Practitioner inquiry as a professional learning strategy to support technology integration in early learning centres: Building understanding through Rogoff’s planes of analysis

ABSTRACT

Professional learning and development for early childhood educators are increasingly recognised as pivotal in supporting curricula that are socially and culturally relevant to children. The ubiquitous nature of technology creates the necessity for educators to increase their knowledge and understandings of how to support children’s digital citizenship. The focus of this paper is on practitioner inquiry as a professional learning strategy to support technology integration in early learning centres in Australia. Collective case-studies were undertaken with educators at three early learning centres in New South Wales, Australia to gain insights into their beliefs and attitudes towards technology and to investigate ways to include technology as a complementary tool or resource in play-based learning. Rogoff’s three planes of sociocultural analysis were adopted to better understand the interplay between various influencing factors. Framing the analysis through Rogoff’s approach provided an innovative way to underscore contextually relevant professional learning support that was responsive to diversity in educator beliefs, knowledge and practices with digital technologies as well as specificities of each early learning centre.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood education
• practitioner inquiry
• professional learning
• technology
• Rogoff

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge their appreciation to the educators and early learning centres that took part in this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.