Browsing by Subject "vuorovaikutus"

The aim of this study was to describe difficulties in kids self-regulation and define multiple things that cause it in day care interaction situations. The research questions are 1. How difficulties in self-regulation appear in interaction, 2. What are the causes that effect to self-regulation, and 3. What pedagogical methods are applied concerning self-regulation in day care groups in this research. Stress is closely related with self-regulation. When faced with a stimulus, people become alerted. That elevates stress level and calls for self regulation. Self-regulation is considered as dependent on circumstances and interaction. Difficulties in self-regulation often coexist with difficulties in peer relations. People have inborn abilities to regulate emotions and behavior, but self-regulation skills are also learned in interaction with others. Human is considered to be pro-social by birth, and to be favoring helping others. Interventions concerning self-regulation has been developed, to enhance pedagogical sensitivity among day care teachers. Pedagogical sensitivity reduces stress and helps children to self-regulate. Two day care groups from Helsinki participated in this research. Research groups had children with special needs integrated. The data was collected by videotaping and observing the interaction in normal daily activities in spring 2015, two days in a row. Interesting clips were chosen from the videotapes to be shown to day care teachers together with the interviews. In interviews, the teachers commented about the situations from the videoclips and answered open questions about self-regulation. Observations from the videotapes and transcribed interviews were analyzed according to methods of qualitative content analysis. According to research findings, difficulties in self-regulation appear in interaction with unique ways. Children seem to have their own individual ways to react in face of a stress and in need of self-regulation. Difficulties in self-regulation appeared in behavior merely described with three concepts: ”fight, flee or freeze”. Difficulties were either active and extraverted, or passive and introverted. The causes that effect self-regulation in this research were distinctive and dependent on the situation. Children had very different abilities to face day care interaction situations. Self-regulation was effected with multiple, also random causes, and because of that self-regulation cannot be seen linear from its causes and effects. Causes were classified as 1. abilities to regulate, 2. causes that strain and challenging interaction situations. These three causes can be found in all research situations that had self-regulation difficulties. Adult support, well-planned, structured day care environment and customs, that have been formed together, were the main causes that supported self-regulation in this research. In research day care groups self-regulation difficulties were prevented in many ways. Teachers had good knowledge and know-how about self-regulation. To support development of self-regulation in wider perspective knowledge should be increased. Children should have opportunities to train their self-regulation skills in their natural interaction situations, for example, with adult supported play, and interventions that enhance emotion-regulation and interaction skills.

Dialogue on children's wellbeing has significantly increased over the past few years. The research focus has been on subjective wellbeing, with the individual's own experiences as the main concern. The focus in this case study is on the child's voice, or discovering how well or poorly children were heard at kindergarten meetings, where they discussed photographs that they had taken. The child's voice in this context refers to the child's own experiences and perspectives narrated by himself/ herself. In my study, I focus on listening to the child through participation. I concentrate on observing how listening and participation were realized in semi-structured interactive situations within a kindergarten group. In addition, I pay attention to any factors that contributed to the child's voice being heard. In my research, children's participation is observed from a sociocultural perspective. The research data was collected in a kindergarten group, whose activities are based on positive pedagogy. The aim of positive pedagogy is to support the child's overall wellbeing, emphasizing children's own initiative and involvement in their surroundings. This pedagogical faction that has recently gained popularity specifically pays attention to children's individual, meaningful experiences, and on positive feelings that the children can process and share in a familiar community. The study represents a child-focused research approach, in which children are direct providers of data. The actual research data consists of filmed interactive situations, in which the children narrate the experiences they have documented. A detailed analysis, applying Harry Shier's model (2001) on the pathways to participation and discourse analysis, was conducted on reflection discussions among five children. The children's participation in this study was multilevel: the children's roles were not only passive, but active when their views were taken into account. Three significant factors that contribute to children's voices being heard emerged in the study. Strategies of teacher, various tools used in activities, and other children appeared to affect participation and listening in reflection discussions. A conclusion to be drawn from the study is that cultural tools and other people have an effect on how the child's thoughts and opinions are presented in discussions.

