Abstract

The prevalence of technologies in early learning spaces has prompted researchers to develop creative methodologies to investigate the ways young children use digital media. This chapter examines the potential of arts-based methods for researching the diverse ways young children use digital media technologies in their learning. Arts practices offer methodological opportunities for researching young children’s digital media use because they attend to multidimensionality, complexity and theoretically rich research questions and projects. The chapter will assert the difference between research that looks at children’s digital art, and research that uses arts-based methods to investigate a wide range of topics. Two project examples help to explain how digital media research might extend on the usual methods and employ arts-based methods, and how arts-based research can produce useful and meaningful data that can be used singly, or in combination with other methods and data sources.