Professor Rosie Flewitt FRSA has spent more than 25 years researching young children’s communication at home, in early childhood education, and in wider nonformal learning spaces. Her research draws attention to the many ways in which children make meaning through their movements, gaze, gesture, images, sounds and language as they engage with the different people and artefacts they encounter, including digital technologies.

Rosie’s work is driven by a commitment to recognising and respecting individual children’s communication preferences, and to promoting inclusion and social justice in education and in research. This means enabling children to be listened to, heard and respected by challenging barriers to inclusion, and by supporting the development of inclusive pedagogy and policy across mainstream and ‘special’ early childhood education settings. An interwoven thread which adds texture to this body of work is the development of innovative research methodology, notably visual, ethnographic and participatory approaches to conducting early childhood research with children and their families.

Earliest digital memory

Being taken on a primary school trip to Bletchley Park, near the village where I was born in England, to see a colossal computer, which was most likely the original, or possibly a rebuilt, Colossus used in WW2 Allied code breaking. The teacher told us this would be our future, and I thought he was crazy. Turns out he wasn’t.