From children's own perspective, play and learning are not always separate in practices during early years. The purpose of this article is, first, to scrutinise the background and character of early years education in terms of play and learning. Second, to elaborate the findings of several years of research about children's learning in preschool related to the curriculum of early years education and, finally, to propose a sustainable pedagogy for the future, which does not separate play from learning but draws upon the similarities in character in order to promote creativity in future generations. Introducing the notions of act and object of learning and play (by act we mean how children play and learn and with the object we mean what children play and learn) we will chisel out an alternative early childhood education approach, here called developmental pedagogy, based on recent research in the field of play and learning, but also related to earlier approaches to early education.

Summary. One group of Hungarian (N=29) and one group of Swedish (N=31) secondary school students read Franz Kafka's famous parable “Before the Law” several times, each reading being followed by the students recalling the story and stating how they had understood what the story meant. A limited number of qualitatively different ways of understanding the parable were found and these different ways could be related to each other in terms of how well they had captured the meaning of the story. In some cases the students used what we have called “reflective variation” in their reading of the story. Reflective variation could have the form of “variation in meaning”—the students trying alternative understandings of the story as a whole or of its constituent parts. Another form of reflective variation found was “elaborative variation” — the students making explicit the implications of their understanding of the story or of some of its constituent parts. The use of reflective variation was highly correlated with more advanced ways of understanding the parable.

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The aim of this article is to analyse teachers' changing ways of talking about children's aesthetic learning in the early years as a result of a research and development project. With a point of departure in developmental and variation theory, a praxis oriented project was designed with the aim of finding out whether collaborative talk and meta-cognitive dialogues could contribute to children's learning of music, dance and poetry. The participating teachers were offered in-service training in order to develop a new way of teaching and new ways of thinking about the curriculum and children's learning. Interviews with the teachers were carried out at the beginning and the end of the project. The teachers' learning was expressed in changed ways of talking about aesthetics and learning. From an emphasis on personality development and the teacher's lack of expertise with the aesthetic subjects as an obstacle, the teachers expressed a view of having become more aware of the concept of learning objects in the aesthetics, of their own role as teachers in directing children's attention and to listen to children. The teachers thus gained a new way of talking about themselves as teachers and about children's learning within music, dance and poetry.

In this study, an extensive episode of teachers working with the intention of developing children's understanding of rhyme is analysed. The data for the analysis consist of a video-recording of two teachers and seven children (aged 3-5 years) working with a type of rhyme-card and trying to construct a poem. The analytical interest lies in the opportunities that the teachers provide children to develop a notion of rhyme. The result shows that what a rhyme is to large extent remains implicit in the talk. The critical distinction between a relation between words based on sound (i.e. a rhyme) and a relation between words based on sense also remains unverbalized. This means that while some children may discover this distinction themselves through participating in this activity and encountering a variety of examples, a child who has not understood this difference is not actually helped to do so. Relevance and implications of this study to the practice of preschool are briefly discussed.