Browsing by discipline "Kasvatustiede (varhaiskasvatus)"
Now showing items 21-26 of 26
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(2010)The purpose of this study was to examine the conceptions adoptive parents and kindergarten teachers have of adopted children in day care. Earlier Finnish research concerning international adoption has discussed adoption, adopted children and adoptive parents from the point of view of identity, racism and school. There has hardly been any research in Finland concerning adoption from the point of view of day care. The study focuses on how the special characteristics of adopted children are taken into consideration in day care. The ecological theory, in which a child's growth and learning environments are studied as part of the broader environment, provided the theoretical framework for the study. The study was based also on a second theory: intercultural competence or the capacity to interact with different people taking into consideration their individual characteristics and situations so that one understands and is understood. The first research problem consisted of describing the conceptions adoptive parents and day care teachers have of the special characteristics of adopted children. The second research problem was to examine adopted parents' expectations of kindergarten and of kindergarten teachers. The third research problem was to find out what kind of support day care teachers think they need when working with adopted children. The study focused on 20 adoptive parents and 15 kindergarten teachers. Research material was collected in the form of essay writings amounting to a total of 73 pages. The respondents wrote about their experiences with the help of a supporting questionnaire. The research method was qualitative and narrative. The results of the study show that adoptive parents have similar conceptions of adopted children's special characteristics concerning their character, social competence, adaptation and appearance. Adoptive parents had a better understanding of the dynamics of attachment than kindergarten teachers, in this study. When describing the special characters of adopted children, the teachers regarded adopted children in particular as needing special support. According to the results of the study, adoptive parents feel adoption matters and adoptive parenthood are something quite new and bewildering to day care teachers. Adoptive parents did not feel they got any support from the kindergarten in their parenthood. Adoptive parents regarded as particularly important the start of day care and the familiarisation process during which adopted children need time and special support due to earlier experiences of separation and abandonment. The findings of the study show that kindergarten teachers have little knowledge of adoption and the significance of adoption for a child's growth and development. Kindergarten teachers felt at a loss in dealing with adoption issues and clearly need additional support in the matter.
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(2014)Targets. Lately more emphasis than ever before has been given to bringing forth and taking into account children’s perspective in matters that concern them. It is also purpose of this study to give the voice to children and shed light on their perspective. This study is a part of extensive early childhood education development and research project, Orientaatioprojekti, operated by Helsinki University (Department of Teacher Education), ten municipalities in Keski-Uusimaa area and Hämeenlinna. The research is related to the day care quality evaluation (spring 2012). The main interest of the study was to examine things and situations children told they found unpleasant in day care center, also in relation to child’s gender and age. To better understand the results, the narrations and the consistency of the answers as well as children’s general satisfaction towards the day care were also examined. Methods. The research participants were 573 children, ages ranging from 1 to 8. Parents collected the data by interviewing. Two closed and one open-ended questions were analysed in this research and those questions dealt with children’s general satisfaction in day care center and what do they found unpleasant there. Parents recorded the answers to the web form and the data was then transferred to Excel software. Answers of the closed questions were examined through basic descriptive statistics. The unpleasant things and situations in the open-ended question were analysed through qualitative content analysis. Additionally, the appearance of the answers was also analysed. Used methods there were mostly outlined by researcher herself but some features of discourse analyse were also utilized. Results and conclusions. Most of the children stated that they feel mainly comfortable in day care center. The children mentioned different types of unpleasant things and situations and those were explained in various ways. Above all the challenges in peer relationships were on children’s mind. The peer group pointed out significant but the interaction was not always trouble-free. It seems to be important for children to practice and develop their social skills. Besides of these answers many children found the nap time as a single daily routine to be unpleasant. The number of nap time mentions varied a lot between different sexes and ages. There were also some other differences between the answers of children of different sexes and ages. For example, relatively many of the youngest ones did not answer to the open question at all.
