Multimodal participation frameworks during young children’s collaborative drawing on paper and on the iPad

Due to its distinct affordances, the iPad might foster alternative forms of collaborative creativity when compared with pens on paper. In this article I examine how a collaborative drawing task among five pairs of 5-6 year olds unfolded on paper and on the iPad, framing the investigation through the concept of multimodal participation frameworks. Through multimodal analysis of 25 episodes of video observation, I focus on the multimodal actions that comprised the children’s collaborative creativity and identify three patterns of interaction: 1) working together, 2) collaboration ‘coming loose’ and 3) vying for control. I then explore how the affordances of the resources used were implicated in these distinct patterns of interaction. The analysis suggests that participation frameworks were tighter and more focused on the task when children drew via the iPad, perhaps because the resources were more physically confined, the screen was harder to see and the drawing app produced a novel and dynamic visual effect. During collaborative drawing on paper, the pens often acted as a distractor, drawing attention away from the drawing and disrupting the fluency of turn-taking. These findings suggest the need to challenge the popular perception that iPads facilitate solitary game-playing and video-watching at the expense of collaborative creativity.