An investigation of Teacher Social Media Usage with Parents at Preschool

The interaction between teachers and parents is a key factor within preschool education and its policy. Children’s understanding of education and academic progress are influenced by their home settings since the development of a child takes place mainly within the family, and preschool is an important time to connect home learning to a formalised education setting. There are logistical, emotional, linguistic, cultural and time-related constraints that can act as barriers to this connection. Social media could offer an opportunity to improve links between the preschool and home environments and thereby increase parents’ involvement in their children’s education.
This qualitative case study offers an in-depth and comprehensive exploration of a teacher's and parents’ interactions through social media in a preschool context and the extent of, and effects arising from, the interconnections within this limited context of social media use. The selected preschool is attended by five-/six-year-old children. Data were gathered through a single case and thematic analysis was used to interpret the data.
The main findings were that the teacher's and parents’ social media interactions could be understood through an interpretative framework that extends the Epstein Model of Parental Involvement to reveal the interactions between home, school and the wider community, and that these interactions were considered by stakeholders to have a beneficial effect on parental involvement. Specifically, the use of social media helped to contextualise the content learnt about during preschool activities and personalised the conversations between stakeholders. Such interactive, multimodal and multidirectional interactions were possible with a teacher willing to make use of social media. Some parents, however, were concerned about the potential adverse effects on the children’s social and emotional development; while the lack of a legal framework for social media use in the preschool classroom was another area of concern for both the teacher and parents. Overall, the study contributes to the prior literature on parent involvement with twenty-first-century interaction paradigms.