The aim of the study. In preschool, children talk daily with peers and educators. This study examines the children's thinking and communication skills mainly through the concepts that Neil Mercer and his colleagues have defined. In light of earlier studies on the subject, an exploratory talk is especially meaningful in developing children's social and cognitive skills. In an exploratory talk, the children talk together using different methods to find agreement. This kind of discussion means they are thinking together. The aim of the study was to find out how children in early childhood education think together. The earlier study focused mainly on the school context; therefore, this study focuses on the early childhood education context. The main questions in the study are the following: what are the factors that make thinking together possible and what is the role of an educator? Methods. The research material consists of 25 episodes that were chosen from material filmed in two groups of 5-year-olds, with two days per group. In all of these episodes, there is interaction between the children and between an adult and the children. The episodes were categorised in groups depending on the way the children talked during the discussions. The main focus was on the exploratory talk. The main results. Three things made thinking together possible: the conversational culture in the group, the disagreements in conversations and problem solving, and a calm space for playing and immersion in the discussions. The role of the educator was incoherent. Either the educators were not present in the discussion events or they mostly interrupted them. The main problem was the quality of interaction. The questions the educators asked were simple right or wrong kinds of questions. When the children asked more thoughtful and open-ended questions when talking to each other, it led them to think together. These results are important, because transferring them to practice in early childhood education may support children's interaction, discussion and thinking skills, as well as developing a conversational culture in preschools.

The study examines teacher-child interaction in the early childhood classroom using improvisation as an analytic tool to locate pedagogical moments of spontaneous play and sustained shared thinking. The goal was to contribute to the understanding of the interactional mechanisms that occur when creativity is distributed throughout the group. Research of play interaction is fundamental in the context of early childhood education. More precise theoretical formulations of what happens during the play-based interaction between an adult and children are yet rare. One of the reasons is that play as a research phenomenon is complex and hard to operationalize in a systematic way. This study explains, by the means of in-depth case study findings, how the theoretical concept of improvisation can produce more careful descriptions about the early childhood teaching and the intricacies of teacher-child interaction in play based activity. Data for the narrative case study was collected through observations and video recordings of naturally occurring activities and encounters in a toddler play-based classroom. Data was enriched through video-elicited interviews (stimulated recall) of a single teacher. Research material was transcribed and analysed by the means of critical narrative analysis (CNA). Video recordings were also analysed through observing the involvement of the children (LIS-YC) and the engagement of the adult (AES). Focusing on early childhood education and play from the perspective of adult-child relational interaction, this research puts forward and presents evidence for two claims. First, in the context of early childhood education play should be understood as a professional skill of an adult and as a life-long qualitative dimension of interaction. Second, study findings suggests that improvisation, pedagogical sensitivity and introspective self reflection together could provide a new, more holistic interpretation to educational activities such as play in the viewpoint of adult's pedagogical practise. The results indicate that there is similarities between the logic of improvisation and the characteristics of pedagogical sensitivity. Study findings are consistent with theoretical perspectives that emphasize the active role of the adult in the development of the children's play competence.

Purposes. This is an ethnographic case study about elementary school teacher as a listener of a child's voice and about children as ethnographers in the classroom. The current study aims to make visible factors that limit listening child's voice at school and especially in the interaction between the teacher and the student. It also describes children's views and thoughts about school. This study is a part of consortium research "Children tell of their well-being - who listens?" (TelLis, a project number 1134911). Methods. The study was conducted at the school during four weeks at spring 2013. The data was gathered using children as ethnographers -method and consists of 57 classroom diaries written by fifth and sixth grade students and reflected by their four elementary school teachers. In addition, data includes children's drawings, teacher's interviews before the study, two teacher's group interviews and observation notes. In this study I describe teachers as listeners of students' voice during children as ethnographers -period. I ask, what kind of knowledge teachers find in children's classroom diaries. I also ask, how teachers make use of classroom diaries at their work. Analysis is based on qualitative content analysis. Findings and conclusion. Teachers found knowledge of students' culture and knowledge of their action, thoughts and opinions in classroom diaries. In addition, teachers looked for knowledge to evaluate competencies and developmental needs of students' and the class. Teachers used classroom diaries primarily as a tool of evaluating and educating children, but also as a tool for listening children and educating themselves as professionals. According to content analysis, listening to child represented mostly listening based on evaluating and educating children and themselves. There was less listening based on developing the school and the least listening based on encountering a child. Because of teachers' strong aims of evaluating and educating, listening to child was limited. The current study shows, that despite of several factors limiting listening to child's voice in society, school community and class community, teacher with his/her aims, views and actions has an emergent role as a listener of a child's voice. Teachers should create especially those kinds of listening moments that are based on encountering a child naturally and humanely.

