Browsing by Author "Einiö, Meri"

Objectives. In this study I covered gender and gender sensitive education from early childhood students’ perspective. There were two research questions: what are early childhood education students’ conceptions about gender and what are early childhood students’ conceptions about gender sensitive education. In this study conception stands for a person’s associations of some phenomenon. My interest was what kind of conceptions students bring out and how they talk about gender and gender sensitive education while interacting with each other. The aim of this study is to describe what students know or bring up about gender and gender sensitive educati-on. Methods. This study is a qualitative study. The data of this study was collected by using a focus group conversation. Three early chidhood education students from University of Helsinki par-ticipated in the focus group conversation. In the focus group conversation the students discus-sed gender and gender sensitive education for about an hour. The conversation was based on the provided material. The data was recorded and then transcribed word for word. The transcri-bed data was analysed using content analysis. Results and conclusions. Based on the discussions two essential conceptions about gender and four essential conceptions about gender sensitive education emerged. The essential conceptions about gender were: Individual as the definer of gender and Society as the definer of gender. The essential conceptions about gender sensitive education were: Equal treatment, Child-initiated activity, Challenge and Educators abilities. The early childhood education students had a lot of knowledge about gender and gender sensitive education and it’s contents. The students recognized many gendered practices in early childhood education. The students experience their own abilities to be weak to practise gender sensitive education because they find that the subject has not been covered enough in the early childhood education studies.