Associate Professor Christina Davidson’s research examines the social interaction of children during their everyday activity in homes, communities and classrooms. She is particularly interested in the ways that children’s social interactions contribute to literacy learning and literacy teaching. Most recently, this work has encompassed social interactions during web searching in homes and preschools, and social interactions that accomplish literacy lessons in primary school classrooms. Christina will contribute to the Healthy Child program, providing expertise in interaction analysis with a specific focus on development of language enabling talk about digital texts, including on-screen print and images.

Christina has published extensively on young children’s web searching, use of YouTube, and early development of digital literacies. In 2018, she was acknowledged as one of the twenty most cited authors published in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods. Christina is a co-editor of the book Digital Childhoods: Technologies and children’s everyday lives and has recently been appointed as associate editor of the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. In 2016, Christina was the co-recipient of the first national research grant awarded by the Primary English Teaching Association Australia for the project, Researching dialogic pedagogies for literacy learning across the primary years.

Earliest digital memory
Trying to enable a class of 30 boys in high school to compose first drafts of stories on 15 shared computers