Keywords

Introduction

Professional life stories with 29 pioneers within early childhood education and care (ECEC), active during the second half of the twentieth century, have been rendered by Singer and Wong (2021). Their study includes researchers who have been part of the expansion of ECEC, both as a practice for children and as an academic field. Most of these researchers do not have an academic background but have life experience that has led them to the field of ECEC. I am one of these pioneers, not socialised into the mainstream of research – which previously has mainly involved psychological studies with tests and large samples. The paradigm shift in research during the same time was that theories pointed out the importance of context in learning and development, resulting in the emergence of studies in ECEC and not only on individual children. Earlier child development is the academic discipline that has served as the foundation for ECEC (Pramling & Pramling Samuelsson, 2011).

The present chapter can be viewed as telling the story of educational pioneer work in research in which researchers and teachers collaborate in knowledge-building. More specifically, this chapter is based on research on children’s subjective perspectives on their own learning, which brought with it questions about developing, through pedagogy, children’s understanding of the world around them. The story that is told is also one of how teachers have participated in developing a new approach to pedagogy – later called Development Pedagogy – in early years education, based on empirical studies (Pramling Samuelsson & Asplund Carlsson, 2008). Investigating children’s perspectives on learning, this chapter is based on two main studies, conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. It takes its starting point in a doctoral thesis focusing on metacognition in young children’s learning, since it was here that the idea of a preschool pedagogy was born (Pramling, 1983). The reason for beginning to think of a new approach to work in preschool was that the results showed that teachers’ and children’s ideas of what children learned were not at all in conformity. In the interviews with children, metacognition played a central role in making different content areas visible. Metacognition can be described as ‘making learning an object of learning’ (NSIN Research Matters, 2001, p. 6), which implies getting children to think, talk, and reflect on learning. Learning about children’s subjective world, metacommunication (i.e. communicating about how one communicates, e.g. what is meant by what is said), and metacognition became central. In the study, teachers’ work with specific content also showed that their intention with the teaching was different from what the children perceived it was all about. These results led to reflective questions, such as whether and how a metacognitive approach could be developed to support children’s learning in early years education, which we wanted to try out in the two following studies in which methodology would be the focus.

The thesis, as mentioned above, was that teachers take a great deal for granted about children’s learning, which they should not do if they want to influence the children’s understanding of the world around them. The two pedagogical studies, intended to develop children’s learning and teachers’ role in this, were then carried out together with teachers. They will be described in the next section, followed by a discussion of the methodological design and how the teachers were involved in the research. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the implications of the results but will also illuminate a number of identified challenges and tensions involved with conducting this research.

Background

The background of this chapter is a dissertation called The Child’s Conception of Learning (Pramling, 1983), reporting on a study inspired by Piaget’s work, in which children’s ideas about their own learning were traced and described in terms of qualitatively different conceptions –related to both what they learnt and how they perceived that learning comes about. The doctoral thesis described children’s development of an understanding of learning, in three qualitatively different categories regarding what they learn and three categories regarding how they learn: what, learning as doing, as knowing, and as understanding, and how, as doing, as growing older, and as having experiences. In the same study, the themes worked with in preschool were observed, and the children were interviewed, which showed that the teachers had the intention to teach them about time, for example, while the children experienced it as having learnt to make clocks. The teachers’ intention involved knowledge of or about something, while the children interpreted the activities as learning to do something, which was related to their understanding of what it means to learn (their conception of learning). Their ideas about learning came through in whatever question they were asked. For instance, in response to the question ‘What would you do to find out about how far it is to the moon?’, four categories of conceptions appeared: (1) the child discusses building a space shuttle and going there themselves (one has to do something to find out), (2) they mention asking an astronaut (someone who has been there), (3) they discuss asking their family or teacher (someone may know even though they have not been there), and (4) they say they would find this out via media (in a book or at the computer). Against this background, the metacognitive aspect of getting children to reflect on their own learning became a key factor in bringing the research to the next study.

