Technology: Reflecting on transitions to post-digital practice in a sample of early years settings
By Eleanor Milligan (University of East Anglia), Viki Veale (St Mary’s University) Janet Morris (University of Greenwich), Lorna Williams (University of Worcester)
The Reception Class Teacher Network (RCTN) coordinators explore how early years practitioners are navigating transitions into post-digital practice. This blog offers an overview of the conceptual framing, methodology, and emerging insights from the study, and invites you to join our afternoon symposium to engage more deeply with the findings, tensions, and possibilities raised.
From digital debates to post-digital realities
Debates about technology in early childhood education and care (ECEC) are not new. Edwards’(2023) theorisation of three broad “eras” of thinking about young children and digital technologies provides a helpful lens for understanding how professional narratives have shifted over time and how practitioners’ lived experiences often sit across, between, or beyond these eras.
Era 1 is characterised by a polarised debate about whether technologies are helpful or harmful. During the 1980s and early 2000s, computers were often positioned as developmentally inappropriate and external to children’s “natural” learning. Writers such as Palmer (2006) framed technology as part of a wider “toxic childhood”. Notably, these deficit narratives persist today in renewed anxieties around screen time, parental guilt, and campaigns for a “smartphone-free childhood”, frequently pitting technology against play and wellbeing.
Era 2 marked a shift in the 2010s as technologies became more mobile, interactive, and embedded in everyday life. Touchscreens, apps, robots, and digital toys reframed digital technologies as part of children’s play “diet” (Edwards, 2013). However, research from this era, such as Nikolopoulou and Gialamas (2015) also highlights that while teachers increasingly recognised links between play and ICT, digital practices were not yet fully integrated into pedagogy.
Era 3, the post-digital turn, moves beyond questions of appropriateness altogether. Contemporary research demonstrates that children grow up within digitally saturated environments from birth. The Toddler Tech and Talk project (Flewitt et al., 2024) challenges the dominance of “screen time” as a meaningful measure, instead recognising a wide ecology of screen and non-screen digital devices. Edwards (2023) conceptualises the post-digital as a condition of “living with technologies”, where the digital is inseparable from human action, interaction, and meaning-making.
Post-digital concepts in early childhood pedagogy
Edwards identifies five interrelated concepts; convergence, subjectivities, social systems, networks, and human experience, that help make sense of post-digital pedagogy in ECEC. Together, these foreground how learning emerges through blurred boundaries between digital and non-digital practices, how children’s identities are shaped through tools and relationships, how classrooms sit within wider policy and family systems, and how learning unfolds through networks of people, places, materials, and technologies. Crucially, post-digital thinking recentres lived experience: children’s emotions, bodies, relationships, joy, curiosity, and wellbeing remain central, with technology understood as part of how these experiences are lived rather than an add-on or distraction.
Methodology: RCTN as a living research project
Operating within a community of practice framework (Wenger, 1998) and a constructivist paradigm, this research draws on qualitative insights from a purposive sample of Reception Class Teachers (RCTs). Data were gathered through conference posters, Padlet contributions, and qualitative feedback surveys, and analysed thematically.
RCTN itself functions as a living, phenomenological research project, seeking to understand the lifeworld of reception teachers—what it is like to be a Reception Class Teacher today, and how that experience is interpreted and given meaning. Our sample was self-selected, consisting of practitioners who chose to engage with RCTN’s digital professional development opportunities. This context matters: it allows us to explore how confidence, reflection, and professional learning shape transitions towards post-digital practice.
Emerging insights and why they matter
Three key insights are emerging. First, the child remains at the heart of practice. RCTs are striving to remain faithful to developmentally appropriate, play-based pedagogy while responding thoughtfully to the post-digital realities of children’s lives. Second, reception classes sit at a critical nexus. With policy guidance and public discourse lagging behind technological realities, reception teachers are uniquely positioned, and burdened with ensuring pedagogically sound uses of technology as children transition into formal schooling, drawing on children’s funds of knowledge from home. Third, the research reinforces the necessity of RCTN as a community of practice, supporting pedagogic confidence, reflective dialogue, and professional agency in post-digital contexts.
Case study data, including Mariah’s journey, illustrate how access to relevant CPD, critical observation, action research, and reflection can support shifts in thinking across the eras. Where such opportunities are absent, practitioners risk narrowing their pedagogy and limiting children’s opportunities—particularly for inclusion and community connection.
Join the conversation
We invite you to think with us about what post-digital practice means for early childhood education, not as a technical problem to solve, but as a human, pedagogical, and ethical endeavour. Join the afternoon session to explore these findings, challenge assumptions, and contribute your own perspectives to this evolving conversation.
To find out more about the RCTN visit our webpages https://bit.ly/ReceptionCTNetwork
References
Edwards, S. (2013). Digital play in the early years: a contextual response to the problem of integrating technologies and play-based pedagogies in the early childhood curriculum. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 21(2), 199–212. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2013.789190
Edwards, S. (2023). Concepts for early childhood education and care in the postdigital. Postdigital Science and Education, 5(3), 777-798.
Flewitt, R., El Gemayel, S., Arnott, L., Gillen, J., Goodall, J., Winter, K., Dalziell, A., Liu, M., Savadova, S. and Timmins, S., 2024. Toddlers, tech and talk: Very young children's language and literacy learning at home in a post-digital age. Summary report.
Nikolopoulou, K., & Gialamas, V. (2015). ICT and play in preschool: early childhood teachers’ beliefs and confidence. International Journal of Early Years Education, 23(4), 409-425.
Palmer, S. (2006). Toxic childhood: How the modern world is damaging our children and what we can do about it. Orion. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning as a social system. Systems thinker, 9(5), 2-3.