Vygotsky's theory in early childhood education and research. Russian and Western values

Book review: Reviewed book: Vygotsky’s theory in early childhood education and research. Russian and Western values. Edited by Nikolay Veraksa and Sonja Sheridan, New York, NY, Routledge, 2018, 219 pp.Non peer reviewe

Children's Sense of Agency : a Co-Participatory Investigation

This dissertation focuses on children s sense of agency. The aim is to investigate the kinds of agentic experiences children undergo in their everyday lives and examine the kinds of events and activities in which these experiences take place. The dissertation thereby seeks to contribute to current understandings of the particularity of individual engagement in collective activities and enrich descriptions of the connectedness of individual and social level processes. To understand children s agentic experiences from their perspective, this dissertation employs and develops co-participatory visual methods for studying children s sense of agency. The empirical data analyzed here come from two different case studies in which preschoolers and elementary school pupils documented their agentic experiences, and then reflected on these experiences in either open-ended interviews or joint focus groups. The empirical analysis focuses on the social construction of children s sense of agency in these reflection situations. In addition, the role of the visual tools as part of the reflection situations is examined via embodied interaction analysis. The results of the dissertation demonstrate the different ways in which children experience their agency in everyday life. Analysis of how sense of agency is socially constructed provides evidence that children s accounts of their agentic experiences range from straightforward statements to complex reports. Furthermore, the results suggest that children s agentic experiences take place in mundane and ordinary events in addition to special occasions. The results also show how the visual tools served acted as mediational means in the telling and listening that took taking place in the reflection situations. Overall, the dissertation results suggest that parents, educators, and other professionals who want to encourage and foster children s sense of agency could benefit from paying attention to the small agentic moments in children s daily lives as potential growth points for the children s awareness of their own agency. The visual documentation methods employed and developed in the course of this research could function as a meaningful pedagogical practice in this regard.Tämä väitöskirja käsittelee lasten toimijuuden tunnetta. Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on selvittää millaisia lasten toimijuuden kokemuksen ovat heidän arjessaan ja minkälaisissa tilanteissa he kokevat olevansa toimijoita. Väitöskirja pyrkii näin lisäämään ymmärrystämme yksilöllisen osallistumisen erityispiirteistä ja rikastamaan yksilöiden ja yhteisen toiminnan välisiä yhteyksiä koskevia Ymmärtääkseen lasten toimijuuden tunnetta lasten omasta näkökulmasta, tässä väitöskirjassa sovelletaan ja kehitetään osallistavia visuaalisia tutkimusmenetelmiä lasten toimijuuskokemusten tutkimiseen. Tutkimuksen empiirinen aineisto koostuu lasten kanssa käydyistä reflektiivisistä keskusteluista. Ennen keskusteluita lapset dokumentoivat arkensa toimijuuskokemuksia digikameroiden avulla. Myöhemmin he reflektoivat näitä kokemuksiaan joko avoimissa- tai focusryhmähaastatteluissa. Väitöskirjan analyysi koskee toimijuuden tunteen sosiaalista rakentumista näissä tilanteissa. Lisäksi väitöskirjassa analysoidaan miten visuaaliset työkalut välittivät tätä toimintaa. Väitöskirjan tulokset puhuvat sen puolesta, että lasten arjen toimijuuskokemukset dynaamisia ja rikkaita. Tarkastelemalla toimijuuden tunteen rakentumista vuorovaikutuksessa väitöskirjan analyysi osoittaa, että kokemuksia koskevat kuvaukset vaihtelevat suoraviivaista monimutkaisempiin kuvauksiin. Tulokset viittaavat siihen, että lapset kokevat toimijuutta hyvinkin arkisissa ja tavallisissa tilanteissa erityisten tapahtumien lisäksi. Lisäksi tulokset tuovat esiin miten eri tavoin visuaaliset työkalut välittävät reflektiotilanteissa tapahtuvaa kertomista ja kuuntelemista. Kaiken kaikkiaan tulokset viittaavat siihen, että vanhempien, opettajien kuin muidenkin lasten toimijuuden tunteen tukemista tärkeänä pitävien olisi hyvä kiinnittää huomiota lasten pieniin toimijuuden hetkiin heidän arjessaan. Nämä hetket voivat olla lapsille merkittäviä hetkiä heidän oman toimijuutensa ymmärtämisen kannalta. Väitöskirjassa hyödynnetty ja kehitetty tapa dokumentoida ja jakaa näitä hetkiä muiden kanssa voi toimia hyvänä pedagogisena käytäntönä tässä suhteessa

"Moka on lahja". Kuinka epäonnistumiset voidaan jäsentää uudestaan koulussa FUSE Studio lähestymistavan kautta

