Browsing by Author "Olli, Maija"

Objectives. The purpose of this study was to examine what kind of forms of co-regulation a teacher of early childhood education utilizes in order to calm down and activate children within a framework of a playworld. In addition, opportunities of the co-regulation were examined. One of the main interests of this study was also to examine, which kind of possibilities the co-regulation can create when it comes to the interaction between the teacher and children. In this study, the co-regulation was considered as an ongoing, moment to moment unfolding regulation process, occurring in the interaction between the adult and children. In this approach, calming and activating occur through multimodal communication. Methods. The video data of this study was collected by using video observation in the preschool group (6-year-olds children) in the Southern Finland in spring 2018. The data consists of 6 hours and 24 minutes of video recorded, naturally occuring interaction. This study was a qualitative research and conversational analysis was used as a method of data analysis. Results. In earlier research studies, calming and activating are considered as typical forms of the co-regulation. The third form of the co-regulation, however, was found in this study. This new form is calming and activating, which means calming and activating occur in the interaction at the same time. In according to this observation, the adult creates co-regulation by using two different interaction levels. When interacting on the one-child interaction level, the adult responds to the child’s co-regulation needs. As for interacting on the group interaction level, the adult responds to the needs of all children. There were found some similarities between the progress of the playworld activity and the co-regulation. In specific parts of the playworld activity, some forms of the co-regulation were found to be more recurrent. The results support that co-regulation is a dynamic regulation process which varies during the interaction. By utilizing the co-regulation, the adult is capable of responding to the different needs of a group of children. Benefits of the co-regulation occur especially when organizing pedagogical interaction in a big group of children.