The theoretical perspective behind the study discussed above, which also came to guide subsequent studies, is phenomenography (Marton, 1981). Marton and Booth (1997) describe phenomenography as the empirical study of the qualitatively different ways in which people experience and understand various aspects of the world around them. From this perspective, learners’ subjective perspectives become important, as it is the case both that children make sense of something based on their earlier experience and that what they learn may result in their changing perspective. The word phenomenon, from the Greek, means ‘what appears’, in the sense that it is always someone who ‘sees’ something. In other words, there is a reciprocity between the object (a world and the things in it) and the subject (the human). A phenomenon can, for instance, be learning or specific content worked with in preschool. The child’s perspective becomes central in this kind of research, a notion that is different from a child perspective (see, e.g. Sommer et al., 2010, for this distinction, or paragraphs 3 and 12 in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989).

Within phenomenography, the ontological view is that subject and object are not separate but rather incorporated in an internal relationship with each other. When the child incorporates the world, the world becomes part of the child. On the one hand, the child’s understanding of the world becomes part of their personality; thus, knowledge is deeply personal. On the other hand, a non-dualistic perspective builds on the premise that there are not two different worlds – one real objective world, separated from the subjective mental world. There is only one existing world, which people experience in different ways and which is subjective and objective at the same time (Pramling, 1994). From this premise, knowledge becomes a way to experience different phenomena and aspects of the surrounding world, and learning becomes a question of changing conception (meaning) about something or expanding the child’s views to new dimensions. Since we have seen that ways of thinking and talking about learning influenced children’s understanding of various other phenomena, our question became If we could manage to develop children’s ideas about their learning, might they learn better? The results of the two following studies, focusing here on the methodology, showed that it was not enough to get children to reflect on their own learning; the same kinds of metacognitive reflections have to be used in all content areas that are worked with.

Two Development Studies

The next step in the research programme involved getting teachers to work in a metacognitive way with the intention of raising the children’s awareness of their own learning, in the study Learning to Learn (hereafter called Study I; fully reported in Pramling, 1990). It is in this process that the cooperation between teachers and researchers is put on the stage, since it could not have been done without the teachers working in practice. In other words, we grew interested in more didactical/pedagogical questions, such as how to improve children’s learning in preschool. As metacognition was a key factor, we focused on this with two intervention preschools. There, metacognition was related to (1) learning, (2) structure, and (3) content. The pedagogical approach consisted of alternating between these three levels, with learning being the most general one. The structural level is less general as fundamental structures can be found in different contents (e.g. an ecological cycle, cause-effect), and finally, the third level is the content, which is the least general. In teaching, the kind of pedagogy used means to alternate between these three levels. The results from Study I show that it is a question not only of making children more aware about their own learning but also of using a pedagogy in which the metacognitive dialogues are recurrently used in communication with children about the content (or learning objects) teachers want them to develop an understand. Children from the intervention groups grasped the message in two books and understood the ecological cycle they had seen a presentation on at the Museum of Natural History, on a much more advanced level than children from the comparison groups. In other words, they had learnt to learn (i.e. generative learning), meaning that they could make better sense of new experiences.

Study II, which can be seen as a replication of Study I but extended in time and the number of children and teachers, was called The Foundations of Knowing: Testing of a Phenomenographic Effort to Develop Children’s Ways of Understanding the Surrounding World (Pramling, 1994). What was different in this study was that teachers read research literature on young children’s conceptions of literacy, mathematics, nature, culture, etc., which means that earlier research on children’s conceptions of various content became the curriculum for the project. This provided teachers with knowledge about what it could look like when children developed an understanding of, for example, dividing something, number conception, symbols, and reading. Apart from this, it was similar to Study I, building on interviewing children and learning about metacognition. The results in this study also showed a more advanced understanding in the experimental groups of solving different tasks and talking about various content areas, as well as a better ability to retell and make sense of a story read to them, as compared to the children in the comparison groups.

Based on these empirical studies, a preschool approach called Developmental Pedagogy now began to emerge (Pramling, 1996a, b; Pramling & Pramling Samuelsson, 2011), which means that key factors from the research approach are transferred into a pedagogy. The first principle of this approach is that the child’s subjective world serves as both the starting point for intervention and shaping their learning about the world around them. From this follows the second principle that communicating and metacommunicating with children become central. This communication is intended to lead to the children talking, thinking, and reflecting. The third principle is that identified qualitatively different ways of conceptualising something are made visible to children in order to make them aware that there are many different ways to think about something in the group and that while these conceptions are different they are not simply wrong or right – it is not a misunderstanding but rather an understanding on children’s premises. Experiencing variation in ways of thinking can influence children to change their conception. Variation becomes important for making something visible to children; the simplest variation can make contrasts visible. The metacognitive dialogues have a central place in the development of preschool pedagogy.

