Browsing by Subject "participation"

Early studies have shown that parents in modern society are living their everyday life in the middle of the cultural expectations. Studies also show that children enjoy being in day care, if they have friends there, as well as the opportunity to play and to do something meaningful. Purpose of this study was to bring children's voices heard and to describe the child's everyday experiences. The study was to find out pre-school children's everyday life experiences at home, in family and in day care center. Children live their everyday life at home and in day care centers. This study describes the child's well-being and everyday in the basis of Bronfenbrenner eco-logical theory of education. The data were collected by questionnaire in Hämeenlinna day care centre personnel and its customers in the spring of 2011. For the individual interviews participated 478 children. The data were analyzed by using content analysis and content analysis methods. The study was a qualitative and approach by phenomenographic. The results showed that children want to play both at home and in day care centers. 39 % of the children wanted to spend time with their parents at home and in day care center only 13 % of children wanted to be with adults. Importance of friends in day-care center was emphasized, because 37% of the children mentioned in their responses friends. The study also asked if children are listened by the adults and 63% of the children felt that adults listen them carefully.

The increase of multilingual children in Finnish ECEC has highlighted the need to assess its inclusivity and effectiveness in educating and caring for children from various backgrounds. As early childhood is a crucial time for the development of language, social-emotional skills, and experiences of participation, it is essential that all children are effectively supported in developing these skills and provided with experiences of belonging. This study aims to investigate multilingual children’s participation opportunities during a shared reading and discussion activity. Eleven video-recorded shared reading sessions from different ECEC groups were analysed using qualitative content analysis. Finnish was the language of instruction in all groups. Multilingual children’s behaviour was examined in reference to three categories: active engagement and participation, passive engagement with little participation, or interfering behaviour with limited engagement and participation. Based on these observations, groups were divided into three categories depending on if they were considered to have a lot, some or little participation and engagement for multilingual children. Teachers’ methods for facilitating participation and engagement were also investigated, which resulted in 6 main themes and 19 categories being identified. The analysis revealed that most multilingual children actively participated in the activity, and teachers used multiple methods to facilitate participation and engagement. However, there were several groups where some children did not participate actively and received little support and attention from the teacher. Children’s multilingual competence was also rarely made visible during the sessions, as Finnish was the only language used in all groups. While the findings were generally positive, the lack of support for some multilingual children’s participation and the prevalence of monolingual practices indicate that the use of language-aware and inclusive methods could be developed especially in reference to shared reading.

The study examines one case of students' experiences from the activity in a collaborative learning process in a networked learning environment, and explores whether or not the experiences explain the participation or lack of participation in the activities. As a research task the students' experiences in the database of the networked learning environment, participating in its construction, and the ways of working needed to build the database, were examined. To contrast the students' experiences, their actual participation in the building of the database was clarified. Based on actual participation, groups more active and more passive than average were separated, and their experiences were compared to each other. The research material was collected from the course Cognitive and Creative Processes, which was offered to studentsof the Department of Textile Teacher Education in University of Helsinki, and students of the Departments of Teacher Education Units giving textile education in Turku, Rauma and Savonlinna in the beginning of 2001. In this course, creativity was examined from a psychological and sosiocultural context with the aim of realizing a collaborative progressive inquiry process. The course was held in a network-based Future Learning Environment (Fle 2) except for the starting lecture and training the use of the learning environment. This study analyzed the learning diaries that the students had sent to the tutor once a week for four weeks, and the final thoughts written into the database of the learning environment. Content analysis was applied as the research method. The case was enriched from another point of view by examining the messages the students had written into the learning environment with the social network analysis. The theoretical base of the study looks at the research of computer-supported collaborative learning, the conceptions of learning as a process of participation and knowledge building, and the possibilities and limitations of network-based learning environments. The research results show, that both using the network-based learning environment and collaborative ways of studying were new to the students. The students were positively surprised by the feedback and support provided by the community. On the other hand, they also experienced problems with facelessness and managing the information in the learning environment. The active students seemed to be more ready for a progressive inquiry process. It can be seen from their attitudes and actions that they have strived to participate actively and invested into the process both from their own and the community's point of view. The more passive students reported their actions to get credits and they had a harder time of perceiving the thoughts presented in the net as common progression. When arranging similar courses in the future, attention should be paid to how to get the students to act in ways necessary for knowledge building, and different from more traditional ways of studying. The difficulties of students used to traditional studying methods to adapt to collaborative knowledge building were evident on the course Cognitive and Creative Processes.