ABSTRACT
The authors describe an arts-based collaborative research project with four- and five-year-old children in Canada and Australia to generate perceptions and awareness of environments. Children constructed postcards, providing them with opportunities to make meaning of their and others worlds. These were shared on a blog over a 10-week period. Blogs offer multimodal, peer-to-peer conversations between communities of learners that extend beyond the classroom walls. The online format encouraged the children to search beyond the postcards to find out more about their own and others environments and to begin the discourse on issues of sustainability. Multimodal meaning-making through digital postcards provided opportunities for children to make sense of their local and global worlds. This project demonstrated the importance of affording children the time and tools to explore not only their lived experiences but also those of others. The researchers recognised the challenges with not only the time-zone differences but also the difficulty of synchronising the school year.