Design and Method

The studies discussed above were carried out long before (in the second half of the 1980s and at the beginning of the 1990s, respectively) praxis was involved and appreciated in research studies. Both studies involved traditional aspects, such as having intervention groups, with whom the researchers worked, and comparison groups. In a study by Bjørnestad and Pramling Samuelsson (2012) on toddlers in ECEC, it became obvious that Nordic research was different from research from most other countries, being carried out in small-scale, qualitative approaches in ECEC together with teachers. Working with teachers in research had its breakthrough in the Nordic context quite early and in ECEC long before it came into practice in school education. In Study I, four groups of 5- to 6-year-olds were followed for 6 months. In two of these groups, there was an intervention, while in the other two, the researcher followed their work the whole time, but only said she was interested in what work was going on and thus did not intervene at all, except in the case of one certain content that all four were asked to work with. This theme, about ‘the shop’, was worked with for 2–3 weeks (see Pramling, 1990, for a full report, also 1991). In Study II, six groups of 5- to 6-year-olds were followed for 1 or 2 years (depending on whether they were six or five when the study began); all children were involved in the intervention, and the comparison groups consisted of six preschools located in the same area as the one that was followed, where the children became involved in the same kind of evaluation tasks only at the end of the study. Working with comparison groups in this way helps clarify the results and thus the consequences of an intervention.

What, then, was similar and what was different in the design of these two studies, besides the comparison groups? In the intervention groups, teachers received feedback on their work from the researcher following their activities and were continuously observed. These teachers also received information and texts about the theoretical perspective and previous research in this area of knowledge. Study I lasted 6 months and Study II 2 years. Study I was carried out in middle-class areas, with four teachers with similar competence and length of experience as preschool teachers. Study II was carried out in low-, middle-, and upper-class areas, with teachers with between 2 and 26 years of practice in preschool. In both studies, however, the question we were trying to answer was whether metacognitive dialogues could contribute to learning. In the first study, we hypothesised that developing children’s conceptions of learning would lead to better learning. We realised that this was not the case, however; rather, these kinds of metacognitive dialogues have to be related to all kinds of content that are worked on. Focusing on content in preschool as was done in these studies was unusual at the time and, in fact, is not even today an obvious aspect of ECEC (Björklund & Pramling Samuelsson, 2020).

The Work with the Teachers in Practice

The teachers, with whom the researchers worked, discussed things and jointly planned the work they would carry out with the children and received feedback from the researchers on what they did in the preschool. In this way, the teachers were involved in the research process. They became a group who supported each other when meeting with the researchers once a month and discussed different aspects such as metacognition, different content areas, and what the current research showed about children’s learning in various content areas. One could say that, for the teachers, the competence development was like an in-service competence, with dialogues both among themselves and with the researchers. They also gave each other advice and ideas related to the various themes they planned to work with. They also shared what they felt they had not succeeded at, such as making some children interested in a specific topic or being able to make an excursion they had planned, and asked for help in replacing this with something else. They often mentioned that they had difficulty asking the right question to get the children engaged. Some of the teachers used a device to record themselves, for instance, when they had circle time with the whole group of children, and then jointly listened to the recording, sometimes laughing about their own actions, which became clear to them when they began listening more carefully to what each child had said. One could claim that the teachers themselves, together with the researchers, used a metacognitive approach when reflecting on and sharing their experiences from praxis.

One very important aspect of the process was developing competence in interviewing children (Doverborg & Pramling Samuelsson, 1985/2012) and analysing children’s understanding of the various contents worked with in preschool. The interview was inspired by the Piagetian clinical interview, although it is criticised today not only for deceiving children but also because children try to determine what the adult who is interviewing them wants to hear (Pramling, 2015). This is why it is so important for the teacher and child to manage to establish intersubjectivity and enable space for each child to express himself/herself and to follow up on the children’s expressions so they feel that the adult is truly interested in and curious about what they have to say. This also led to seeing teaching as a continuous process, which also had consequences for how to structure the time in ECEC. Previously, the teacher had planned what they saw as the children’s learning and was active with them during this time and then enabled them to freely play and do what they wished. If a communicative dialogue was now to be in the centre, the teacher would need to be active with smaller groups all day long, even during play.

