Browsing by Author "Ahonen, Maisa"

The aim of this study was to analyze early childhood education workers' stories about the everyday quality of early childhood education in relation to Karvi's (2019) early childhood education quality indicators. In addition to analyzing the quality of early childhood education, employees' stories are also used to find solutions to improve the quality of early childhood education. Raising the quality goals of early childhood education has been featured in both national and international discussions. In Finland, the public debate has focused not only on the increasing goals, but also on the challenges of early childhood education's ability to pull and keep professionals in the field. The discussion has taken place from the perspective of researchers, early childhood education professionals, families and politicians. Early childhood education is an important part of the Finnish school system, and the importance of high-quality early childhood education as a promoter of children's development, well-being and learning has been noted nationally and internationally. However, it has not been possible to form a unified national level for the quality of early childhood education in Finland, but based on previous studies, the quality is realized unevenly. The material for this study was formed from stories published in September-December 2021 by the @varhaiskasvatuskenkertomuksia account on Instagram. Based on a qualitative content analysis, 483 stories and 9 surveys were selected for the study. The data was analyzed using qualitative content analysis, which has indications of deductive content analysis. The research revealed that the realization of the quality of early childhood education in the stories of early childhood education workers did not for the most part correspond to Karvi's (2019) early childhood education quality indicators. However, no conclusions can be drawn from this result about the quality of early childhood education in Finland as a whole, but rather it confirms previous research results that the quality of early childhood education is uneven, for example, between early childhood education units. The narratives used as data about the everyday life of early childhood education seem to come from places where the quality of early childhood education is poorly implemented. From a societal point of view, it would be important to find out where the quality differences in early childhood education stem from, and what measures could be taken to improve the quality of early childhood education and even out the differences between units.