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(2014)The traditional nuclear family is the most common type of family in our society. During the last decades other kinds of family models have appeared besides the nuclear family. Every child comes across with the diversity of families at some part of their lives. It will happen during their lives or when they start the early childhood education and school. Children should know how to meet the diversity and grow to understand it so that everyone would feel themselves appreciated. Children's books can be a tool to handle diversity of families with children. Through children's books, a child can observe different kinds of families and their lives from a reasonable distance. From a book, the child can find objects to identify to. The child also learns to understand his/her own family as well as other kinds of families. All this widens up the child's picture of the world and teaches how to tolerate dissimilarity. The goal of this research was to find out what kind of families can be found from the popular children's book series Risto Räppääjä, and how the families are represented in it. Another goal was to reflect how educators could use the series in preschool and in elementary school while discussing about diversity of families. The research also tries to broaden the impressions of parents and other educators towards how children's literature can be used variedly when teaching children liberality and how to be a member of the society who accepts dissimilarity. This research was qualitative. The research method was content analysis, where fictional documents were analyzed. The documents were 13 books from a children's book series Risto Räppääjä. Many kinds of families were found from the children's book series Risto Räppääjä. The extended family Räppääjä and nuclear family Perhonen were the most relevant families in this research. These two families broke many of the stereotypes that are placed towards families. Children's points of view and thoughts about families in general also surface from these two families. An adult reader and a child reader find opportunities to reflect the families to their own lives and consider their attitudes through these two families. Also through all the families in the series reader will learn different kinds of ways of living. The children's book series Risto Räppääjä can be used in many ways in preschool and elementary school, for example in conversations, drama and artwork.
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(2012)This case study took place in Southern Finland at the municipal day care center. The focus was to investigate toddlers' possibilities to play and explore different situations from the perspective of play and playfulness. Also the role of adults in promoting play and playfulness was examined. According to previous studies play and playfulness are important concepts to children's development and learning. However play and playfulness don't take place only in the playing situations. Connection to other activities alongside playing situations is obvious. This study tries to depict children's play on daily basis in all kinds of situations. The study focuses on the pedagogical factors that have an influence on play possibilities. The case study group included 12 toddlers and 4 adults. The data was collected by many methods, including play observation, interview and play environment observation. The analysis was undertaken by content analyses and interpreting the results of numeric indicators (AES and ITERS). The result was that children play in all kinds of situations but the features of play differ according to different activities. Additionally the exploiting of play differs in different situations: at some point play and playfulness was repetitive but in the others the usefulness of play wasn't recognized or it wasn't considered appropriate for a particular situation. This leads to the question: is the usefulness of play and playfulness pedagogically recognized? Further the results confirm that the conditions and elements of play are important when supporting the play. Especially the adults' involvement and interaction in play are significant. The implication of the study is that it is important to talk about the factors that influence play and playfulness. Conversation between adults helps to develop play and playful interaction.
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(2012)Research of social exclusion is mainly focused on to explore young people and adults. There is only limited research available of social exclusion of children under school age. Social exclusion is however involved in a day care centre's every day life. Social exclusion is a multi-threaded term which is included closely in theories of socialization and children's social development. Previous researches have shown that social exclusion is a sum of many factors. Researchers' definitions of social exclusion are often varied according to what has been the subject and purpose of the research. This research focuses on to examine how the withdrawn behaviour appears in day care centre and how does it affect to social relationships between children. The research also studies the amount of support that withdrawn children need compared to other children. Previous researches have demonstrated that withdrawn behaviour is one of many sections of the social exclusion. The material of this study is gathered from "Orientaation lähteillä" research (Reunamo 2010). 50 day care centres and 14 childminders from Uusimaa and Hämeenlinna took part in the research. Age of the 892 children who participated in the research varied from one to seven. Method of this research was quantitative and the data was gathered by observation, interviews and teachers pedagogical evaluation of children. The data was analysed by using a one way analysis of variance and the statistical significance of results were confirmed by Kruskall-Wall test. According to this study the withdrawn child's main activity was orientation action; wandering around, waiting for something to happen or monitoring the situation. When the withdrawn children attached to action they didn't seek other children's company or express interest in other children's activities. Withdrawn children didn't have interest in social objects like toys or other items. According to teachers' evaluations withdrawn children needed more support in different areas of development than other children. The needs of support were not only in the field of social development but also on the side of motor-, cognitive- and emotional development. Social isolation and problems with it appear as early as under school age. The younger the child is the easier it is to intervene and cut the social exclusion circle.
Now showing items 21-26 of 26