Editorial

Like the preceding issue, Vol. 16:3, this issue of the Journal is truly international in range, with papers from Cyprus, Denmark, England (2), Hong Kong, Slovenia, Sweden and from an international consortium of researchers led by Eeva Hujala of Finland. Though the contributions are diverse both in their contents and methodologies, they present two coherent focuses. The first four articles deal with teacher attitudes in regard to socially endangered children, democratisation, the practice of listening and learning conversations and parent–teacher partnerships. The implications for teacher training are also explored in these studies. A second set of contributions is more focused on young children: on why (and how) they involve teachers in their play and learning, their visual representations in problem solving in mathematics; the communication efforts of pre‐verbal children; and finally two individual case studies, looking at the coping strategies of two young children, one from Hong Kong dealing with the transition from home to kindergarten and the other from Pen Green coping with issues of attachment and separation.

Papers focusing on pedagogues and teachers

The first paper in the collection is from Bente Jensen of the Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus, Denmark, who reflects on the Danish approaches at kindergarten level to socially endangered children. The study is based on a survey of the Danish literature on the subject, and on preliminary findings from the ongoing ASP project (Action Competencies in Social‐pedagogical Work), involving some 60 centres and 2,700 pre‐school children. Among the conclusions drawn is that pre‐school pedagogues in Denmark require more time and knowledge to change their current intervention practices. Above all, they need to stop applying a compensation perspective, which tends to lock children and families into the marginalised positions that the interventions were meant to address. Instead, it is necessary to use an innovation perspective, characterised by a focus on children’s rights and resources and that promotes life opportunities for socially endangered children’s through education, competence development and social inclusion. At kindergarten level, institutional practices (e.g. differences in language, rules and other communication strategies vis‐à‐vis different groups) and the child’s relations to the pedagogues (vital for the child’s feeling of belonging and self‐worth) are important areas for examination. Tentative results from the research suggest that Bourdieu’s reproduction hypothesis, which posits that social inequality is constructed and reconstructed through daily life in institutions, may still hold true.

The second paper by Professor Nada Turnšek and Asko Pekkarinen of Ljubljana University, Slovenia, presents the findings of a survey on attitudes (beliefs, preferences) of 222 Slovenian and 230 Finnish early childhood teachers/pedagogues toward democratic practices in early childhood services. It is a thorough piece of comparative research with important policy implications. The treatment of the questionnaire and answers included descriptive statistics, cluster analysis, analysis of variance (Chi‐square test, t‐test) and two‐way Anova/Manova analysis. The paper is introduced by an overview of the main principles of democratic early childhood education, viz. plurality, equity and participation. New democratic pedagogies have re‐conceptualised the role of children in the learning process, enabling children’s participation and active involvement in the learning process (Laevers 1994), the choice of their own learning strategies (Hohmann and Weikart 2002) and the creation of their own meanings (Rinaldi 2005; May and Carr 1996).

The study examines which elements of democratisation the teachers consider important for providing high quality institutional education; to what extent they support an active role of children in the process of socialisation and learning; to what extent they agree with the attitudes indicating a hidden curriculum; how they understand the principle of equal opportunities; what their position is on the rights of children from immigrant families; and which model of cooperation with parents they prefer (47 dependent variables altogether). The differences between Slovenian and Finnish teachers/pedagogues are significant on most variables, the largest concern for Slovenia being teacher attitudes towards children of immigrants. The study also draws important policy conclusions for Slovenia, based on the results of the survey, in particular, to broaden the professional competencies of teachers and headmasters. It concludes that traditional teachers’ education – based primarily on developmental psychology and normative child development – is insufficient to prepare teachers for educating children to live in an increasingly diverse world.

The third contribution, by Bridget A. Egan of the University of Winchester, England, describes the experience of 44 teacher education students, who, during an extended 3rd year practicum, try to initiate and maintain a session of ‘sustained shared thinking’ with young children in the Early Years Foundation Stage (three to five years old in the English education system). The author focuses on the skills that teachers need to practise a listening pedagogy and promote ‘sustained shared thinking’ with young children. During the practicum, students were required to transcribe their sessions with the children so that the record could be used for later discussion and reflection. They were asked also to complete a writing frame using three separate starting points: ‘I enjoyed sustained shared thinking because…’; ‘Sustained shared thinking was difficult because…’; and ‘To get better at sustained shared thinking I need…’ Among the findings of the experiment was the conclusion by students that the development of good listening and questioning skills is a key ability. The author acknowledges that such a short opportunity to try out listening, questioning and extending meaning is clearly not sufficient to develop expertise. Yet, the experiment offers a minimum experience that gives the students food for reflection, an appetite for more engagement and a glimpse of the benefits that sustained shared thinking can offer to young children.

