Keywords

Introduction

In this paper, I discuss two data collection methods: an online survey and photo-elicitation interviews (PEIs) used in my PhD project (Lembrér, 2021). These different ways of gathering data were used to investigate parents’ views on mathematics education for young children at home and in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) institutions in Sweden and Norway. The data included parents’ stories about mathematics education and provided insights into pedagogical and mathematical aspects of home and ECEC that parents value.

Curricula documents for ECEC in Sweden and Norway highlight the importance of collaboration between teachers and parents for children’s learning and development (Norwegian Ministry of Education, 2017; Swedish National Agency for Education, 2018). Yet, parents’ views have received little attention in Scandinavian early childhood research. International research highlights the importance of understanding children’s learning as embedded in the social, cultural and family contexts in which it occurs (Goodall & Montgomery, 2014; Phillipson et al., 2017). Most studies about parents and mathematics education in ECEC have focused on informing parents about good activities to do at home and how teachers in ECEC could support parents to better understand mathematics-related learning opportunities for young children (e.g. Blevins-Knabe et al., 2000). Some studies have shown that the involvement of parents in their children’s mathematics education is considered important in ensuring that they achieve an appropriate academic outcome. For example, Mapp (2003) and Missall et al. (2015) found that informal home mathematics activities, such as when parents highlight number symbols or counting with children, seem to contribute to children’s early mathematical skills, which contribute to their achievement at school. Other researchers, such as Anderson and Anderson (2018), have queried the one-way communication from ECEC to home and have stressed the need to understand the mathematics that adults introduce to young children at home. Previous research suggests that a lack of collaboration between ECEC and parents may be linked to the different roles parents and teachers play in children’s lives (see for example, Green et al., 2007; Sonnenschein et al., 2012; Van Laere & Vandenbroeck, 2017). Parents may have limited opportunities to share what they already do without awareness of how these differences may interfere with developing opportunities for richer collaborations. Opportunities for collaboration often depend on the context, such as the parents’ familiarity with the educational institutions (Murray et al., 2015; Norheim & Moser, 2020). Against this background, research on mathematics education for young children in terms of parents’ views can be divided into three themes. The first theme is about how research findings should be translated into the home. The second theme identifies research concerned with how parents engage children in mathematical ideas through everyday experience. The third indicates the different roles that parents play in children’s lives and the contextual considerations that may interfere with opportunities for such collaboration. Nevertheless, research that values parents’ views requires appropriate methodologies that reveal how parents see, think about, and value their children’s mathematics at home and in ECEC.

Vázquez Campos and Liz Gutiérrez (2015) stated that points of view are identified by highlighting of specific content, related not only to what is experienced but also to what is possible to experience. Therefore, in this paper, I define a view as a way of seeing the world that comes from the life experiences that people carry with them. A point of view is not only a place from which people view things and events but also how those things and events can be viewed from a certain kind of situation or position. The events that parents share provide insights into their experiences of mathematics education for young children at home and ECEC.

What kinds of parents’ views can be identified in the research is related to methodological choices as these shows how the data collection contexts affect how they are interpreted. In this paper, I discuss the methodological choices in research on early mathematics education framed by two data collection methods: an online survey and photo-elicited interviews (PEIs), with a particular interpretation of insights, gained about parents’ views on mathematics education for young children. I argue for the need for more discussion about the methodological choices for investigating parents’ views on mathematics education for young children.

In the following section, I present Bruner’s theory of narrative construction (1991, 2004), which links people’s views and the cultures created and negotiated within a society (Bruner, 2009). Bruner’ theory provides the foundation for how investigating parents’ views is undertaken. I also briefly describe previous research into parents’ views on mathematics education for young children and describe the data collection methods used in my studies (e.g., Lange et al., 2022; Lembrér, 2020). In the last sections, I discuss these methods with particular understanding of how the data collection has affected the research insights from investigating parents’ views on mathematics education for young children.

