No abstract

THE AIM OF THIS RESEARCH is to provide a better understanding of children's competence, vulnerability and power issues, and to promote better decision making and protection of children by educators. This means the pedagogy in early childhood education needs to be based on understanding the nature of children's participation and participatory learning. Further on it requires understanding about how the educators working in day care could aim the pedagogical process to supporting children's participation via developing practices. Research is based on a large survey conducted in the Finnish early childhood education (ECE) field and analysed through abductive content analysis. The results show that in the pedagogical process three kinds of participation supporting means could be identified: facilitating environment and atmosphere; facilitating professional skills for learning and supporting children's perspective; and facilitating ongoing participatory practices. Finally, a framework of developing participatory practices was constructed from the findings to represent the pedagogical cycle of participation.

In this article, we describe the professional development towards distributed leadership among different organizational levels in Finnish day care centres within the Helsinki metropolitan area. The aim of the study was to monitor the progress of professional development between educational administration and practitioners. The data was based on descriptions of reflective practices used in the development projects of each research day care centre. Participants were asked to describe developing practices and reflect on their own contributions to the process as both individuals and together as working teams during the two years of the development project. The researchers collected these reflections, analysed them to produce results and then delivered this evidence to participants for utilization in reflection and further processing of working practices with the support of the mentor. Directors and mentors viewed distributed leadership as a good way to encourage development practices and brought out the role of staff as important agents in the development process. The distribution of leadership seems to be best realized among the participants at the lowest and middle hierarchical levels.

Early childhood education and care is a current interest in many countries. Many international studies have highlighted the importance of high-quality early education environments where learning and play are integrated. Studies show that these types of learning environments have a positive impact on children’s future prospects and overall development. Critical curriculum steering documents from Finland and Brazil form the basis of this study and can similarly be shown to define the quality of these environments, as well as providing definitions of playful learning in these differing cultural contexts. A content analysis explores patterns of the cultural and pedagogical difference of definition. This descriptive comparison permitted similarities and differences between the countries with regard to play to emerge. In this article, the authors explore what these different cultural and pedagogical definitions of play and playful learning are and what they might mean. The article thus makes a methodological contribution to a broader discussion of comparative studies of national curricula in early childhood education with specific regard to children’s engagement, learning and development in and through play. The theoretical conclusions are, however, more tentative, but the authors suggest some innovative ways to conceptualise cultural and pedagogical differences in play by making an analogy with Wittgenstein’s analysis of games in his Philosophical Investigations.

The concept of pedagogy is the key to understanding pedagogy in early childhood education (ECE) in the Nordic countries, which are known for their high quality of life and education. However, in ECE, there are several different approaches toward pedagogy and it can be said that pedagogy is a multidimensional and dynamic concept. In this paper, the different approaches to pedagogy are defined and reconceptualized through an integrative literature analysis focusing on scientific papers and research reports of the concept. Five approaches to pedagogy were constructed: pedagogy through interaction, pedagogy through scaffolding, pedagogy through didactics, pedagogy through expertise, and pedagogy through future orientation. The identified tensions and elements within the five approaches are presented. Finally, the shared elements among these pedagogical approaches are presented in a dynamic model.