The fourth contribution, by a consortium of researchers led by Eeva Hujala of the University of Tampere, Finland, examines the perspectives of early childhood teachers on parent–teacher partnerships in five European countries: Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, Norway and Portugal. The paper is the first phase of an International Parent–Professional Partnerships (IPP) project. The research utilises survey data collected from the participating countries, which has been treated using both quantitative and qualitative analytic methods. The results show that there are significant differences in teachers’ views of parents’ involvement in ECEC centres between societies as well as within each country. Parents also differ in their capacity to develop and maintain partnerships with teachers. Differences in the professional status of the teachers in each country, e.g. between educators in the social welfare services compared to teachers in early education programmes, may also influence the understanding of parent–teacher partnerships in ECEC services.

An important preliminary conclusion from this project is the need to enhance the theoretical conceptualisation of parent–teacher partnerships in early childhood services and to introduce new analytic paradigms. Much of our understanding of early childhood practices can be traced back to developmental learning theories, whereas family studies have been based for the most part on theories found in family psychology, sociology and anthropology. With increasing collaboration between professionals from education, health, and welfare fields, there is a need to create new theoretical models that integrate diverse discipline backgrounds.

Papers focusing on pedagogues and teachers

The fifth contribution, by Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson and Eva Johansson of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, shifts the focus to children but has also important implications for teachers. It describes why and how children involve teachers in their play and learning in early education settings. The analysis is based on video‐observations of eight groups of children: one toddler group, five sibling groups, one preschool class and one primary school class, over the course of a whole year. The study finds that children involve teachers in their play and learning for the following reasons: 1) to get help from teachers in play and learning, 2) to be acknowledged by teachers as competent persons, 3) to make teachers aware of when someone breaks rules, 4) to get to know how things work and 5) to involve teachers in play and playful communication.

The study is important for both ethical and pedagogical reasons. In line with present thinking about respect for children’s views, it uses a children’s perspective as a starting point. Yet, for the authors, this focus on the child’s world is more than an ethical stance. Pramling and Johansson suggest that knowledge of children’s thinking is critical to developing sound pedagogy. It is not just a question of taking the child’s perspective but rather of getting close to the child’s life‐world, so as to understand what is important for children and how they learn. Young children are fundamentally meaning‐makers, trying to make sense of the natural world and society. It is in through observing and listening to them that adults learn how important play is in their lives and how it relates to learning.

At the foundation of both play and learning lies the creation of meaning. In play, intense learning can take place as it is the children who have control. In play, they have the possibility of setting their own goals and of creating meaning in and through their activities. Yet, teachers tend to put most of their efforts into the activities they have planned themselves and where they have an intention to teach children something. The essential aspect – to extend the meaning and ideas that the child expresses – is often overlooked. Inter‐subjectivity – encounters between the life‐worlds of children and educators – is not only important for children’s creation of meaning in play and learning but also for the teachers’ view of children, their understanding of learning and of their role in the kindergarten.

The sixth study on children’s visual representations in solving math problems was undertaken by a team of researchers from the University of Cyprus, Nicosia. It investigates the modes of representations generated by kindergarteners and first graders while solving standard and problematic problems in mathematics. The sample of the study consisted of 38 kindergarteners (age five to six) and 34 first graders (age six to seven). Two standard problems (addition and subtraction) and two unsolvable problematic problems were given to the participants. The majority of kindergarteners used a variety of spontaneous visual representations in order to solve both types of problems. In contrast, first graders mainly used symbolic representations corresponding to the numbers involved in the text of the problems.

