Search results for "Qualitative"
showing 10 items of 1328 documents
Teacher–child relationships narrated by parents of children with difficulties in self-regulation
2016
This study addresses the relationships between teachers and children (four to six years old) with difficulties in self-regulation from the parent's point of view. Narratives were constructed in 21 interviews with parents of children who have difficulties in self-regulation. The study focused on two questions: (i) What kinds of teacher–child relationships can be identified in the parents’ narratives? and (ii) How is the child positioned in this relational context? The teacher–child relationships found were labelled neutral, problematic and caring. Within these categories, the child was positioned in nine ways ranging from the child as troublesome to the child as unique. The study offers tool…
Younger children in ECEC: focus on the national steering documents in the Nordic countries
2015
The aim of this study was to review the national steering documents on early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, with the focus on children up to the age of three, posing the question: What do these documents tell us about ECEC for younger children in the Nordic early childhood settings? Methodologically, a qualitative document analysis was applied. The documents provide a picture of young children whose age, individual needs and a number of other factors, such as cultural background, should be taken into account in ECEC. These children learn holistically, in close interaction with their environment. Their safety and well-being are seen as pa…
The construction of citizenship in initial teacher training of Early Childhood Education
2020
Los graves problemas sociales y ambientales de nuestro mundo exigen un modelo de educación para una ciudadanía global, participativa y crítica. Para ello es necesaria una formación del futuro profesorado como educadores en ciudadanía, desarrollando la concienciación en relación con esos problemas y las actitudes de compromiso social, con un modelo didáctico que propicie la construcción de dicho modelo de ciudadanía en su futuro alumnado. Sobre esta fundamentación, se desarrolla una investigación cualitativa, mediante entrevistas grupales, que analiza el proceso de construcción de la ciudadanía en estudiantes del grado de Maestro en Educación Infantil de la Universidad de Sevilla, en el marc…
Perspectives on Leadership in Early Childhood Education and Care Centers Through Community of Practice
2021
This article investigates early childhood education and care (ECEC) leadership through the concept of community of practice (COP). The focus is on ECEC leaders’ perceptions regarding their leadership during the educational changes taking place in the context of Finnish ECEC. The purpose is to increase understanding of how leaders see themselves in relation to the ECEC multi professional working community and practices of distributed leadership. The data are five focus group interviews of ECEC leaders analyzed with directed content analysis within the theoretical frame of domain, practice, and community forming the core of COP in Lave and Wenger. The results show how all three COP component…
Important themes in research on and education of young children in day care centres: Finnish viewpoints
2013
The aim of this article is to outline important themes, according to Finnish early childhood education researchers, that need to be addressed in researching and educating children under three years of age in Finland. To achieve this aim, the article divides into two parts. First, we present and discuss the results of a small-scale survey, conducted in Finland, on the views of key informants in the early childhood education units of Finnish universities. Second, the views presented in the survey are used as a starting point to introduce two ongoing qualitative case studies on the everyday life of toddlers in Finnish day care centres. In line with the survey findings, these case studies empha…
The teacher's lap – a site of emotional well-being for the younger children in day-care groups
2014
This study focuses on a particular relationship between teachers and one- to three-year-old children: the child in the teacher's lap. When, in what situations, does this happen? Who are the children in the teacher's lap? Why are they there? How do children express emotional well-being when in the teacher's lap? Relational, sociocultural and revised attachment approaches to emotional well-being supplied the theoretical framework of the study. Data were collected by ethnographic methods and analysed qualitatively. Two day-care groups in Finland participated. For most of the day, at least one child was in a teacher's lap. The teacher's lap signified, for example, not only consolation and confi…
Recording Support Measures in the Sequential Pedagogical Documents of Children With Special Education Needs
2019
This study investigates the descriptions of support measures in the sequential pedagogical documents (individual education plans or programs and others) of children with special education needs from early childhood education and care to preprimary education. According to the previous research, the role of pedagogical work is largely disregarded in these documents, which typically focus on describing children’s challenges instead of support measures. In this study, the sequential pedagogical documents ( N = 257) of 64 Finnish children were studied for approximately 3 to 6 years, and the data were analyzed by investigating the textual and content-related coherence, as well as the linguistic …
Negotiating Ethics-in-Action in a Long-term Research Relationship with a Young Child
2021
AbstractThis article continues the discussions of relational ethics put forward in Human Arenas in “Arena of Ethics” (Hilppö et al., 2019). Our aim in this article is to explore and discuss relational ethics, as ethics-in-action, in a long-term research relationship with a child. Our question is: How is ethics-in-action negotiated during critical incidents in the construction of a research space that involves a long-term research relationship with a young child? This article is based on a research project that focused on children’s transitions in early childhood education and care (ECEC). These transitions include the transition from home care to ECEC as well as transitions from child group…
‘Ordinary’ and ‘diverse’ families : A case study of family discourses by Finnish early childhood education and care administrators
2021
The increased family diversity is a major global trend. Although family configurations are also diverse in contemporary Finland, it has been argued that Finnish family policies and institutional understanding of family life continues to focus on the heteronormative two-parent family with a native Finnish background. To address this issue, we analysed Finnish family discourses through qualitative interviews with early childhood education and care administrators (n = 47), applying a discourse analytic framework. Our results suggest that families are discussed through two divergent but interwoven discourses, i.e. the discourse of ordinary families and that of diverse families. The former focus…
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…