Using the sociocultural concept of learning activity to understand parents' learning about play in community playgroups and social media

This paper considers utilising the sociocultural concept of learning activity to understand parents’ learning about young children’s play in the context of community playgroups and social media use. Parents’ knowledge about children’s play influences the provision of parental-provided play experiences for young children and can be enhanced through participation in a community playgroup. Increasingly, playgroup parents are using social media to communicate about children’s play at playgroup and this social situation for learning about play is yet to be theorised for maximising young children’s access to play-based learning experiences in early childhood. Learning activity as a sociocultural concept, recognises learning as an activity for self-development. It has been applied to formal education contexts but has not been used to understand parents’ learning in informal early childhood education contexts. This paper explores its potential for generating new knowledge about parents’ learning about play in the home and community by conceptualising learning as an activity enacted within the social situation of community playgroups and social media. Implications for the mobilisation of this social situation are framed in the context of parent engagement in early childhood education.