Browsing by Author "Oesch-Kuisma, Hanna"

The development of children’s ability to self-regulate stress, actions and emotional expression in balanced manner is nowadays even more important as children are flooded with stimuli and demands. Kindergarten teacher’s emotional skills and competence are essential since they support the development of children’s self-regulation. Mindfulness is practised in schools around the world, and it may offer new tools also for early childhood education. In this enquiry I studied the views of kindergarten teachers about using mindfulness with children, as well as their emotional competency as instructors for children’s regulation abilities. Additionally I studied what kind of practices and activities are already in use in kindergartens to support the emotional and mindful skills of the children. I collected the research material with internet questionnaire. 65 kindergarten teachers from Helsinki and Espoo in southern Finland responded to the questionnaire. The questionnaire was developed by myself and therefore it’s reliability was found to be relatively low. Resolving of the research material was made with methods of quantitative reseach to find out the correlations and statis-tical contacts of different variables. The findings of this study concluded that being familiar with and/or educated in mindfulness was statistically connected with teacher’s competence, self-control and emotional self-knowledge as well as with teacher’s conflict management skills and thoughts about conception training with children. Additionally responder’s work experience correlated with teacher’s body awareness and mind set about conception training with children. Responder’s educational background correlated with teacher’s optimism and with their understanding regarding children’s abilities to learn how brainfunctions control emotion regulation. On the basis of these findings kindergarten teachers seem to be intrigued for applying mindfulness in early child-hood education in many ways. It can also be deduced that teachers themselves will benefit from mindfulness, as it has been found to enhance self-knowledge and awareness of your own modes of operation and improve interaction skills. So far there has been only very limited research about the kindergarten teachers’ competence in emotional intelligence. The outcomes of this study can be applied for appraising mindfulness applications into early childhood education and developing education and professional competency of kindergarten teachers.