‘I’m peppa pig’: young children’s self-initiated song-singing with a digital device as multi-modal expressive practices

This article is based on the argument that the current audiovisual culture for young children, accessible to them via digital technologies interwoven in their everyday family lives, provides a multi-modal resource for creative meaning-making. We emphasise that for today’s young children, songs exist in increasingly mediated, multi-modal ‘virtual’ worlds of children’s TV programmes, films, video games and social media. To ground our arguments, we share two vignettes of self-initiated song-singing by 3-year-olds drawn from a project that set out to explore innovative approaches to music education practice. Digital voice-recorders, operated independently by the children, enabled them to draw on mediated song memories, creatively re-articulating them. We propose that their activity should therefore not be reduced to a focus on songs or song-singing, but understood as multi-modal, expressive practices, drawing on media culture and home-lived experiences which can be, as we describe, creatively re-mediated with friends and adults in educational settings.