Early Childhood Teachers’ Professional Development: The Hybrid Educational Experiment

In recent years, particularly in the ‘new normal’ period, social media has been widely used as a vital part of professional learning and communication. Nevertheless, there is limited research on educational experiment in terms of how social media–based professional development can be promoted to support physical meetings for teacher professional learning. We examine the functions of social media, such as WeChat, in the hybrid educational experiment, using Vygotsky’s ideas of social situation of development and crisis and Edwards’s concept of relational agency. We engage in theoretical discussion through the analysis of illustrative vignettes from the previous study conducted with three kindergarten teachers in different facilities in China. We argue that the hybrid educational experiment through social media (e.g., WeChat) and face-to-face professional development training creates motivating conditions to support teachers’ meaningful professional development and promote professional agency. The hybrid educational experiment also enables researchers to understand the process of teachers’ professional development and traverses the complex, shifting and uncertain areas of pedagogical roles and practices. The study reveals that engaging with social media (e.g., WeChat) provides the research foundations to capture teachers’ professional agency in a new way and process teachers’ sustainable professional development in play-based learning programs.