Toward a Holistic Pedagogical Approach in K-6 Education: Evidence From a Multiple-Case Study in Spain

This article examines how a multidimensional, skill-driven curricular framework plays out in diverse primary school settings toward a holistic K-6 curriculum framework. Particularly, it explored how unplugged tasks involve imaginative pedagogies, computational thinking skills, new media literacy skills, and social-emotional skills across three different primary schools by fulfilling two learning conditions, without coding/programming and without using digital devices. Within-case and cross-case analyses were conducted by following the qualitative multiple-case study research design. The evidence stems from lesson analysis, observation field notes, and interview transcripts with 152 participants. We collected 94 lessons from the three schools and we analyzed the data by using a predefined coding scheme grounded upon four frameworks. We conclude that the detected teaching practices uncover promising trajectories by demonstrating a great potential to consider the proposed framework as an effective and age-appropriate pedagogical approach applicable to low-technology and coding-free learning environments. The study highlights the need of teacher professional development, especially on computational thinking in reference to cognitive/intellectual, emotional/affective, social, creative/imaginative, and material dimensions for conscious computational thinking practice implementation. Given the paucity of research on unplugged and, especially, non-programming/coding methods at primary education level, this study can open up prominent issues for further examination and validation.