Theoretical Perspective About Parents’ Views

Bruner (1991) stressed that narrative construction should be understood as universal, where the personal view is constructed and reconstructed through social interactions and cultural activities. In his work, Bruner used stories to talk about people’s experiences, he stated that: “to narrate” derives from both “telling” (narrate) and “knowing in some particular way” (gnarus), the two tangled beyond sorting” (Bruner, 2002, p. 27). He highlighted the power of narrative or storytelling for imposing order on life’s uncertainties and one’s expectations of life. Therefore, narrative construction shows the importance of contexts and provides opportunities for exploring views on particular topics, such as children and the family culture in which mathematics education occurs.

Bruner (2002) highlighted the importance of meaning as a central process of the individual mind and social interaction. Bruner stated:

There is no such thing as an intuitively obvious and essential self to know, one that just sits there ready to be portrayed in words. Rather, we constantly construct and reconstruct ourselves to meet the needs of the situations we encounter. (Bruner, 2002, p. 64)

From this understanding, parents’ views become identifiable because narratives do not just recall memories but indicate the values connected to others’ expectations and culture as well as their own experiences, ideas, and opinions. Parents’ views appear in the problems, dilemmas, or contradictions in the narratives that connect past, present, and future events with mathematics education for young children. Past experiences are connected with what may be yet to come through the values developed from past experiences, as these are likely to be used to interpret future events. Contexts affect what comes to be views or valuable knowledge about mathematics education for young children. For example, institutional views often determine events with children at home. Takeuchi (2018) showed that in Filipino immigrant parents’ interactions with children about multiplication methods, the methods used in the children’s Japanese school were valued more highly. The parents considered their past experiences with an informal finger method, commonly used in Filipino culture, to be a counterproductive activity for doing multiplication, even if they knew that it provided correct answers.

For Bruner, a narrative is about “the desire to communicate meaning” (1990, p. 8) and that people use narratives to construct and make sense of their views of the world. As such, he emphasised the importance of language as a tool for understanding the world. Through narratives, people build up a view of themselves and their place in the world. A narrative is, thus, situated in the context of its time and provides a sequence of events with an interrelated, meaningful connection, which allows for the reasons behind these events to be interpreted. Bruner’s narrative construction provides opportunities to better understand the meanings that people create from their experiences. This is because narratives can reveal or confirm cultural norms, values, rules, and regulations (Bruner, 1991, 2004). These narratives include people recalling events using particular knowledge or understanding. For example, in a study by Wager and Whyte (2013), parents provided information to ECEC teachers about mathematics activities done at home. The teachers incorporated this information into their planning of mathematics activities at ECEC in two ways. The first way involved including only activities presented by parents that teachers were familiar with. These teachers disregarded the activities they did not recognise from their own experiences or practices. The second way involved integrating home experiences that teachers were unfamiliar with. In this way, teachers adopted some of the parents’ experiences of home activities, but it was a much less common approach. In both cases, the teachers made choices about what mathematics activities should be included based on how the teacher interpreted the narratives told to them by the parents.

Bruner’s narrative construction can be used to understand the meanings that parents created from their experiences. The sequences of events described in the narratives may also include what Clandinin and Connelly (2004) describe as the three-dimensional narrative research space. These dimensional spaces are: the personal and social (the interaction); the past, present, and future (continuity); and the place (situation). Narratives are constructed in a specific place and situation and in a way that the narrative modes of thought generally do not highlight or make clear to those trying to understand them. The sequence of events may include information about the setting or context of participants’ experiences. Einarsdottir and Jónsdóttir’s (2017) study of collaborations in Iceland between parents and preschool teachers identified tensions when the parents became more interested in early childhood policy and pedagogical practices. The results indicated that while teachers sought to keep their professional status as educators when talking about children’s early years’ education, the parents were viewed as providing teachers with informal knowledge about their children. The views of parents were valued only to the extent that it was individualised, so it was only about their particular children. As a result, the teachers did not seek collaboration in implementing the institutional goals and organisation of pedagogical practices at ECEC. Bruner (1991) stated that in interactions, people navigate between their previous experiences and knowledge of the world around them. This kind of navigation could be seen in the teachers’ views about what should happen in the Icelandic ECEC institutions affected their interpretation of what the parents told them.

