engagement among all three groups peaked during active shared engagement with the materials. These periods coincided with less dialogue and occurred in the middle of the activity.

Thomas Mann’s literary obsession with Nietzsche’ philosophy was lifelong, continuously evolving, and constantly subversive. His early short stories were preoccupied with Nietzsche’s Wagner reception and cultural critique of decadence; the middle-period novella, “Death in Venice” engaged with the mythical pair of the Dionysian and Apollonian; the novel Doktor Faustus, his self-proclaimed “Nietzsche book,” combined Nietzsche’s biography, aesthetics, and “the problem of the German.” In each phase, Mann’s reception was never simply dutiful, but rather mischievously pitted one Nietzschean position against another, deriving dramatic force from the often contradictory capaciousness of his thought. This chapter focuses on a work not always considered as part of Mann’s Nietzsche reception: Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, an early short story later expanded to become Mann’s last novel. The text playfully juxtaposes Nietzsche’s “problem of the actor” and his ideal of self-fashioning, what Alexander Nehamas describes as Nietzsche’s “life as literature.” It explores issues of style, taste, parody, “gay science,” and the concerns attendant upon the translation of Nietzsche’s literary philosophy back into literature proper. It shows how the parody and mockery of Nietzschean ideals cannot help but fall in with the models they turn on, and the implications for our understanding of Nietzsche’s own writing.

Chapter 4 discusses various theories of learning that have an impact on how EC professionals can work with young children. Theories about how children (and, indeed, adults) learn science and the factors that affect learning in young children are described. The relationship between everyday concepts and scientific concepts is distinguished. The place of affective factors in children’s learning is also described. Various case studies are presented to highlight aspects of children’s learning.

Chapter 11 focuses on EC STEM education. It describes what STEM looks like in EC settings and identifies ways in which STEM elements can be incorporated into children’s learning. The chapter describes how STEM-related play can enhance young children’s appreciation of the world and provides a range of examples that have potential for STEM learning. Digital tools and applications for STEM learning are featured in this chapter.

Chapter 9 highlights the importance of play in young children’s science learning. During playful events, children can explore, discover, investigate and experiment, thus promoting critical thinking and scientific inquiry. Play pedagogies that promote children’s learning through playful activities are discussed. Four case studies are presented to highlight how EC professionals can encourage children’s scientific exploration and thinking through play.

Welcome to the fifth edition of Science in Early Childhood. Who would have thought we would have come so far since the inception and publication of this book back in 2012? Or that science education in early childhood (EC) would have moved forward so much? This new edition retains the essential elements of science learning and teaching that inform and guide pre-service teachers and EC professionals, while addressing the latest version (Version 2) of Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (EYLF) (AGDE, 2022) and Version 9 of the Australian Curriculum: Science (ACARA, 2023). Recognising the importance of shared knowledge, we have some new co-authors to bring fresh ideas and to mentor through the process of writing chapters.

Dr Jodi Edwards, an Aboriginal woman of Yuin and Dharawal kinship, wrote this chapter through her lens as an Elder connected to Country and the waters of the Illawarra coast of New South Wales. She explains how cultural knowledge-holders have seen, and continue to see and interpret, the natural environment through rich environmental play experiences that help shape cultural identity and strengthen Aboriginal Lore/Law. In a contemporary context, Jodi extends on these ways of understanding by sharing the rationale behind a children’s playscape and public art space being developed by the Shellharbour City Council in collaboration with the local Aboriginal community. The playscape is a play-based site for physical activity, and a place for storytelling and language learning, and for learning about bush tucker and bush medicines. It is intended to inform local young people and visitors alike about the multiple sustainable practices engaged in by the Aboriginal community of the area. At a broader level, the playscape also offers considerable potential for enhancing cultural and language reclamation, decolonisation and reconciliation.

In this revised chapter, the authors reiterate the fundamental importance of children’s learning experiences in natural environments. However, they challenge educators to re-examine their worldviews and pedagogies around such experiences. Relationships between humans and nature are problematic – especially at this critical juncture in Earth’s history. The authors make a compelling case for Australian immersive nature play programs (INPPs) as offering opportunities to explore a nature–sustainability nexus. They discuss three stories from the field to illustrate their arguments. Further, they propose that authentically embedding First Nations peoples’ worldviews into INPPs presents additional richness for teaching and learning in nature programs.

Social media engagement means losing and finding oneself on a sea of disparate and divergent rhythms, which in this chapter is taken as both material condition and metaphor for the mixture of playful surprise and persistent dread that characterizes the digital dimension of contemporary Black life in the United States. This chapter reads together a collection of technologies, digital and nondigital texts, and memory to explore how contemporary Black social media protest draws on and extends legacies of Black textual play.