The goal of this thesis was to research the interaction in Finnish as a second language lessons and the support of visual elements to the students and to the use of Finnish vocabulary in the classroom. In the thesis it was researched how the students possibly use the visual elements in the classroom to help them to find a specific Finnish word. The aim of this thesis was also to research if the assignments the students did during the lesson might helped them to learn Finnish vocabulary. There are only few studies on the support of the visual elements in the classroom and to the students learning. The data was collected as a part of the Long Second research project. The lessons were recorded twice a week in 2011-2012 in instruction preparing for basic education lessons. The data of this thesis was recorded in January and February 2012. The lessons consisted the human body and it's functions. In this thesis was used four Finnish as a second language lessons. There were five to six students in each lesson and they were 7 to 12 years old when the lessons were recorded. The data was transcribed and analyzed using the methods of the conversation analysis. In the classroom there is rich interaction between the students and with the teacher but also with using the support of the visual elements. Using the methods of the conversation analysis examples was presented where the students used the visual elements to support their interaction in the classroom. On the basis of the collected data, it seems that the visual elements in the classroom might support the learning and remembering of the Finnish vocabulary of the students. Furthermore it seems that the student's assignments done during the lesson possibly support the interaction of the students and help them to constitute a joined understanding on a subject.

The purpose of this study was to investigate explaining among third grade primary school students undergoing inquiry-based science project. Secondly, the aim of the study was to observe the ways with which the teacher sought to promote and scaffold explanation development by students. Previous studies have shown that self-made explanations have an impact on learning outcomes. Explaining has a particularly important role in science education in which the starting point for teaching should be in utilizing students' own experiences, skills and knowledge. This is a qualitative case study written from a socio-cultural point of view using video research as a method. The class in question had 18 students. Material was collected during the spring 2008, when a science project was carried out in the class. In this study I analyzed 6 classes all related to the project. I categorized the explanations using a modified literature-based classification system. These categories were descriptive and developmental intuitive explanations, descriptive and developmental unifying explanations, descriptive and developmental scientific explanations and unclassified explanations. In order to find out the possible methods the teacher used as scaffolds, I further analyzed all the developmental scientific explanations made by the students. I analyzed discovered scaffolding methods using transcribed examples of the classroom discourse. The results indicated that students' explanations changed during the monitoring period. Intuitive explanations and unifying explanations had a relatively high share in the first lesson, after which it decreased. Nevertheless, this category of explanations did not totally disappear either. The number of descriptive scientific explanations stayed relatively high throughout the analyzed period but the share of the developmental scientific explanations increased. By using certain methods the teacher seemed to support the creation of developmental scientific explanations. Those methods were teacher-led questions, mediating conversation and invocation of students' experience and expertise. The study offers examples of what kind of a role explaining has in practical school work, as well as ways how teachers can support students' explanation development during the classes.

Aims. Previous research has indicated that the quality of pedagogical relationship is related to students’ school-achievement. The quality of the relationship has also been shown to affect student’s engagement and coping in school. In addition, previous research shows that the quality of the teacher-student relationship is strongly affected by the somewhat permanent characteristics of a teacher and a student. For this reason, enhancing teachers’ professionality and awareness could be thought to play a significant role in developing the relationships. As the role of the teacher in the development of the relationships has been recognized as important, this thesis is focused on studying teachers' perceptions. Thus, the purpose of this thesis is to examine what kind of challenges do Finnish classroom teachers associate with the forming of pedagogical relationships, and which factors do teachers describe as promoting the quality. By answering the research questions, the aim is to increase knowledge of what Finnish classroom teachers think about pedagogical relationships. Methods. The research approach adopted in this thesis was qualitative. The research data was gathered by semi-structured interviews that were carried out via video calls. Seven classroom teachers were interviewed. The interviews took place during January 2022. When selecting the interviewees, the only criteria was that the participant had to have experience in working as a classroom teacher. There were also imaginary case-examples used in the interview. The cases represented different kinds of pedagogical relationships. The data was analyzed by a phenomenographic approach. Results and Conclusions. The teachers’ views on the challenges were divided into five different categories: teacher-related challenges, student-related challenges, school-related challenges, parent-related challenges and external challenges. The teachers’ views on the promoting factors of the relationships were divided into seven categories that include pedagogical methods, teacher’s thinking and being, attitude towards students, parents, collegial support, school culture and external factories. The results strengthened the idea of pedagogical relationships as dynamic phenomena that are influenced by multiple different factors. Considering the results of this thesis provides teachers an opportunity to raise their own awareness and reflect their own principles. The results also showed the kind of challenges, recognized by teachers, that could be easier to solve with better resources for education.