People share their views when interacting by telling narratives about events and experiences. Narratives are social or personal stories which refer to cultural values and traditions as they offer meaningful connections to events. Bruner (1991, 2004) stated that narratives address the meanings people create from their experiences. These experiences include layers of understanding about representations of time, interpretations, what feels right to say or do, cultural norms and contextual background knowledge. Narratives about events to do with mathematics activities for your children appeared in the two data collection methods. The stories told through these methods, either explicitly or implicitly, provided insights into parents’ lived experiences in society. Therefore, the connection between parents’ narratives and views became apparent in how they constructed their narratives in the individual survey responses and the interactions between parents in a PEI.

In the next section, I describe both methods and then discuss how Bruner’s narrative construction was used to identify how the parents’ views were constructed by merging their individual and social understandings of the world.

Data Collection Strategies

The two data collection methods were an online survey and photo-elicited interviews (PEIs). Earlier studies indicated that photo-elicitation interviews yielded narratives jointly constructed by the participants and offered a sharing of attention because photos have communicative features when viewed together (Lapenta, 2011). The online survey was useful in describing a population’s characteristics (Braun et al., 2021). For my PhD project, Polish immigrant parents and their responses provided opportunities to gain insights into their experiences in their home countries and their new countries.

The first data collection phase focused on immigrant parents’ views on mathematics education for young children; therefore, an online survey was designed to capture some of these views from Polish immigrant parents living in Sweden and Norway. The focus on Polish parents was because there are more Polish immigrants yearly in Norway than any other nationality (Østby, 2016), and Polish citizens were also the fourth-largest immigrant group in Sweden in 2015 (Statistics Sweden, 2016).

The use of surveys for data collection is a common technique for focusing on a specific population sample. Surveys can be conducted within a limited period of time and are cost-effective for collecting data (Cohen et al., 2000; Trost, 2012). This method allowed participants to remain anonymous. The survey consisted of 16 questions. The majority were open-ended, and two were multiple-choice. These questions are described in detail in Lembrér (2021, pp. 30–34). The survey questions aimed to find out about parents’ individual views and understand how these views could inform ECEC in both countries. The data from the first phase were responses to a survey on an online platform (SurveyPlanet), answered between June 2016 and closed in November 2016 (41 Polish parents resident in Sweden completed the survey), and May and September 2017 (54 Polish parents resident in Norway completed the survey). The links to both surveys were made available on the websites of the Polish organisation in Sweden (Polonia info), and an organisation in Norway (Moja Norwegia/My Norway). All the parents that responded to the survey made an explicit or implicit reference to early childhood education in Sweden/Norway and had to have at least one child in ECEC in Sweden/Norway.

The photo-elicitation focus group interviews (PEIs) comprised the second phase of the data collection. Photo elicitation is a method that involves participants taking photos that are later used as stimuli during interviews. Basing the interviews on their own photos helps participants to articulate their interpretations (Hurworth, 2004). This provides insights into how the parents see the relationship between individual views and the wider societal context. Photos as stimuli provide familiarity (Harper, 2002), and the user-generated image is a term often used in research when participants take photos (Epstein et al., 2006). The participants’ choice of photos is an initial consideration when investigating specific groups’ views on certain experiences from particular environments. The parents were asked to take photos of their children engaged in mathematical activities, with no information provided about what mathematical activities could be. The data collection for PEIs began in May 2017 and ended in November 2017.

An overview of the data is given in Table 1 and includes the method, data material, and participants’ descriptions.

