Making sense: digital kindergarten during Covid-19 lockdown

Abstract

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially during the period of lockdown, great changes in education have occurred, and preschool education has not remained an exception. The biggest change in education during lockdown was the switch from live contact to a digital context in which learning took place. On the one hand, this has led to a large number of studies that have included perspectives of the system, families, and teachers, and their perceptions about education during the lockdown, but on the other hand, there was a very small number of studies which were focused on the perspective of children, and none of them included the perspective of preschool children. In this paper, we mapped all recognized (non)sense of the digital learning experience in kindergarten during the 52 days of COVID-19 lockdown in Serbia. Thirteen children from different parts of Serbia were co-researchers in this paper, and they were consulted about some specific topics such as activities that were realized and how relationships with peers and educators were established in a digital environment. We strived to establish the connections with possible reasons for the lack of meaning and relevance of digital learning not just for children but for all actors in contemporary education by using a postqualitative approach to data interpretation.

Keywords

• preschool
• children's perspectives
• consultation with children
• digital learning
• (non)sense