Browsing by Subject "Early childhood education"

Objectives. According to the Finnish National core Curriculum, one of the objectives of early childhood education and care is to support children's evolving skills of participation and influence, to which the skills of public performing are unequivocally linked. The presence of performance anxiety can be considered a key obstacle in the development of these skills. According to previous studies, performing anxiety can limit an individual's life in many ways, decrease success in studies and lead to challenges in promoting an individual’s working life. The purpose of this study is to find out how much scientific information the personnel in early childhood education and care have at their disposal when planning, evaluating, and further developing the content areas of early childhood education, taking the aspect of performing anxiety into consideration. Methods. This study was started out as a systematic literature review by searching for data from three scientific databases of remarkable importance with suitable search clauses. Based on the definition of concepts relevant to this study, search clauses were formed considering the individual search guidelines for each database. The search results were collected in tables and their relevance to this study assessed accordingly. After analyzing the retrieved data and based on the results obtained, the focus was turned to deeper theoretical cerebration on the phenomenon of performing anxiety in the context of early childhood education. Results and conclusions. Pedagogical attention should be paid to the development and control of performing anxiety during early childhood education in the spirit of the National Core Curriculum of Early Childhood Education. In practice, however, there is little to none scientific data available to early childhood education and care personnel on which to base the practicing of the skills of public performing, taking the aspect of performance anxiety into account.

The purpose of this study was to examine pedagogical leadership and quality in early childhood education in the context of the Finnish early childhood education and care system (ECEC). According to Fonsén (2014), pedagogical quality requires strong pedagogical leadership. However, studies indicate that there is instability of quality in Finnish day cares (Karila et.al., 2017). In addition, Finland’s ECEC system has undergone vast changes over recent years, which have led to unclarity of staff roles and responsibilities. This has increased the work pressure of day care directors in maintaining both the management of daily tasks as well as pedagogical quality. The main research focus was to examine how elements of pedagogical leadership in recent studies of pedagogical leadership in early childhood education relate to pedagogical quality in Finnish early child-hood education and care. Pedagogical leadership was approached from the perspective of national and municipal levels. The effect of pedagogical leadership on pedagogical quality was also explored from the perspective of staff education. The research findings were then applied to the practical levels of early childhood education by approaching quality from the perspective of guardians, children as well as staff and directors. The methodology for this qualitative study consisted of content analysis of the most recent studies on pedagogical leadership in early childhood education. The data was collected using purposive sampling methods and was analysed systematically through use of coding and thematic categorisation. Finland’s Education and Evaluation Centre’s (FINEEC) recent research-based structural and process quality indicators provided the themes that were used as a foundation to examine how pedagogical leadership related to the structural and process quality factors in the studies on pedagogical leadership from the year 2010 to the present. The findings were presented thematically using an interpretive ‘talking with theory’ approach that allowed the researcher to present the findings and the supporting theory simultaneously. The research revealed that changes in the governance of early childhood education in 2015 led to a distributed format of leadership that poses challenges to early childhood education and leadership in terms of defining the core tasks in early childhood education. Differing interpretations of roles and responsibilities of staff affect the quality of education and care in day care centres in Finland. Also, communication between the national, municipal and practical levels of leadership was also an influencing factor in the quality of early childhood education. This research revealed challenges in communication between different levels of early childhood education in Finland. Distributed pedagogical leadership presented itself as a major theme in the analysis as a method to alleviate the pressure of leaders in the field. However, the studies also revealed a complexity in the perimeters and definitions of the concept of distributed leadership that are yet to be overcome. The most recent advances in pedagogical quality in the field of early childhood education, which have been spurred on by the pedagogical leadership research studies that have been examined in this study, indicate that the improvement of quality in early childhood education in Finland is dependent on the strength of pedagogical leadership on all levels of management in early childhood education.