Browsing by Author "Autio, Heidi"

The purpose of this thesis is to explore children´s perception of their possibilities to participate in and influence the daily activities and their learning in preschool. This study emphasizes the children´s perception by exploring the phenomenon from the children´s perspective. The theoretical background focuses on influence and participation as concepts, democratic rights and factors that have an impact on children’s possibilities to be able to affect the daily activities and their own learning. The study´s empirical part was executed as a qualitative interview with preschool children. Ten preschool children participated in the interview and the interviews were conducted in pairs at the preschool. The research approach for this study is phenomenographical, because I wanted to research children´s perceptions of their influence and participation at preschool. The study shows that children perceive limited possibilities to affect the daily activities of the preschool. An interesting result is that children perceive that it is mainly the educators who decide at preschool and that free play is the only activity in which the children feel that they can decide freely what to do. In the results differences in perceptions of the possibilities in the free play emerge since some children consider that they can decide independently while other children consider that they can decide almost independently. It is found that the children have a possibility to affect the planned daily activities to some degree. Though it is entirely depending on if the educators offers the children the opportunity. The results show that most of the children perceive that they can affect their own learning, with help from their own dedication the children can get assistance in learning.