This issue of Early Years appears in between two special issues focused on specific concerns in the professional education of early years practitioners – the interface between academic learning and workplace learning during initial training (issue 35, 2), and the development of what are called ‘attitudinal competences’ for working with young children (issue 35, 4, forthcoming). Although this issue of independently-submitted papers has no single theme, its diverse set of papers all address concerns which are central for the journal, and for its parent organisation, TACTYC. All explore the ways in which young children, from babies to six-year-olds, experience their early years in education and care settings, and all recognise how the values and beliefs of early years’ educators are shaped by their national contexts, and also shape the children’s experience.
The papers included here describe research in five countries: Australia, Germany, Iceland, Sweden and Portugal. All these countries have adopted, to differing degrees, the global or ‘western’ early childhood values and practices which have developed in recent decades: a commitment to listening to and respecting children and parents; to valuing each child as unique and as a rights-holder; to recognising children’s agency in their own learning and to viewing children’s development as multi-faceted and holistic. In response, all are engaged in a continuous process of policy development in pursuit of these goals, mostly with respect to improving the qualifications and understanding of practitioners. But developing and then implementing policies of this kind is a struggle: changing the profession’s inbuilt values and beliefs requires a long slow process of reflection and critical thinking. ‘Old habits’ die hard because they are embedded in the discourse we have acquired during our own lifelong socialisation into professional practices. Hence the need for researchers to continue to explore the ways in which practitioners think and act, to help us to direct our knowledge and skills towards improving children’s experiences.
So one way of reading these papers is to read into them the current aspirations and practices for early childhood education and care which they reveal. The papers are broadly of three kinds. Two, from Germany and Portugal, describe conscious efforts to change practice, in the use of documentation, evaluation and assessment. Another two, from Australia and Sweden, explore how educators see their own beliefs and values implemented in their daily work with children. And two, from Iceland and Sweden, examine children’s activities and behaviours within the environments provided for them. Readers can readily recognise the nature of the contexts in these six different settings, and the ways in which their underlying theories and visible practice shape children’s possibilities for agency in their development.
We begin with the studies of policy and practice in documentation, evaluation and assessment. From Germany, Helen Knauf reports on an exploration of the ways that documentation is understood and practised in German preschools. Her research produced 40 case studies of preschools, from small (a single group of children) to large (15 groups of children), and catering for children from birth to 2 years, from 2 to 6 years and from 3 to 6 years. She contrasts two fundamental rationales she identified for practising documentation – that its function is to support children’s learning, and that its function is to act as an assessment tool. The documentation itself takes three main forms, which are photographed in situ, and discussed with the centre directors, in the course of the research. Through her analysis, Knauf identifies a typology of uses but concludes that at present assessment is the primary purpose of most documentation in most centres, and that this does not take advantage of its many potential uses in supporting children’s learning.
Sara Barros Araújo describes a more formal intervention in Portugal, where concerns about assessment practices since the 1990s have led to attempts to implement more participatory and democratic forms of evaluation and assessment which include the views of children and families. Professional development towards this aim has included the introduction of a Portuguese version of the Effective Early Learning (EEL) project, and Araújo reports here on the implementation and outcomes from a module based on the EEL practices of identifying children’s involvement and adults’ engagement. The policy requires an intensive period of training trainers, and is now being rolled out more widely. Araújo has analysed a large number of written reflections submitted by 12 teachers in the course of their training, and is able to draw conclusions about the impact the module can have on improving quality. Data from the participants indicate particular shifts in their understanding of observation, in their ability to reflect collaboratively on their actions, and in what Freire would call their ‘critical insertion’, or transformative action.
The next two papers look at the impact on practice of educators’ own beliefs, about their role as carers of children, and about the competencies and capabilities that children bring into preschool. Annica Löfdahl and Maria Folke-Fichtelius report on a study of the place of ‘care’ in Sweden’s current early childhood provision. Swedish practice was long identified with the term ‘educare’ but changing emphases in policy and provision, and greater accountability among preschool settings, appears to indicate a much stronger recent focus on the ‘learning’ aspects of working with young children. The authors explore how national policy is enacted in the local contexts of individual preschools, and in the changing theories and discourses which inform teacher professionalism. Their data derives from discussions in staff meetings and from individual interviews, and is analysed with two constructs of care in mind: care as an activity (such as helping children to wash their hands, dress and undress), and care as an attitude (undertaking all activities with children with a concern for their wellbeing). The analysis suggests that both managers and preschool teachers are under pressure to demonstrate ‘learning’ and have therefore devised a new construct, which the authors describe as a ‘transformation’ in which ‘everyday and seemingly trivial activities were presented in terms of children’s learning and knowledge’.
Andi Salamon and Linda Harrison, reporting on a study carried out in Sydney, Australia, describe how they worked collaboratively with the educators in one day-care setting to understand their beliefs about the competences of children under one year old. The authors argue that the uni-directional link that is often assumed to exist between the beliefs, theories and values of educators and their everyday interactions with children should be understood instead as a bi-directional flow. Thus, educators bring their beliefs and values to the setting, but their interactions with children and families continually modify and transform these beliefs, so that an educator’s behaviour at any time may be the product of multiple influences. This complex process is clarified by the theory of Practice Architectures, which takes account of the external and internal factors which are present at any moment in time. The authors used this theory to support a group of educators in reflecting in detail on their interactions with a small group of children aged from 6 to 12 months. The findings, based on video observations which were used as a stimulus for group discussion, include intriguing beliefs about babies’ competences and capabilities across different domains of development.
The final two papers offer direct observations of children’s behaviour in their preschool settings. Hrönn Pálmadóttir and Eva Johannson, working in Iceland, take a phenomenological approach in collaborating with educators to identify the values communicated in a group of children under three, during their play together. Icelandic day-care settings, like those in other Nordic countries, are strongly based on principles of democracy, rights and agency and the adults’ role is to support even the youngest children in creating a community in which all are included. In this room for children under 3 years, the children are carefully observed and videoed, and the video material is discussed with educators, who share their own aims in working with the children. Successful play and interaction in this age group, with adult support and guidance, allows the development of intersubjectivity and friendship among the children, and enables them to develop empathy with each other.
In the final paper, Pernilla Lagerlöf describes and analyses a small, unplanned incident in a Swedish preschool. It occurs when three six-year-old girls, who are close friends in and out of school, are being introduced by the researcher to a new software program which enables them to interact with the computer in making music. The incident develops because the computer system stops working, and while the adult is struggling to fix it, the girls develop their own role play in front of the video camera. Lagerlöf analyses this sequence of events in detail, uncovering the children’s relationships and the cultural and community experiences which inform their behaviour, describing this as ‘playing in between’: the girls incorporate their previous musical activities and their popular cultural references into a seamless game which builds on the planned procedures for the session as well as on what matters to the girls as individuals and as friends.
Despite their different perspectives and starting points, these six papers, read together, demonstrate a shared concern with children’s daily lives and wellbeing in their early childhood settings. The spontaneous activities and peer interactions of the children, across widely differing forms of provision constrained by widely differing national policies, are the ultimate concern of all these researchers, who see children’s opportunities to play and learn, and the ways that they are supported and assessed, as taking priority over more academic or performance outcomes.