A cultural-historical re-conceptualisation of digital pre- and post-survey design embedded in a dynamic multi-modal professional development program

The dynamic nature of an early childhood education workplace is a challenging one that continuously seeks to test educators*, and therefore it is common for them to consistently seek to improve their knowledge, skills, and competencies. Amongst the myriad of different professional development strategies that exist to help early childhood educators with their professional development, how might we capture teacher development? How do we authentically capture this dynamic context and make visible how teacher practices change and teachers themselves develop? One tradition has been to undertake pre- and post-surveys. Yet this method does not in itself bring out what Vygotsky (The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky (Vol. 5. Child psychology) (Rieber, R. W. (Ed.)). Plenum Press, 1998) theorised as the idea of a developmental ‘crisis’. Further, teacher development was never the focus of Vygotsky’s theory of human development. This chapter provides insights into how this can be achieved through a cultural-historical re-conceptualisation of pre- and post-survey design which includes a series of data collection points over time within and across dynamic practices of a professional development program that was simultaneously challenging and motivating for teachers.

*In this chapter, the authors use the terms ‘educators’ and ‘teachers’ interchangeably.