Keywords

Children’s Education Worldwide

The United Nations Agenda 2030 points out in Goal 4.2: “By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education”. Globally, the gross pre-primary (1 year before school) enrolment rate increased by 27% points in the last 19 years, from 34% in 2000 to 61% in 2019. Despite this progress, as of 2019, there were at least 175 million children aged 3–6 years old who were not enrolled in education, according to a UNICEF (2022) global report on early childhood education (ECE). It is great that ECE is on the agenda and that more and more children get a chance to participate in education, but the whole field of education and care before schooling is very complicated, and it is difficult to compare findings among countries. For example, the names for these kinds of activities vary: day-care, crèche, preschool, play school, infant school, kindergarten, toddler group, early child development, early childhood care and education, child-minding services, etc. There is no uniformity whether on what settings before school are called or what they contain. Further, the same notion can have different meanings in various countries (Pramling Samuelsson et al., 2018). In Sweden, preschool stands for all education from toddlers to school entrance, whereas preschool in, for example, the Netherlands represents part-time education for children between two-and-a-half and four as a preparation to start school, while a full day programme is called day-care (Preschool and day-care in the Netherlands, 2022). The reason for the large variation may be that children’s learning before school is most often linked to family policy and not to educational policy. Nevertheless, the common rhetoric remains: “Education starts at birth! Parents are the child’s first teachers; ECE is only complementary or compensatory to family experiences, depending on how the family functions”.

However, all children should mean ALL—all ages and wherever they live. Agenda 2030 is for all children, and even though Goal 4.2 states readiness for school, it does not indicate whether early years education should be like school education. Professionals have to decide what is meant by preparing children for school and life. Goal 4.7 points out the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development. One of these notions is global citizenship as a process in which evidently language and mathematics become necessary for first becoming a local citizen and then becoming a global citizen. Thus, although the goal may not point out mathematics or literacy in some form, the target aspect is citizenship.

How Can a Child Perspective and Children’s Perspectives Be of Use in Young Children’s Learning?

Agenda 2030 is not the only central aspect of early education; the UN Convention of the Right of the Child (UNICEF, 1989) is equally crucial. Specifically, two articles of the Convention stand out:

  • Art 3: In all actions concerning children, whether taken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.

This article posits that adults’ thoughts are the best for a child, based on both general knowledge of child development and knowledge of the child as a person. This can be viewed in ECE mathematics as the adults’ plan according to the age of the children and the personal knowledge of the individual children in the group. This is what Sommer et al. (2010) called a child perspective – interpreting what is best for each child based on general knowledge about the specific child and earlier experiences. This may be what is often labelled “developmentally appropriate” education in the United States (Sanders & Farago, 2018).

  • Art. 12: States Parties shall ensure that children who are able to form their own opinions have the right to express them freely in all matters affecting the child, in which case the views of the child shall be given importance in relation to the age and maturity of the child.

Sommer et al. (2010) perceived this as the children’s perspectives—listening to and interpreting the child’s expressions. Here, the child is involved in an active way, giving his or her thoughts, ideas, etc. Children are given agency for their own experiences, which makes it necessary to create opportunities to listen to children.

In Article 3, the child is viewed as an object, even though adults intend to meet children’s needs, and in Article 12, each child is viewed as a subject who has agency. In the first case, teaching a child mathematics refers to giving children tasks that are appropriate for their age, according to what child development tells us that children are capable of doing. In the second case, mathematics teaching in ECE is a question of giving tasks and communicating with children to capture their ideas and learn from that to take a new step towards challenging children (Shier, 2001). From this perspective, solving a problem is a joint negotiation between the teacher and children, in which there is an opportunity to solve the problem in various ways and not always according to what the teacher thinks is correct. An example of the last case could be when children get the task to divide 10 buns between three people, and some children take an ethical perspective instead of a mathematic one, claiming that it is fairer for the father to get five buns because he needs more food, or for the mother to get only one bun since she always is on a diet (Doverborg & Pramling Samuelsson, 1999). Here, considering the children’s perspectives is a key component of teaching!

