Children’s Initiatives in the Finnish Early Childhood Education Context

Pedagogical practices in early childhood education, which embrace children’s initiatives and agency, have been found to have an effect on children’s learning and competence skills. These initiatives can be seen crucial for children’s well-being and self-motivation. However, children’s initiatives are sometimes considered only as wants and that children are incapable to express meaningful initiatives in educational settings. In this chapter, we introduce children’s initiatives in their educational settings and examine the gap between children’s experiences and teachers’ observations. Children’s initiatives exist in a myriad of ways through the daily practices and processes that nourish motivation to ultimately create meanings through actions. It is essential to focus on children’s participation as it encourages and promotes agency and motivation within early childhood development.Peer reviewe

Lockdown lessons: an international conversation on resilient GI science teaching

We report the findings from two global panel “conversations” that, stimulated by the exceptional coronavirus pandemic of 2020/21, explored the concept of resilience in geographic science teaching and learning. Characteristics of resilient teaching, both in general and with reference to GISc, are listed and shown to be essentially what might in the past have been called good teaching. Similarly, barriers to resilient teaching are explored and strategies for overcoming them listed. Perhaps the most important conclusion is a widespread desire not to “bounce back” to pre-COVID ways, but to use the opportunity to “bounce forward” towards better teaching and learning practices