Through children’s eyes : narratives of data-driven systems and imagined futures

Children’s everyday lives are increasingly shaped by data-driven systems that collect, analyze, and act upon personal data through platforms, apps, and algorithmic processes. While research on datafied childhoods has expanded, much of the existing literature examines children’s digital experiences through adult-defined frameworks of risk, skills, and protection. Although these approaches have generated important insights, they offer a more limited understanding of how children themselves narrate and make sense of data-driven technologies. In particular, fewer studies have focused on how children articulate their own perspectives on data-driven systems and imagine technological futures in their own terms.

This thesis addresses this gap by examining how children use storytelling and multimodal narrative practices to construct meanings around data-driven systems and the role of technology in imagined futures. The data was collected in a two-day workshop including 43 sixth-grade students (aged 11–12) from three different classes in a Finnish international school. Drawing on narrative inquiry and Labov’s model of narrative structure (Labov, 1972), the study analyses children’s stories created through storyboards and Scratch-based digital narratives. The analysis focuses on how narrative elements such as orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution, and coda are used to articulate experiences, concerns, and expectations related to data-driven technologies.

The findings show that children’s narratives provide rich insights into their perceptions of data-driven systems, revealing concerns about surveillance, misuse of personal data, automated decision-making, and unequal power relations between users and technologies. While many stories frame digital risks at an interpersonal level such as cyberbullying or scams others implicitly engage with more systemic issues related to datafication and algorithmic governance. Children frequently attribute agency to technological systems, depicting them as autonomous, influential, and sometimes uncontrollable actors within their stories. At the same time, storytelling enables children to explore ethical tensions surrounding technology, even when formal technical concepts remain implicit.

The study contributes to educational research by showing how storytelling functions as a powerful meaning-making resource through which children engage with complex data-driven phenomena. It highlights the pedagogical potential of narrative and speculative methods for supporting critical data literacy, offering educators a way to surface and work with children’s emerging understandings of data practices. By foregrounding children’s voices, this thesis advances child-centred approaches to digital and data literacy education and underscores the value of narrative inquiry for researching datafied childhoods.