Aims. The aim of this dissertation was to find out and understand how children view different ways of touching: how they name them, what meanings and situations they associate with different ways of touching, and with whom they see different ways of contact as possible. I examined touch as part of social interaction. The aim has been to understand how touch is used and interpreted differently in different situations. Examining contact from the perspective of children is especially important for teaching. Teachers, school staff, and caregivers of children can take advantage of available research information when working with children. In addition, it helps to pay more attention to touches with children and important features associated with them, such as different individual ways of interpreting and dealing with touch. Previous research has shown that touch is an important means of interaction and can communicate a wide variety of things (Wiio, 1994). Through touch, the teacher can, among other things, help students with school assignments, facilitate concentration, comfort (Tainio et al., 2019), enhance learning, relieve stress, calm down (Owen & Gillentine, 2011), encourage and motivate (Guéguen, 2004) the students. Methods. The material of the study consisted of 30 student interviews collected by Koskettava koulu -project. There were 16 interviews, which two of them were individual interviews and the remaining 14 were paired interviews. In the interviews, students were shown 6 different images, each with different ways of touching. Pupils answered the interviewer's questions about touching and were also free to share their own thoughts about the images and the ways of touches. This dissertation is a qualitative study and I used content analysis and thematic methods as methods. Results and conclusions. Various themes emerged from the students' interviews, the largest themes were: 1. Touch in teacher and school activities, 2. Touch in emotional communication, interaction and expression, 3. Touch with close people, 4. Touch in hobbies and doing things together, and 5. Ritual touch and norms and limits of touch. Pupils often viewed the touch used by the teacher from a positive perspective, and many aspects of helping, encouraging, guiding, and comforting were associated with the touch. The teacher was considered to use touch as part of teaching and interaction with students. The teacher’s touch was often interpreted as positive and benevolent, although in some cases the teacher’s touch could also interfere the student’s concentration. Pupils were positive about touch from the teachers they personally liked. A teacher was considered to touch children when he or she liked his or her students or when the student was succeed at something. Touch was interpreted mainly in school, spare time, and home contexts. Touch contacts were mostly with close people. Touch contacts with strangers were generally viewed with suspicion.

This study enquires into the thought of feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young. Young proposes that in institutions committed to fairness and equality the differences between social groups get produced in interaction through gestures, facial expressions, reactions and ways of speaking. Conversation analysis is a method for studying everyday interaction between people. Finnish curriculum taking effect in autumn 2016 puts emphasis on respecting diversity and its understanding as part of every student. In order to reach these goals, it is necessary to better understand how students construct their diverse identities and group memberships in their encounters. Everyday interaction is a central context for the construction of identities and differences. In this study I ask, how Young's understanding of interaction combines with conversation analysis. I examine if conversation analysis is a suitable method for researching educational justice. I analyse video material produced in a Finnish upper secondary school. The study focuses on a sequence in which two students discuss using during recess, using categories associated with nationality and ethnicity. I use conversation analysis to analyse the sequence. I contrasted conversation analytical ways of understanding concepts of identity, social group, and interaction with ways informed by Young's theory. In this I utilized an understanding of the process of identity construction that was born through analysis, using examples from data together with theory. Both Young and conversation analysis share a common understanding of the social construction of identities and groups. Young's thought on interaction emphasises the unconscious aspects of human activity. In contrast with this, conversation analysis investigates only the visible aspects of action, making it unconcerned about the unconscious motives of action. From the viewpoint of conversation analysis that emphasises participant orientation, Young's way of approaching interaction through imagined examples proves problematic. Young suggests that building a more just society demands both an understanding of the diversity of identity and a making visible of repressive interactional practices. Conversation analysis can be seen as a way of making visible the processes of identity construction and interactional practices.