Browsing by Subject "Early childhood education"

Objectives. According to the Finnish National core Curriculum, one of the objectives of early childhood education and care is to support children's evolving skills of participation and influence, to which the skills of public performing are unequivocally linked. The presence of performance anxiety can be considered a key obstacle in the development of these skills. According to previous studies, performing anxiety can limit an individual's life in many ways, decrease success in studies and lead to challenges in promoting an individual’s working life. The purpose of this study is to find out how much scientific information the personnel in early childhood education and care have at their disposal when planning, evaluating, and further developing the content areas of early childhood education, taking the aspect of performing anxiety into consideration. Methods. This study was started out as a systematic literature review by searching for data from three scientific databases of remarkable importance with suitable search clauses. Based on the definition of concepts relevant to this study, search clauses were formed considering the individual search guidelines for each database. The search results were collected in tables and their relevance to this study assessed accordingly. After analyzing the retrieved data and based on the results obtained, the focus was turned to deeper theoretical cerebration on the phenomenon of performing anxiety in the context of early childhood education. Results and conclusions. Pedagogical attention should be paid to the development and control of performing anxiety during early childhood education in the spirit of the National Core Curriculum of Early Childhood Education. In practice, however, there is little to none scientific data available to early childhood education and care personnel on which to base the practicing of the skills of public performing, taking the aspect of performance anxiety into account.

In Finnish day-care centres kindergarten teachers and nursery nurses work together in multi-professional teams. These occupational groups have different qualifications and educational backgrounds. However, earlier studies have shown that many day-care centres don't make use of the multi-professional expertise produced by these different professions. In these centres work assignments are often shared according to the work shifts, regardless of the educational background of the workers. As a result, different educational backgrounds of the staff are sometimes seen, instead of enriching the work, as causing uncertainty about the skills of the professional groups and appropriate work tasks for them. Uncertainty is also caused by the historical roots of the day care. In this study, I tried to clarify the present state of multi-professional teamwork in day-care centres through three research problems. The research problems are: (1) How do the work assignments of the different occupational groups differ from each other in a multi-professional team? (2) What are the challenges for multi-professional teamwork in early childhood education? And (3) Which factors are linked with the personnel's perceptions about the functionality of the multi-professional teamwork? The data was collected through an open internet survey. A total of 157 kindergarten teachers and 136 nursery nurses responded to the survey. The analysis was carried out by the methods of content analysis. Theory directed content analysis was used to clarify the meanings of the open questionnaire replies and to classify the content of the survey in the themes that summarize the research results. According to this study, kindergarten teachers' and nurses' work assignments differ from each other at least in part of the day-care centres. However, this is not the case in every day-care centre because there is a lot of day-care centres where work assignments are not shared at all according to the educational backgrounds, but only by the work shifts. The challenges of the teamwork were everyone does everything -working culture, lack of appreciation, lack of understanding, invisible expertise, and changes that come outside of the day-care centres. The personnel's perceptions about the team's functionality were influenced by the division of the work assignments, the personal characteristics of the team members, the appreciation of others and the actions of the director. In particular, the division of the work assignments created disagreements between the occupational groups. According to this study, the field of early childhood education is undergoing a form of a struggle where occupational groups fight each other with strategies of social closure over capitals and positions.

