Browsing by Author "di Nola-Vatanen, Flavia"

The moment of rest has been studied quite little in the Finnish early childhood education research, in the light of the research carried out, its implementation has been proved pedagogically weak. The purpose of this study is to find out what causes such pedagogical weakness. To achieve this understanding, the first aim is to clarify the significance of the moment of rest as an early childhood education institutional moment. After this, the goal is to find out whether this is reflected in the views of early childhood education teachers. For the first task, I use current institutional documents related to the early childhood education. I then open up the more general concept of basic activities, following Kettukangas’ conceptual analysis study and comparing her results with other researchers who have dealt with basic care situations. Based on these results, I will try to deduce the specific characteristics of the moment of rest. Reflecting the characteristics related to the basic activities in general, the moment of rest should be recognized as a situation that includes various essential aspects. Its purpose is not only the satisfaction of the physiological need for rest (basic care). To this must be added three other dimensions: the taking care of the emotional state of the child (caring), the educational aim that pursues the autonomy of the child (educational purpose) and the consequent pedagogical approach based on planning (pedagogical intentional interaction). These characteristics are also the criteria that define the moment of rest within the institutional framework of early childhood education. The main question of the study became: are there notable differences between this institutional concept of the moment of rest and the opinions that early childhood teachers have about it? To answer it, I clarified the opinions of early childhood teachers about the moment of rest through a qualitative research, to which I applied a phenomenographic approach. The material was collected using an open-ended questionnaire, published in November 2019 in a social media group targeting early childhood education teachers. Trough the survey I obtained 74 eligible answers. As a method of data analysis, I used data-based content analysis. Based on the research results, early childhood education teachers are usually not aware of all the defining characteristics that belong to the moment of rest as institutional moment. In particular, they do not recognize the specific educational goals of the moment of rest, and therefore do not plan or use pedagogical methods to achieve them. However, the results also give hope that the situation can be resolved if the concept of the moment of rest as an institutional early childhood education moment were better explained in documents, textbooks and studies.