In an era of high-stakes testing and performance demands that regulate future educational opportunities and affect how schools are managed and funded, failure can easily become stigmatized in the practices of schooling. In turn, it can lead students to avoid activities in which they can be evaluated as failing. As researchers, if we wish to help students recognize the value of failure in the process of learning and to capitalize on failures as significant learning opportunities, we must find ways in which failure at school can be reframed as something productive, rather than punitive. In this study, we investigated how student experience in a FUSE Studio—an alternative infrastructure for learning in schools organized around principles of student choice and interest (Stevens et al., 2016)— support a different, more productive ‘use’ of failure. Our study is an investigation of how failure was framed in the FUSE Studio by students and teachers and whether these participants recognized learning from failure as a productive part of their FUSE Studio experience. Our analysis, which was based on a year-long video ethnography conducted in a typical FUSE Studio, revealed two distinct ways in which failure was framed. In addition, an analysis of participant interviews highlighted that the students and a facilitator viewed failure as a significant and productive part of their FUSE Studio experience. In sum, the study contributes to the existing literature on the value of failure for learning, by highlighting a way that failure can be framed as being productive for both students and teachers.In an era of high-stakes testing and performance demands that regulate future educational opportunities and affect how schools are managed and funded, failure can easily become stigmatized in the practices of schooling. In turn, it can lead students to avoid activities in which they can be evaluated as failing. As researchers, if we wish to help students recognize the value of failure in the process of learning and to capitalize on failures as significant learning opportunities, we must find ways in which failure at school can be reframed as something productive, rather than punitive. In this study, we investigated how student experience in a FUSE Studio—an alternative infrastructure for learning in schools organized around principles of student choice and interest (Stevens et al., 2016)— support a different, more productive ‘use’ of failure. Our study is an investigation of how failure was framed in the FUSE Studio by students and teachers and whether these participants recognized learning from failure as a productive part of their FUSE Studio experience. Our analysis, which was based on a year-long video ethnography conducted in a typical FUSE Studio, revealed two distinct ways in which failure was framed. In addition, an analysis of participant interviews highlighted that the students and a facilitator viewed failure as a significant and productive part of their FUSE Studio experience. In sum, the study contributes to the existing literature on the value of failure for learning, by highlighting a way that failure can be framed as being productive for both students and teachers.Peer reviewe

Puhesääntöjä neuvottelemassa : tutkivaa vuorovaikutusta välittävän artefaktin rakentuminen

