Search results for "ARH"
showing 10 items of 1211 documents
Evening early childhood education and care: Reformulating the institutional culture
2020
The article investigates the ongoing reformulation of the institutional culture of early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Finnish evening ECEC. Educators’ practices in implementing evening ECEC were explored and viewed through the lens of young children’s belonging. Data were collected by observing the evenings of eight children aged 20–36 months in two Finnish centers offering flexibly scheduled ECEC and analyzed using qualitative thematic analysis. Three main themes of educators’ practices were identified: (1) managing a unique and changing social group, (2) fostering homeliness, and (3) maintaining routines and institutional order. While these practices mostly contributed to child-…
Documenting Napping: The Agentic Force of Documents and Human Action
2015
The article examines the question of the agentic force of documents in institutional practices and proposes a conceptual model of the agentic relation between documentation and human actors. For this aim, it presents an empirical case study of Finnish early childhood education and care. The study deals with individual education plans (IEPs), which are an example of child documentation that aims at an individualised and participatory pedagogy. The analytical focus is on a single topic of an IEP, the child’s afternoon naps, and how these are negotiated in the three-party encounter between a parent, a practitioner and the IEP document. The theoretical framework draws on the theories of documen…
Finnish Pre-Service Teachers’ Perceptions of Perceived Competence in Early Childhood Physical Education
2021
Early childhood education and care (ECEC) teachers have a central role in supporting young children’s physical activity (PA) and overall development in the early years. However, the value of early childhood education teacher training (ECETT) programmes is not widely understood. This study aimed to investigate pre-service teachers’ perceptions of perceived competence when (1) supporting a child’s PA, (2) teaching PE, and (3) observing and assessing a child’s motor skills and PA. These self-evaluations were compared with a range of individual, educational, and behavioural characteristics. Final-year Bachelor degree pre-service teachers (n = 274
Parental agency and related emotions in the educational partnership
2017
This study investigated the understudied issue of parental agency and related emotions in the educational partnership in the context of Finnish early childhood education and care. We asked (i) what types of parental agency can be identified in the educational partnership and (ii) in what ways emotions are related to these types of agency. The narrative method was used to analyse the interview data of parents of children with difficulties in self-regulation. The findings indicate that parental agency in the educational partnership varied from proactive and confrontational to hindered. Typically, pleasant emotions were related to proactive and unpleasant emotions to confrontational parental a…
Finnish and Greek early childhood teachers’ perspectives and practices in supporting children’s autonomy
2017
Kindergarten teachers from different cultural backgrounds attribute various meanings to children’s autonomy. There seems to be cultural differences in early childhood education curricula with regard to how a child’s autonomy is described and how it is supported. This qualitative study asks: how do teachers narrate their perspective and pedagogical support of children’s autonomy, and what kinds of similarities and differences in the pedagogy and practices can be found in Finnish and Greek early childhood education (ECEC) contexts? The data of this qualitative study consist of a semi-structured questionnaire of 14 kindergarten teachers and observations of their pedagogical practices in the da…
Preservice teachers’ beliefs about young children’s technology use at home
2021
Teachers’ beliefs about young children’s technology use at home are intertwined with their beliefs about parents and their parenting practices. This paper reports a qualitative study of eight purposefully selected Chinese preservice early childhood (EC) teachers’ beliefs about children’s home technology use and associated representations of parents and teachers. The participants possessed inflated positive beliefs about young children’s natural technology competence but were worried that parents would expose children to content for prolonged periods. Teachers’ role was seen as responsible guides for children and educational authorities over parents. Implications for research and teacher edu…
Kindergarten space and autonomy in construction - Explorations during team ethnography in a Finnish kindergarten
2018
Abstract Children’s autonomy is a cultural ideal in Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC). In this article we examine autonomy in spatial terms. The theoretical background is developed by applying spatial sociology. Our starting point is that space is relationally produced, thus, we understand space as continuously negotiated, reconstructed and reorganized phenomena. In this article, we investigate the production of space by different actors in ECEC and seek to show how autonomy is also continuously produced and re-produced in the negotiation of space. For this investigation we use data collected as part of a team ethnographic project in a Finnish kindergarten. The project inclu…
Language orientations in early childhood education policy in Finland and Norway
2021
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/),which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This article investigates the language orientations in education policy documents for early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Finland and Norway. Finland, an officially bilingual country, and Norway, a predominantly monolingual country, share similar views on ECEC. However, the ECEC field in both c…
Values of well-being and togetherness in the early childhood education of younger children
2017
This chapter illustrates the younger children’s expressions of the values of well-being and togetherness in day-care groups and the educators’ role in communicating these values. The values of well-being and togetherness were closely interconnected. The children expressed these values by bodily gestures, laughter and enthusiasm in their activities and by mutual interest, physical closeness, and playing together. The educators communicated the values by a caring attitude and emotional warmth. They were present to the children and assured that the atmosphere was supportive and joyful. The educators encouraged the children to engage in shared endeavors and, above all, played with them. Final D…
Subsidizing private childcare in a universal regime
2023
AbstractAll families in Finland have the freedom to choose between subsidized home care, universal public childcare, and private childcare. We study the impact of the introduction of private childcare subsidies in Finland. Private childcare subsidies have causal effects on take-up but no impact on home care or employment among women with small children. Instead, private services seem to crowd out public childcare. Private services have a socioeconomic gradient by mother’s education that steepens when the subsidy increases. Families’ preferences between home care, public childcare, and private childcare do not explain the result.