Table 1 Overview of data collected
Full size table

The narratives that were produced from these two data collections were about events and experiences of mathematics education for young children. The initial analysis began with identifying what insights appeared in the surveys, about events to do with young children’s mathematics activities, and the transcripts of the photo-elicited interviews. Reflecting on the data, I describe how the narratives produced from these two data collections provided different insights into parents’ views on mathematics education for young children. These narratives were investigated to identify the relationship between parents’ individual views and wider societal views. In the next section, I describe the two types of narratives constructed when gathering data from parents.

Results and Discussion

The types of narratives that appeared were produced as a result of the way the survey questions were asked and how the interactions between the participants in PEIs developed. The context in which these narratives were produced provided insights into why various aspects of individual and societal views appeared. The context also gave insight into what can or should be described in the narratives.

The parents’ narratives were shaped by the settings in which they were collected and connected to the three-dimensional space narrative enquiry framework (Clandinin & Connelly, 2004). In the narratives about parents’ lived experiences, I found patterns, descriptions of what mathematics education is, and evidence of the social influence that affected parents’ views from specific cultural standpoints (see Chap. 5 in Lembrér, 2021). The narratives brought up the personal and social and were dominated by the autonomy of a parent to be original when telling stories, their commitment to the group, and the values they might share. For example, the interactions show links between personal and social factors of experiences involving sharing life experiences through which a teller looks inside into their feelings, hope, and outside to external environments. The narrative reveals not only the mathematical events but also the settings in which the narratives were collected.

The Individual Context of the Online Survey

In the survey, the questions were designed to elicit narratives, albeit short ones. The questions asked about individual parents’ experiences related to the environments of home and ECEC where children might be involved in mathematics education. When designing the survey questions, particular mathematics activities at home and ECEC identified in earlier research (e.g. Aubrey et al., 2003; Bottle, 1999) were presented, and the parents were asked to identify the mathematics activities their children did at home and ECEC.

The survey results gave a broader view of a particular group of parents on a specific set of questions about parents’ experiences of mathematics education for young children at home, in ECEC in Poland and Sweden, and between Poland and Norway. Overall, the answers to the survey questions were relatively short, making it difficult to know if more details would have changed the understanding of the values connected.

Although the questions were designed to encourage parents to describe mathematics activities, the shortness of the responses limited the kinds of narratives parents could share, which led to the identification of particular kinds of views. The collected set of views that emerged from the survey about participants’ experiences of mathematics education for young children indicated an implicit recognition of the influence of everyday life in the given society (Bruner, 2002).

The narratives allowed for practical and situated knowledge to be identified. This knowledge suggested a similar view from this group of immigrant parents about what was valuable for the mathematics education of young children. For example, the following two narratives illustrate Polish immigrant parents’ dissatisfaction with the ECEC institutions that their children attended in Sweden and Norway.

Survey response (Sweden)::

I do not think that playing in the sandbox has a greater impact on learning mathematics – unless they count sand molds or distribute a group of toys in equal parts among the children.

Survey response (Norway)::

There is a tragic level of education in Norwegian preschools compared to any preschool in Poland. The Norwegian preschool is a children’s storage room until parents take them home. I am very disappointed; I plan to return to Poland because I see that children do not learn anything here, and only at school from the first Grade, do they start learning anything.

In the first narrative, the parent valued counting. Other aspects of mathematics, such as volume, measurement or understanding of shapes, which can occur when playing with sand, were not recognised and not valued. The second narrative is from a parent who, influenced by expectations from the Polish approach to early childhood mathematics education, considered that Norwegian preschool did not provide appropriate experiences to their child. From these two narratives, it is possible to see how an online survey could elicit parents’ critical points of view. The complexity connected to the construction of these narratives was apparent in that there were different sources that parents drew on when developing their views, which came from wider societal and institutional expectations and their own previous experience of mathematics education.