This study highlights the formation of an artifact designed to mediate exploratory collaboration. The data for this study was collected during a Finnish adaptation of the thinking together approach. The aim of the approach is to teach pulps how to engage in educationally beneficial form of joint discussion, namely exploratory talk. At the heart of the approach lies a set of conversational ground rules aimed to promote the use of exploratory talk. The theoretical framework of the study is based on a sociocultural perspective on learning. A central argument in the framework is that physical and psychological tools play a crucial role in human action and learning. With the help of tools humans can escape the direct stimulus of the outside world and learn to control ourselves by using tools. During the implementation of the approach, the classroom community negotiates a set of six rules, which this study conceptualizes as an artifact that mediates exploratory collaboration. Prior research done about the thinking together approach has not extensively researched the formation of the rules, which give ample reason to conduct this study. The specific research questions asked were: What kind of negotiation trajectories did the ground rules form during the intervention? What meanings were negotiated for the ground rules during the intervention The methodological framework of the study is based on discourse analysis, which has been specified by adapting the social construction of intertextuality to analyze the meanings negotiated for the created rules. The study has town units of analysis: thematic episode and negotiation trajectory. A thematic episode is a stretch of talk-in-interaction where the participants talk about a certain ground rule or a theme relating to it. A negotiation trajectory is a chronological representation of the negotiation process of a certain ground rule during the intervention and is constructed of thematic episodes. Thematic episodes were analyzed with the adapted intertextuality analysis. A contrastive analysis was done on the trajectories. Lastly, the meanings negotiated for the created rules were compared to the guidelines provided by the approach. The main result of the study is the observation, that the meanings of the created rules were more aligned with the ground rules of cumulative talk, rather than exploratory talk. Although meanings relating also to exploratory talk were negotiated, they clearly were not the dominant form. In addition, the study observed that the trajectories of the rules were non identical. Despite connecting dimensions (symmetry, composition, continuity and explicitness) none of the trajectories shared exactly the same features as the others.Tässä tutkimuksessa tarkasteltiin tutkivaa vuorovaikutusta välittämän artefaktin rakentumista osana Yhdessä ajattelu interventionohjelman toteutusta. Interventio-ohjelman tavoitteena on opettaa oppilaita käyttämään tutkivan keskustelua yhteistoiminnallisessa oppimisessa sekä muissa opetuskeskusteluissa ja -tilanteissa. Interventio-ohjelman keskeinen osa ovat puhesäännöt, joiden kautta luokkahuoneen vuorovaikutusta pyritään muuttamaan. Tutkimuksen teoreettinen viitekehys nojaa sosiokulttuuriseen oppimisen tutkimukseen. Viitekehyksen mukaan erilaisilla materiaalisilla ja käsitteellisillä työkaluilla on keskeinen asema ihmisen toiminnassa ja oppimisessa. Käyttämällä erilaisia työkaluja ihminen pystyy ylittämään lajikeskeiset rajoitteensa sekä hallitsemaan omaa toimintaansa. Intervention aikana luotavat puhesäännöt nähdään tämän viitekehyksen valossa toimintaa välittävänä artefaktina, jonka luokkayhteisö yhdessä rakentaa neuvotteluiden kautta. Aiempi interventio-ohjelmaan koskeva tutkimus ei ole juurikaan tutkinut puhesääntöjen rakentumista, mikä perustelee tämän tutkimuksen tekemistä. Tutkimuksen tutkimuskysymyksinä olivat: minkälaisia ovat puhesääntöjen neuvottelupolut, sekä minkälaisia merkityksiä puhesäännöille neuvoteltiin? Tutkimuksen menetelmällisenä viitekehyksenä toimii diskurssianalyysi, jota on täsmennetty tarkastelemalla intertekstuaalisuuden rakentumista sosiaalisessa vuorovaikutuksessa. Tätä menetelmää on käytetty puhesääntöjä koskevien temaattisten episodien analyysiin. Temaattinen episodi määriteltiin tutkimuksessa yhtenäiseksi puheaihejaksoksi, jossa puhutaan yhdestä tai useammasta puhesäännöstä. Tutkimuksen toisena analyysiyksikkönä oli puhesäännön neuvottelupolku, joka muodostui samaa puhesääntöä koskevista temaattisista episodeista. Neuvottelupolkuja analysointiin vertaamalla niitä toisiinsa ja nostamalla esiin yhteneviä sekä polkuja erottelevia piirteitä. Lopuksi sääntöjä verrattiin Yhdessä ajattelu -ohjelman antamiin ohjeisiin. Tutkimuksen päätuloksena oli havainto, että puhesäännöille ohjelman aikana rakentuneet merkitykset oli yhtenevämpiä kumulatiivisen puheen puhesääntöjen kuin tutkivan puheen sääntöjen kanssa. Vaikka tutkivaan puhetta tukevia merkityksiä oli myös säännöissä, näitä oli selvästi vähemmän kuin kumulatiivista puhetta koskevia sääntöjä. Lisäksi tutkimuksessa havaittiin, että puhesääntöjen neuvottelupolut olivat hyvin erilaisia suhteessa toisiinsa. Vaikka näitä yhdistäviä ulottuvuuksia löydettiin neljä (polkujen symmetria, koostumus, jatkuvuus ja läpinäkyvyys), ei neuvotelluista puhesäännöistä yhdenkään neuvottelupolku ollut sama kuin toisten

Perspectives on the Finnish Early Years STEAM Education : Reflecting on the Avant-Garde

Skills needed to live in our current societies are rapidly changing. How will we provide children with the skills they will need in the future? While early years education has been traditionally strong in supporting 21st century skills like creativity, collaboration and problem-solving within play, new demands such as fostering digital skills and computational thinking challenge current practices and methods and call us as researchers and educators to urgently rethink and re-design how such skills could be advanced in early childhood education. Over the recent years, the Finnish educational system has enjoyed intense national and international attention, and the Early Childhood Education and Care sector along with it. This has resulted in multiple descriptions and attempts to characterize its main differences from other national systems. The Finnish early years education has been heralded, for example, for its holistic orientation to children’s care, and education as well as its focus on playful learning approaches and participatory culture. However, despite these positive characterizations and the arguably great potential of the Finnish pre-primary education for offering children with rich opportunities to engage in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) learning, early childhood educators are still cautious to implement STEAM and phenomenon-based learning. In this chapter, we will present three distinctive approaches to early STEAM education developed in Finland, namely 1) phenomenon-based learning, 2) children’s maker-spaces and 3) children’s projects. In addition, we will also discuss and draw out suggestions on how these approaches could potentially address the above concerns regarding Finnish early years STEAM education.The skills needed to live in our current societies are rapidly changing. How will we provide children with the skills they will need in the future? While early years education has been traditionally strong in supporting 21st century skills like creativity, collaboration and problem-solving within play, global crises around the ecological, social and economic sustainability of our societies challenge current practices and call on us as researchers and educators to rethink how these and other skills, like computational thinking, could be advanced in early childhood education via science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) education. Over recent years, the Finnish educational system has enjoyed intense national and international attention, the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector along with it. This has resulted in multiple descriptions and attempts to characterize Finnish education’s main differences from other national systems. Finnish early years education has been heralded for its holistic orientation to children’s care and education, as well as its focus on playful learning approaches and participatory culture. However, despite these positive characterizations and the arguably great potential of the Finnish pre-primary education for offering children with rich opportunities to engage in STEAM learning, early childhood educators are still cautious in implementing STEAM and phenomenon-based learning. In this chapter, we will present three distinctive approaches to early STEAM education developed in Finland, namely 1) phenomenon-based learning, 2) children’s maker-spaces and 3) children’s projects. In addition, we will also discuss how these approaches build on the current form of Finnish ECEC and draw out suggestions on how these approaches could potentially address the above concerns regarding Finnish early years STEAM education.Peer reviewe