Results suggest that many kindergarteners tend to draw descriptive pictures about the meaning of problems, rather than using numbers to find an answer. This often prevents them from finding an answer but also frees them from providing stereotyped solutions or from blindly obeying the taken‐for‐granted contract rule that every problem has an answer. In contrast, first graders gave a routine math solution, that is, a symbolic answer, to the two problematic problems, complying with the didactical contract rule. The paper also includes a review of some of the literature on early mathematics, including insights into why children fail to use real world knowledge in their approach to school mathematics.

The seventh contribution, by Berenice Nyland, RMIT University (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), Australia, analyses three communication sequences initiated by two infants and one two‐year‐old in an Australian childcare centre. The study uses naturalistic observations and video to record the sequences. Interpretations are based on the Super and Harkness (1986) concept of developmental niche. The developmental niche is formed by three sub‐systems: the physical and social settings, the predominant modes of child rearing and practices of childcare in the culture; and the psychology of the actual caregivers and their theories about children. Using Bates’ indices of observed action to describe communicative action (gaze alteration, repair of failed messages and the ritualisation of previously instrumental gestures), the study finds that children in this Australian setting initiated more communication than adults and that their communicative messages were frequently misunderstood, even when they repeated the communication or used diverse strategies to repair the message. The author concludes that the adults’ limited capacity to read children’s preverbal communication act has implications for the social design of group care and for the pre‐service training of adults who work with very young children.

In the eighth contribution, Crossing the Cultural Boundary from Home to Kindergarten in Hong Kong, the author, Mei Seung Lam of the Hong Kong Institute of Education, explains how the wider socio‐cultural contexts of home and classroom influence children’s adaptive strategies. To understand how young children make sense of the transition from home to kindergarten, it is necessary to understand their home biographies and to observe carefully how they interpret and interact with the mediational means ¹ presented to them in the new classroom setting. As a case study, the paper provides a rich description of a three‐year‐old girl, Ka‐yan, and an analysis of the strategies she adopts in order to adapt to kindergarten. Ka‐yan is a single‐child with two full‐time working parents from a working class background. Prior to kindergarten, she was cared for at home by a domestic helper. At first view, the mediational means available at home seem relatively unfavourable to preparing her for the structured academic experience of a Chinese kindergarten, with its emphasis on the English language, whole‐class dynamics and group work. When she crossed the cultural boundary from home to kindergarten, Ka‐yan experienced a tension between her home experience and the classroom context that the teachers had structured in accordance with their expectations of how kindergarteners should behave and be taught. From the start, she seemed to be disadvantaged in academic learning because of the learning discontinuity with her previous experience. This spurred her to attempt a variety of strategies to adapt better to pupil status and to a highly structured approach to teaching and learning. Not only does this case study throw light on the challenges that young children confront in transitions but also leads to greater appreciation of children as agents during their passage from home to kindergarten.

The same appreciation of children’s strength and resilience could also be voiced about the protagonist of the ninth and final study, A Case Study Showing How One Young Child Represented Issues Concerned with Attachment and Separation, presented by Cath Arnold of the Pen Green Research, Development and Training Base, England. The study follows a girl, Sam, just four years old, exploring issues of attachment and separation in her play over a period of two years. The starting point for the researcher was an interest in identifying schemas or repeated patterns in order to understand cognitive development and a curiosity as to why young children explore certain schemas at particular times, sometimes quite extensively. Eight children were observed systematically over time. Video observations were viewed by the researcher alongside the children’s parents and workers to make tentative connections between cognition and affect. Using extensive video and written observations and basing interpretations both on children’s use of schemas (Piaget) and attachment theory (Bowlby), the author notes how Sam used play with her friend to explore feelings about separation and loss. Through enveloping animal figures in water, sand and lentils so that she could make them disappear and reappear, she explored her feelings about the reversibility and the permanence of loss.

In a kindergarten context dominated by ‘learning’ – often understood as learning useful for school – the study reminds us just how important play and secondary attachment figures are for young children. Through its expression of issues troubling a child, symbolic play provides a containment of anxiety that, if too great, can undermine the child’s contact with the outer world and undermine learning in all its forms. Citing Vygotsky (1978, 1986), the author also emphasises the role of family events and family context in children’s development and learning. Sharing theory and child observation methods with parents allows practitioners to dialogue with parents about their children’s learning at a deeper level and on a more equal footing than previously.

Notes

1. The author defines mediational means as cultural tools such as language, concepts, objects, routines, forms of expression and ways of doing things in a cultural context.