What Can the Hundred Languages of Children Teach Us?

Abstract

In this paper we want to make use of the "Hundred Languages of Children" observed by Reggio pedagogue L. Malaguzzi, in order to understand the process of being engaged by and engaging with software. These languages allow children to appropriate objects on many levels. Here, we are interested what this means for usage of software and whether we can learn from them. We will take a close look at the reciprocal aspect of engagement, in particular with respect to software, and derive its relationship with imagination and conceptual metaphors. Concretely, we study the conceptual metaphors used by three children appropriating a software package that was definitely not designed for children, but for adults: MS PowerPoint (PPT). We contrast these use metaphors with the one that is expected for teachers in a PPT training unit. We can learn from these distinct attitudes, that not only the software (designers) are responsible for engagement, but the "language" of conceptual metaphors for software use as well.