Robin Samuelsson

Uppsala University | UU · Department of Scandinavian Languages

While interactive touchscreens are currently entering into educational practice, little is known about what this means for learning in early childhood and, in particular, how touchscreens shape action and communication. In this paper, we examine the interactions of 2‐year‐olds and their teachers in a multilingual preschool in Sweden. We analyse the...

Digital devices such as iPads are prevalent in children’s play from an early age. How this shapes young children’s play is an area of considerable debate without any clear consensus on how different forms of play are brought into the iPad interaction. In this study, we examined 98 play activities of children in two preschool settings, featuring 2 a...

There is a renewed scientific interest in the role of childhood in human evolution, pointing to the explorative phase of a human's life history that shapes how children learn and develop. This study presents a synthesis from evolutionary sciences that considers biases in childhood learning through activities in play, exploration, and social interac...

Programmable robots are increasingly used to introduce computational thinking and programming to young children. However, how to practically introduce this is still being developed, where storytelling and project-based methods have been promoted as possible ways to achieve this. This paper presents a study from a preschool featuring 4–5 year-olds w...

Many children grow up in multilingual communities characterised by linguistic hetero-geneity and semiotic and cultural complexity. Translanguaging theory has provided a perspective attuned to communication and education in multilingual settings. However, translanguaging pedagogies have not yet had a broad uptake in early educational settings. The r...

Translated from the Swedish publisher: Can we playfully educate children so that they are given opportunities to develop language and also be stimulated for social and cultural learning? This is one of the most important early educational questions of today when children are assumed to learn an ever-changing content in a rapidly changing world. F...

This paper explores how preschools can be purposefully designed to aid cultural learning through guided play practices. In recent literature, there has been a renowned interest in the role of the exogenous environment in psychological processes, including learning. The idea that the design of preschools can meaningfully be seen as cultural niche co...

This article examines how the environment and routines within preschoolscan support second language use and development. It suggests that certainimitable aspects common to Swedish preschools make the environment suitable for L2 use and development. Data build on a qualitative synthesis of two studies from which typical routine activities where chil...

The role for digital technology in educational settings is a widely debated topic. This paper takes a different ways of approaching digital/analogue activities in early childhood, through the embodied and interactional view of children’s reasoning. The data builds on a visual and sensory ethnography (c.f. Pink, 2015), of a science project about spi...

This thesis studies how second-language and conceptual development emerge through interactions in Swedish preschool environments. It studies how types of interaction, such as play, can scaffold children towards such developments. The studies view interaction as multimodal and embodied and examine how children come to use and develop their second la...

This paper studies the scaffolding of conceptual development for children aged 4–5 years old during a science project at a Swedish preschool. It specifically examines how bodily knowledge and language are used in interaction, and how conceptual knowledge can be scaffolded with the use of external tools and artefacts. The science project was tracked...

This paper examines how children explore the concept of spinning during a preschool project. It takes a cultural-historical approach, and analyzes how artifacts can be used in development of abstract concepts. In line with the pedagogical goals teachers employ these in learning activities during the project in line with their pedagogical goals. Chi...

This article targets the multimodal character of children’s play and its potential for scaffolding second-language development. We follow children who are newcomers to a Swedish preschool and analyze their interactions. Play is, we argue, based on rules or tacit agreements between children, originating in the human capacity of imitation, and create...