The ability to conduct interviews with children is a key competence for becoming able to use metacognitive dialogues to get children to talk, think, and reflect. It is at the crossroads between asking open-ended questions and knowing, as a teacher, what to make children aware of that the competence of the teacher is located. If a question is open, this gives children space to present their ideas rather than simply answering a question that the teacher already knows the answer to (Thulin, 2011). It is here, in children’s own perspectives, that the subjective world of the child becomes visible – which gives the teacher access to the understanding of each child and how it may have developed. In many later research projects, we have often gone back to having teachers conduct interviews with children, to record and analyse them, not to make them skilled at interviewing children per se but to help them become skilled at communicating with them. This means that the researchers had an intention to develop children’s understanding in communication of the various topics they worked with, which entailed that they needed to become skilled at asking children questions, catching their ideas, and challenging them in communication. Just like the teachers had the intention to influence the children’s learning (based on a curriculum), researchers had their intention based on theory and previous research. Many studies have shown how limited the dialogues are in preschool (see, e.g. Siraj-Blachford, 2007; Jonsson, 2013), and in this kind of pedagogy, communication is a key source. Interviewing or having a dialogue with children is much more difficult than interviewing adults, as one has to be able to both interpret what the child’s expressions mean and adopt one’s own communication in response to this.

The observations in the preschools were also video-recorded, and the teachers always knew what days we would come to follow their work. In Study I, only one researcher conducted all the data collection, while in Study II there were also two doctoral students involved. They worked as assistants, making observations in the classrooms and conducting interviews with children.

The teachers were also interviewed at the end of the project. The experience they expressed was double, both referring to a demand to do what they experienced as the ‘right’ things in practice, at the same time as they felt chosen and privileged at having been asked to participate in these research projects – not least as there was not much research being conducted in practice at the time. Illustrating that it was quite unusual to have researchers and practitioners working together, SVT (Swedish public service television) made a programme at one of the preschools. When the children at that preschool had seen the programme, one child said ‘Now I know why you ask so many questions, Kristina’. Being a much more active teacher, expected to make the learning objects visible for the children in communication and negotiation together with them but without being an instructor, was a challenge for the teachers, and they succeeded to different degrees.

In Study I, the evaluation took place like this: Children participated in tasks that they had not done before. In two of the tasks, an external researcher read two different books and conducted the interviews; in the third task, all children were invited to the Museum of Natural History where an employee gave a small ‘lesson’, showing an ecological cycle: a fieldfare (Turdus pilaris), a dead fieldfare, animal faeces, green leaves, brown leaves, a worm, and lying on the floor. The next day, the same researcher who had done the tasks with the book interviewed all the children. All interviews with the children were transcribed verbatim and were held at the end of various tasks. In Study II an external researcher interviewed all children, asking questions related to different content areas they had been working on, like early mathematics, literacy, environment, and social science. All these interviews were also transcribed verbatim. In many of the tasks in both evaluations, the children also made drawings at the same time as they talked or were given photos to look at, in order to make the topic of the conversations more concrete. The message the teachers received from the researchers was that they should try out the ideas involving using metacognition related to the content they wanted to develop knowledge about among the children, by taking in the children’s perspectives in dialogues.

The Researchers’ Intentions and Challenges

This kind of development study was challenging in different ways for all who participated, not least the researchers. Being involved in the whole process of development is common in action research, to which this approach is both similar and different. Pramling and Pramling Samuelsson (2013) write that, while both traditional action research and the type presented in this chapter take place in cooperation between teachers and researchers, in traditional action research the problem worked with is generated from the teachers, whereas the research presented here has the goal of developing children’s understanding of various phenomena, not as a fixed goal but as a direction for development, and:

the researcher and the teacher have already agreed on what to try to develop in children in terms of the teacher directing their attention to certain objects of learning or specific content areas, while action research has a kind of approach where the learners themselves decide what to learn. In a way, practice is at the centre of action research, while research is at the centre of our approach. In other words, our research has a theoretical framework, while action research is concerned with problem solving in practice. (Pramling Samuelsson & Pramling, 2013, p. 10)

This means that we do not cooperate on equal terms. The preschool teachers do not own their own participation but will rather develop their practice in line with the ideas developed by the researchers – based on both earlier studies and a specific view of learning. This partly entails a collision course with their earlier way of acting as preschool teachers. By this time, participation involves arranging different activities to involve the children in and then taking for granted that they will learn from this. And they do, but not always in terms of making sense of a message.