The aim of this study is to examine parents' beliefs on what impact Covid-19 has had on our young children's physical activity. With the term young children, I refer to children aged from one to six years old. The research questions for this study are the following: 1. How do parents view the impact Covid-19 has had on children's physical activity? 2. What kind of change in the child’s physical activity can be seen? 3. Is there a change in the child’s attitude towards physical activity? In the chapter physical activity some background on how children master physical movements will be presented. The chapter contains children’s physical development, as well as benefits and the needs for physical activity. Physical development and physical activity go hand in hand, developing physically often leads to the child becoming more physically active. In the chapter Covid-19 and everyday life, viewpoints on how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected young children’s everyday life and especially physical activity are examined. The Covid-19 pandemic led to activities organized for families with children, such as story-time in library, music-play at the library/church and family café etc. stopped to decrease the spreading of the Covid-19 virus. A short complete lockdown took place in the beginning of spring 2020, where early childhood centers closed, and only parents/guardians who could not stay at home with their children had the right to bring their child to early childhood education. The parents that had the opportunity to stay home with their child were offered online early childhood education via the early childhood education center that they normally attend to. How much activities were sent out depended on the early childhood centers approach and beliefs (Hilppö, et al. 2020; Nurhonen et al. 2021). However, it was decided later that early childhood education centers remained open during the pandemic, and children were offered everyday life as normal as possible. Even though, early childhood education centers opened, the Covid-19 restrictions still existed (Nurhonen et al. 2021). How these restrictions were followed depended on the family. With the use of questionnaire, that were sent out to early childhood education centers and parent-child activities I have tried to get a view on how parents view the impact Covid-19 has had on young children’s physical activity. Has the pandemic affected young children’s physical activity? What are the parents’ beliefs? and how well with Covid-19 going on can children be physically active? I collected 103 answers from the questionnaire. Looking at the collected data I have also tried to see how and what attitudes towards physical activity children have. Do they enjoy being outdoors, physically active and has this changed during the pandemic? What can be concluded from this study is that even though the Covid-19 pandemic has been going on for 2 years it has not, according to the parents of the children, affected young children's physical activity that markedly. The children of this study seem to be as physically active as before the Covid-19 pandemic. This study is only a sample of a specific number of people, trying to explain how Covid-19 has affected the daily lives of children. Further study is needed to fully understand the changes made by Covid-19.

The purpose of this study was to examine pedagogical leadership and quality in early childhood education in the context of the Finnish early childhood education and care system (ECEC). According to Fonsén (2014), pedagogical quality requires strong pedagogical leadership. However, studies indicate that there is instability of quality in Finnish day cares (Karila et.al., 2017). In addition, Finland’s ECEC system has undergone vast changes over recent years, which have led to unclarity of staff roles and responsibilities. This has increased the work pressure of day care directors in maintaining both the management of daily tasks as well as pedagogical quality. The main research focus was to examine how elements of pedagogical leadership in recent studies of pedagogical leadership in early childhood education relate to pedagogical quality in Finnish early child-hood education and care. Pedagogical leadership was approached from the perspective of national and municipal levels. The effect of pedagogical leadership on pedagogical quality was also explored from the perspective of staff education. The research findings were then applied to the practical levels of early childhood education by approaching quality from the perspective of guardians, children as well as staff and directors. The methodology for this qualitative study consisted of content analysis of the most recent studies on pedagogical leadership in early childhood education. The data was collected using purposive sampling methods and was analysed systematically through use of coding and thematic categorisation. Finland’s Education and Evaluation Centre’s (FINEEC) recent research-based structural and process quality indicators provided the themes that were used as a foundation to examine how pedagogical leadership related to the structural and process quality factors in the studies on pedagogical leadership from the year 2010 to the present. The findings were presented thematically using an interpretive ‘talking with theory’ approach that allowed the researcher to present the findings and the supporting theory simultaneously. The research revealed that changes in the governance of early childhood education in 2015 led to a distributed format of leadership that poses challenges to early childhood education and leadership in terms of defining the core tasks in early childhood education. Differing interpretations of roles and responsibilities of staff affect the quality of education and care in day care centres in Finland. Also, communication between the national, municipal and practical levels of leadership was also an influencing factor in the quality of early childhood education. This research revealed challenges in communication between different levels of early childhood education in Finland. Distributed pedagogical leadership presented itself as a major theme in the analysis as a method to alleviate the pressure of leaders in the field. However, the studies also revealed a complexity in the perimeters and definitions of the concept of distributed leadership that are yet to be overcome. The most recent advances in pedagogical quality in the field of early childhood education, which have been spurred on by the pedagogical leadership research studies that have been examined in this study, indicate that the improvement of quality in early childhood education in Finland is dependent on the strength of pedagogical leadership on all levels of management in early childhood education.