Research / Questions worth staying with
What do children think
a machine understands?
My questions come from classroom practice: how children describe a responsive character, what they think it knows, and how an adult can help them make sense of the interaction.
Human Agency / Curriculum in development
How children learn to understand,
question, and shape technology.
The progression links understanding how a system works with questions about design, boundaries, support from people, and shared responsibility. The public v0.2 direction includes six lesson exemplars across EYFS to KS5.
Explore the progression and lessonsWorking idea
Relational Agency
I use Relational Agency for a question I am still working on: how can a child understand both what a system can offer and what it cannot take responsibility for? The idea asks us to pay attention to the design of an interaction, the boundaries around it, and the people who remain responsible.
A response can feel meaningful without carrying the knowledge, mutual obligation, or responsibility of a person. This is a design proposal informed by practice, not a diagnosis, clinical tool, or validated measure.
See it in the curriculumThe Narrative Anchor
Young children bring their own expectations to the characters they meet. I am exploring how stories and play can help them talk about responsive technology.
I want children to enjoy a character or story while still understanding that a responsive system is not the same as a trusted person.
“The Narrative Anchor” is my working name for this question. The idea is still in development, informed by classroom experience and developmental literature. It is not a validated intervention.
Read the classroom starting pointEmotional reliance belongs in the conversation
The school-owned seven-strand framework I designed at DCB includes emotional reliance and wellbeing. The next step is to make the age progression, intended outcomes, and relationship to existing frameworks explicit.
Current guidance increasingly addresses relationships and emotional dependence. The contribution I want to develop is the practical progression: what this looks like in Nursery, in Primary, and later in Secondary.
Read the essayWhere I’m looking next
How do children describe a character that responds to them? What changes when an adult mediates the interaction? How can we tell whether a lesson supports judgement beyond the lesson itself?
Observation and classroom stories can identify useful questions. Answering them requires clear measures, careful comparison, and attention to what we still do not know.