Although the survey required individual responses, it was assumed that there would be societal influences on the narratives through the parents’ expectations about the kinds of answers that the survey developer were expecting. There was a range of views presented, from the critical perspective provided earlier, to those which valued the approaches used in the Scandinavian countries. Thus, parents’ narrative could include contextual background knowledge from interpreting the pedagogical practices that they were aware of in the ECEC:

Survey response (Sweden)::

Children learn to count in play activities. I think that play is a good approach to learning mathematics.

Survey response (Norway)::

I am very happy with the way children are taught mathematics in our (Norwegian) kindergarten. Children learn it casually, on specific examples. The road to abstract thinking goes gradually, starting with things that children know that they can touch. Thanks to this, they get used to mathematics as a natural part of life. I am very happy about this approach.

Narratives such as these provided insights into the relationship between specific individual experiences and societal norms in that they emphasised the particularity of mathematics education for young children at ECEC from a particular cultural experience. This can be seen in the description of the valued pedagogical norm, “learning through play”, as being a “good approach”. The societal influence appears in the similarity between how play is described by the parent and how it is described in the Swedish preschool curriculum, highlighting that children learn through play (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2018). This narrative indicates that, potentially, this Polish parent had knowledge of and was influenced by the curriculum. In the second example, Polish parents living in Norway indicated an appreciation of how the Norwegian ECEC supported children to learn in everyday situation and a view of the Norwegian ECEC providing appropriate mathematics education for their children.

The societal impact on parents’ general view of the institutional values to do with mathematics education was evident from viewing the whole set of responses to the questionnaires. They provided narratives that included their view, both as being individual and showing the influence of societal expectations, which had been adopted by the narrator about ways of engaging with mathematics. For example, in response to a specific survey question, when a series of individual narratives present a similar view about a range of examples of mathematical learning situations, from playing with sand and water, to measuring or jigsaw puzzles, the societal impact on that view becomes more evident.

The Context of Interactions in the Photo-Elicited Group Interviews

The narratives produced in the PEIs reflected the specific context of their construction, including the contributions of other participants about selected photos and related experiences and the impact of broader society on sharing personal memories of events within a group. The PEIs provided a more nuanced understanding of small groups, but were more specific to the experiences of those groups. In the PEIs, participants elaborated on each other’s contributions, contributing to the jointly constructed narratives. As such, the parents’ interpretations of their individual events were less apparent, and as the interaction developed, a joint narrative about a set of events was often produced.

Bruner (2002) argued that group interactions grow on the interplay of narratives, on the sharing of common ideas that can be negotiated for their consequences producing an outcome or resolution. In the PEIs, the Norwegian parents described several events in which they played games with their children, often as examples of adapting mathematics in everyday situations. Yahtzee was raised as a general experience of activity that parents engaged with their children at home. Here the emphasis on the social processes that shaped their understanding of people’s positions was found. Bruner (2002) described narratives as providing shared meanings and symbolic modes for maintaining original or existing genres that contributed to creating and communicating the world. The narratives produced were not always familiar to those who were listening. Several narratives provided details about how the game involved mathematics and indicated that parents could interpret the features of playing a board game with their children and value playing Yahtzee as it provided mathematical learning possibilities in the home environment. From this discussion, the view seemed to be developed that this was the right or valuable activity to do with young children. For example, parents said:

  • PEI Group 1: Yahtzee, for example, involved “gathering all the sixes”, and “We count how many dots there are on the die.”

  • PEI Group 2: We play with a die with the numbers 1 to 6, but with the younger child we use the die with pictures. It is a little easier then.

  • PEI Group 1: We are playing Yahtzee with him (their younger son) in order to collect all the sixes, but it’s also worth gathering all the sixes

In these examples, the parents focused on encouraging children to count with them and recognise specific amounts through pattern shapes or from the numerals (Fig. 1). Yathzee was mentioned in both PEIs groups, and this further suggests that parents have valued learning to count into their general view about mathematics education. Talking about the Yahtzee game made at least one parent reflect on whether they participated in what was presented as a societal norm and reflected on their commitment to the group and the values they might share. This parent said:

  • PEI Group 2: I have got a little guilty conscience because we almost never played Yahtzee with our other child. So we must go home and do that.

