Browsing by Subject "sovittelu"

The purpose of this study was to describe preschool teachers views on the use of MiniVerso in children’s mediation situations. MiniVerso, a practice used in mediations in preschools in Finland is now used in over 1200 locations and more users are being trained continuously. Recent studies about peer mediation have concerned largely school environments, so therefore it is important to study mediation in preschool context. The research questions were: how preschool teachers experience the use of MiniVerso in everyday life in preschool, do they consider the use of MiniVerso to be beneficial and how has the introduction of MiniVerso affected the solving of conflict situations in the minds of the teachers. The research data consisted of interviews of three preschool teachers from the same location. The data was gathered by the end of the year 2018 by theme interviews and it was analysed using theory-guided content analysis. As a result of the analysis two main categories were formed: the factors encouraging to the use of MiniVerso and the factors not supporting the use of MiniVerso. These categories were divided further to more specific subcategories. The results showed that there were both positive and negative attributes in the use of MiniVerso, which had influence on how beneficial MiniVerso was experienced by the teachers. The teachers brought up that the practice had both good and challenging elements and to ensure the best effectiveness of the practice they had made some modifications to the use of MiniVerso in everyday life. A notable finding in my study was that the written agreement used in school mediation does not fit to early childhood education properly without any modification. In addition, the results brought up also a motivational perspective, which also included positive and negative factors. Furthermore, the results showed that the teachers felt that MiniVerso supported the requirements for children’s learning set in the Finnish curriculum for early childhood education. However children’s right to refuse from mediation created difficulties for the implementation of practice.