Another way to compare the two approaches is that we see the teacher’s learning as a result of learning about their pupils’ sensemaking, while the teacher’s learning and development as such form the key aim of action research. Pramling Samuelsson and Pramling (2013, p. 11) continue: ‘This also implies that research and the development of practice are two separate actions in our approach, that is, we “put on the stage” and “orchestrate” what we want to generate knowledge about, but research methods and work with teachers differ, while development and research are indistinguishable in action research’.

Our challenges can be described as trying to get teachers to become aware of the pedagogy we were trying to develop and the content worked with in terms of children’s understanding. This can be seen as parallel to what we want preschool teachers to work towards with their pupils. This was a challenge, since the pedagogy as such was in the process of being developed. Another challenge was to determine whether the content worked with what could be relevant for children to make sense of, as there were no clear end points but only a direction towards understanding. So, just like we consider teaching in ECEC a question of ‘pointing something out to someone’ (Doverborg et al., 2013, p. 8), we as researchers have to try to point something out to teachers that they can make sense of.

Discussion and Conclusions

There is a larger challenge when it comes to researchers and teachers cooperating in a development study, today often labelled praxis-oriented research. Considering that these projects are more than 30 years old at the time of this writing, when they were conducted, Swedish preschool did not have a national curriculum, like most other countries, and the view of preschool pedagogy was different. Traditionally, preschool was based on child development, which means that the focus was on the child’s development as a person and on more general skills, rather than on learning specific content areas. This implies that the development was considered the foundation for learning, while we turn this around and say that children develop when they learn (cf. Vygotsky, 1978, on cultural development) – or, learning and development are two sides of the same phenomenon (Pramling Samuelsson, 2020). Learning as a notion in guidelines for preschool had only appeared in texts (Socialstyrelsen, 1987), a notion that many preschool teachers related to school rather than preschool. One could say that the pedagogy used in the development study broke with tradition in many ways, not least in seeing children’s perspectives as correct from their perspectives and experiences as the result of learning but also in focusing on communication rather than children’s concrete activities merely as the foundation for their development. This means that it was not only a question of the teachers taking part in a development project; they also had to challenge their own ways of thinking about their role as teachers and about children’s learning, besides overcoming the notion that the researchers were not the experts, knowing exactly what they should, but rather functioned as an interested dialogue partner based on theoretical concepts and earlier research. At the same time as the teachers felt special due to having been asked to work with a researcher in their daily practice, most of them developed an astonishing competence from being involved in the research, as becoming skilled at attending to children’s perspectives and engaging them in challenging metacognitive dialogues are not easy tasks with young children. Some of the teachers ultimately enrolled in preschool teacher education at the university.

Looking more closely at the methodology used in the development studies, in a way, there were three parallel processes going on: (1) The researcher worked in a metacognitive way by metacommunicating about the teachers’ work with children – just as the intention was to inspire teachers to work with children in practice. (2) The intention of the methodology dealt with children’s perceptions, which changed the teachers’ role from planning activities to considering what they wanted the children to understand from the activities they organised – involving children’s perspectives as an expression of their views, but also of the meaning they have developed in their learning. And (3) teachers needed to discuss their work with researchers and other preschool teachers who struggled with the same questions – and not least about their own role in children’s learning. All these aspects together constituted a challenge for the teachers, who truly needed each other to put them into practice. But they also had to be prepared for criticism from researchers and colleagues – which means that the atmosphere in the group had to be accepting and show progress. It may also be interesting to think about the cooperation with the children: since we as researchers spent extensive time weekly in the groups, we got to know the children and they got to know us!

Finally, although this research approach was the first in Sweden in which preschool teachers were invited to cooperate with researchers in ECEC, it has now become mainstream in the country since the government launched funding for development, learning, and research, not least to develop long-standing cooperation between academia and preschools and schools (although there is still also more traditional research money to apply for). But it may be typically Swedish/Nordic to use researchers to cooperate in developing practice, at the same time as they can publish scientific articles and books.