Although PEIs were designed to elicit individual views, the specific context of the PEIs revealed that there would be societal influences on the narratives, including the contributions of other parents and the impact of wider society on sharing individual memories within a group.

Fig. 1
A photo of a Yahtzee game scorecard. It has 6 columns and many rows. The first row has details printed, scores are to be filled in the following rows.

A photo taken by a parent illustrating playing the Yahtzee game

Full size image

The narratives produced in the interactions in PEIs were both individual and social and provided insights into what influenced participants’ views beyond what was evident in the responses to the survey questions. Analysis of these narratives aims to understand why or how something happened and the participants’ motivation in the events. Parents’ views are linked to their intentionality of actions regarding what they value in their roles and the kinds of engagement they described themselves as having with their children. For example, a parent said:

  • PEI Group 1: I think that there is a strong connection between home and barnehage [ECEC] because children may get [mathematical] ideas in barnehage [ECEC] and can engage with it at home too and learn a little more about it.

This example indicates an appreciation of the Norwegian ECEC and how they might have been influenced by what was done at the ECEC. This suggests that a parent had subsumed valuing Norwegian ECEC providing appropriate mathematics education, situating the work with children being shared undertaking.

Birkeland (2013) stated that, in PEIs, telling stories about specific contexts included participants confronting each other with different ideas. The co-constructed nature of the narratives was evident in the transcripts, as the participants drew upon input from each other’s narratives when they brought up different points. Therefore, the jointly constructed narratives contained the negotiation of ideas about mathematics education for young children from a set of experiences, using the pictures of their children’s engagement in mathematics activities at home as stimuli. The interactions between the participants prompted broader discussions about mathematics education than the individual parents’ interpretations of their own experiences.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have discussed two data collection methods, an online survey and photo-elicited interviews (PEIs), for gathering data from parents to identify their views on mathematics education. The different types of narratives produced were affected by the ways the data were collected and provided insights into some of the parents’ views on mathematics education for young children. The kinds of narratives that arose in the responses to survey questions brought attention to parents’ individual experiences against the backdrop of societal expectations. In the PEIs, as the interactions developed, parents could reconstruct, unpack and contextualise their views, which gave insights into what influenced those views beyond what had been evident in the survey responses.

In mathematics education research, it is acknowledged that parents contribute to their children’s educational outcomes. Many researchers have studied these contributions using different methodologies (see for example, Anders et al., 2012; Colliver & Arguel, 2018; Hoover-Dempsey et al., 2005; Sheri-Lynn et al., 2014). In this paper, I have illustrated how parents’ identifiable views seem to be situated simultaneously within the individual and social expectations that appeared differently in the data collected through these two methods. Thus, in the support for collaboration stated in curricula documents for ECEC in Sweden and Norway (Norwegian Ministry of Education, 2017; Swedish National Agency for Education, 2018), there are no formal directions about how this is to be achieved. For the research related to parents’ views on mathematics education for young children, the study has shown that further reflection is needed on the influence of data collection on what can be said about parents’ knowledge, experiences and views. The cultural nature of mathematics education for young children influences parents’ views. The way parents are asked about their views might emphasise particular aspects of their knowledge about differences or similarities in mathematics education, such as between home and ECEC institutions.

The focus on the social also indicates the role of the political context in social interactions. In the case of the Polish parent in Norway, it seemed that they lacked the power to have the Norwegian preschool adopt their view on mathematics education for their children, which led them to consider taking their children back to Poland (Lange et al., 2022). The issue of who had the power to affect the mathematics learning opportunities offered to children came up in different ways when considering what might influence parents’ views. Further reflection on the cultural and political nature of data collection is needed.