Search results for "YK"
showing 10 items of 5437 documents
How do early family systems predict emotion recognition in middle childhood?
2021
Facial emotion recognition (FER) is a fundamental element in human interaction. It begins to develop soon after birth and is important in achieving developmental tasks of middle childhood, such as developing mutual friendships and acquiring social rules of peer groups. Despite its importance, FER research during middle childhood continues to be rather limited. Moreover, research is ambiguous on how the quality of one's early social-emotional environment shapes FER development, and longitudinal studies spanning from infancy to later development are scarce. In this study, we examine how the cohesive, authoritarian, disengaged and enmeshed family system types, assessed during pregnancy and inf…
Decreased intersubject synchrony in dynamic valence ratings of sad movie contents in dysphoric individuals
2021
Emotional reactions to movies are typically similar between people. However, depressive symptoms decrease synchrony in brain responses. Less is known about the effect of depressive symptoms on intersubject synchrony in conscious stimulus-related processing. In this study, we presented amusing, sad and fearful movie clips to dysphoric individuals (those with elevated depressive symptoms) and control participants to dynamically rate the clips’ valences (positive vs. negative). We analysed both the valence ratings’ mean values and intersubject correlation (ISC). We used electrodermal activity (EDA) to complement the measurement in a separate session. There were no group differences in either t…
Rationalising public support for private early childhood education and care: the case of Finland
2019
In Finland, early childhood education and care (ECEC) is traditionally publicly provided. However, private ECEC provision has increased during the past decade, largely as a result of financial support from the public sector. Drawing on qualitative interviews with municipal decision-makers, this article identifies three frames within which publicly subsidised private ECEC provision and marketisation are rationalised: the pragmatic frame, the government frame and the choice frame. The results show that even though market logics and tendencies seem to have gained a strong foothold in local policies, there is a keen interest in universalism and maintaining public control over local ECEC provisi…
Language Education Policies and Early Childhood Education
2020
This chapter discusses the importance of different types of early language education in the public system according to national policy in two geopolitical contexts: Continental Northern Europe and the UK. We define early language education policy as the language policies in early childhood education (ECE) including planning, practices, and ideologies related to the teaching and learning of languages. We present a variety of theoretical approaches and discuss their applicability to the field of early language education research. These approaches include traditional top-down policy implementation models as well as more dynamic and ecological theoretical approaches. Following that, we look at …
Selectivity of clientele in Finnish private early childhood education and care
2021
In accordance with the Nordic welfare model, the Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC) system has traditionally been based on public provision and the idea of universalism. However, over the last twenty years the ECEC system has undergone market-oriented reforms. As a result, the share of private for-profit ECEC provision has grown significantly. By applying impression management theory, this qualitative research examines how representatives of private ECEC providers describe the selection and selectivity of their clientele and how they aim at managing the impression they convey through their descriptions. The study shows how three different mechanisms of selectivity are produce…
‘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…
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…