Browsing by Author "Grönvall, Julia"

The purpose of this research is to study how the personnel of early childhood education and care (ECEC) describe the child and learning in the child’s individual ECEC plan and to analyse how well the children’s plans comply with the national core curriculum of ECEC. In 2016, ECEC in Finland changed from daycare to pedagogy when the national core curriculum of ECEC was published and became the national norm. Mansikka and Lundkvist’s (2019) review of the ECEC curriculum from 2005 and the curriculum from 2016 showed that the concept learning is more valued in ECEC today. A Finnish study from the beginning of 2000 indicated that the ECEC personnel had expectations of how the child should behave. A child was expected for example to be social, to follow rules and to play calmly in a way that is considered suitable for the child’s gender (Alasuutari, 2010.) Since the research mentioned above was made, the Finnish ECEC has developed a lot because of the new ECEC law and the national core curriculum. It is interesting to study what kind of impact this development has had on the view of children and learning. The research data consisted of children’s individual ECEC plans. The length of these plans was 1–3 pages and a total of 27 plans were collected. The plans were collected from daycare centers within the same organization. I made a qualitative content analysis of the research data. The analys proceeded in three parts and the research data was compressed in each part. When the first part was done, I had hundreds of words categorized into 18 categories. Finally, four categories of the child view and two categories of the learning view remained. The child view in the children’s individual plans and in the ECEC curriculum were mainly similar. One difference was found in the individual plans. In the children´s individual plans a desire for a compliant child was found. The child was expected to participate in activities and to be compliant in transitions for example when moving from indoors to outdoors. The impact of the physical environment on children's learning was not mentioned in the individual plans, but the ECEC curriculum highlighted the impact of the physical environment. The role of the adults in a child's learning was emphasized in both types of documents, but the child’s role seemed to be forgotten in the children´s individual plans. In the ECEC curriculum the concepts learning and development are used as two separate concepts while the two concepts are used as synonyms in the children’s plans. This study indicates that the two concepts have different meanings. They are used separate in theory but are used as synonyms in practice