Methodological and Conceptual Suggestions for Researching the Interplay of Assessment and Student Agency

It has been claimed that promoting student agency is one of the key features of new generation assessment practices in higher education. While studies in higher education have offered important new knowledge about how students show agency in assessment, what is largely lacking in the field of assessment and agency is i) an elaboration of the theoretical framework or a definition of the concept of agency, ii) a description of theory-driven data analysis and iii) the alignment of the theoretical framework and the analysis methods. In this chapter, we address these three points by offering an example of an earlier study on socio- cultural conceptualisation of agency and self-assessment. What follows is a critical reflection on the methodological choices of this paper. We argue that if the literature on assessment and agency keeps neglecting the socio-cultural aspects of agency, the research runs the risk of not being able to guide practice in the field of higher education or offer insights into oft-reported issues regarding student agency and assessment.Peer reviewe

Compassion and Emotional Worlds in Early Childhood Education

Peer reviewe

Siirtymätoimintoja: lasten projektit suomalaisessa esikoulussa

Online 2021, print 2022This chapter builds on three key theoretical premises of cultural-historical activity theory, namely that 1) human activities are object oriented (Leontiev, 1978; Engeström, 1999) and that 2) children’s learning and development are structured by the various opportunities offered and demands placed on them by different activities that constitute their everyday lives (Hedegaard & Fleer, 2012) and lastly that 3) the relative importance of various activities for children’s development between different historical periods and within ontogenesis changes (Beach, 1995). Within the broad frame of these premises, in this chapter we will explore the notion of children’s projects (Hilppö, 2017) and its theoretical and empirical relevance for the development of cultural-historical activity theory. More specifically, the focus in the chapter is on such projects as transitional activities and how they are related to more leading activities in children’s development like socio-dramatic play and school learning (Elkonin, 1972). Importantly, the chapter will explore how children’s projects emerge through children’s agency (Rainio, 2010; Rainio and Hilppö, 2017) and the opportunities these projects offer for supporting children’s learning and development. The theoretical arguments advanced in this chapter are illustrated with an example of a children’s project from a Finnish pre- primary education group. The chapter will conclude with a discussion about the role of Finnish early education and especially pre-primary education in the emergence of children’s projects.Peer reviewe

The dialectics of agency in educational ethnography

This paper outlines a dialectical conceptualisation of children’s agency for the purposes of multidisciplinary educational theory and practice. We illuminate five contradictory but connected dimensions of children’s agency, or the dialectics of agency, identified from theoretical debate between sociologically and psychologically oriented educational literature: Agency (1) as enacted and imagined; (2) as situatively emergent and progressively developmental; (3) as dependence and separation; (4) as mastery and submission; and (5) as control and freedom. We examine these contradictions ‘at work’ in an ethnographic early education case study. We argue that the children’s struggles towards agency and adults’ efforts and failures to support children in their struggles can be conceptualised as a dialectical movement that has a potential to develop the educational practice itself. Our dialectical reading of both data and theory helps to highlight the challenges the practitioners face when supporting children’s agency and the solutions they implement when doing so.Peer reviewe

Teacher Agency and Futures Thinking

Problems encountered in top-down school reforms have repeatedly highlighted the significance of teachers’ agency in educational change. At the same time, temporality has been identified as a key element in teachers’ agency, with teachers’ beliefs about the future and experiences of the past shaping their agentic orientations. However, research on teachers’ future orientations is typically limited to short-term trajectories, as opposed to long-term visions of education. To address this, we draw on a futures studies perspective to give more explicit attention to teachers’ long-term visions of their work. We argue that the method of future narratives, already well-established in the field of futures studies, is a fruitful methodological framework for studying these long-term visions. In this paper, we first show that the futures studies approach is theoretically compatible with the ecological model of teacher agency. We then outline the method of future narratives to point out the possibilities it offers. Finally, we illustrate our approach with an exploratory analysis of a small set of future narratives where teachers imagine a future workday. Our analysis reveals that the narratives offer a rich view of teachers’ longer-term visions of education, including instances of reflecting on the role of education in relation to broader societal developments. Our study suggests that this novel approach can provide tools for research on teacher agency as well as practical development of teacher education, addressing long-term educational issues and policies