Listening to children is important since it also has become both related to democracy and participation, but studies have shown that participation from the teachers’ perspectives ranges widely from children participating in their own play, since they decide on what to do by themselves, to voting about what to do in various learning situations, etc. (see Williams et al., 2016). Listening to children has been used as a pedagogy in terms of “The Pedagogy of Listening” (Åberg, 2018), which originally emerged from the preschools in Reggio Emilia but has also been used as a rhetoric for all good work in preschool.

Data from an empirical study based on open questions about sustainability work in preschool in Sweden by Engdahl et al. (2021) were re-analysed with a focus on how the preschool teachers use the often-intertwined notions of listening to children and to follow children’s interest, which in everyday work is related to taking children’s perspectives. The new analysis revealed three categories of conceptions, representing various ways of thinking and talking about how teachers say they take advantage of listening to children or meet their interests (Björklund, 2020) which will be described and illustrated by quotations from the teachers in the following segments.

Listening Is Central to Discussions About Democracy and Participation

In this category, teachers relate the perspectives of listening to children and following children’s interest to the social developmental aspects as a representation of making children participating in various activities, and by that giving them possibilities to be involved in a democratic process, becoming able to give their views.

During the past year, we have chosen to focus on collaboration between children in our activities. We have focused on abilities such as feeling responsible, listening, following, leading, expressing thoughts, and explaining. This approach increased awareness of democracy.

We educators have a responsibility to listen to the children, give them influence, and create participation.

Everyone’s opinions are equally valuable!

We practice listening to each other and respecting each other.

From the teachers’ view, taking the above perspective, the reason for listening to children is to develop the social aspects—that is, children’s rights to become a participant in matters about themselves, which today is clearly spelled out as a goal in the Swedish curriculum (National Agency for Education, 2018).

To Follow Children’s Interests and to Listen to Children for Their Learning

In the following category, we can see the perspective of a theory of learning in which children learn when they are active in thinking and reflecting, which has always been a perspective in Swedish preschool, where play and learning both have been central as well as care and education as two sides of the same coin. In this analysis, the teachers further expressed the fact that the child’s interest or idea should always be the beginning of learning about something. The teachers’ task is to listen to what children are interested in to know what to work with.

In addition, there are expectations and faith in the future that will characterise the meeting between the children’s questions and challenges about climate and sustainable development. Therefore, the preschool should listen to and meet the children where there is interest.

The children’s interest and curiosity control the content of the project, and the children become involved.

To slow down, see/feel the joy in what we have and are, dare to stop and start from children’s questions, thoughts, dilemmas, and problems.

The project started with us being out and discovering and exploring to capture children’s interest in sustainable development.

Children’s experience is that projects become the best if we take care of the children’s interests. Then you can really see a genuine interest and a desire to learn. That’s why I start with the children’s ideas.

The role of play in young children’s learning and wellness is central to teachers becoming aware of their interests.

In this category, children’s interests are central to learning. Teachers indicate that they have to listen to children or observe play to understand what topic/theme to work on, since children’s world is the starting point for starting with a specific content area.

Negotiation as the Beginning of Both Learning in and About Democracy and Various Content Areas

In the following category children’s perspectives are always related to communication and negotiation with the teacher. If the ideas or interest comes from the children or not is not the main question, but how the teacher managed to get children interested in something or to share their ideas in the education setting.

We should of course use children’s interest, but you cannot request that exactly all children who come to preschool are interested in just this; therefore, it may sometimes be necessary that we who work in preschool arouse an interest by challenging …

When we try to listen to children’s interests, it usually becomes a Matthew effect—the more you have, the more you get—and the children who already have a lot of influence get more influence. In addition, we educators have a tendency to pick up what the children are interested in that we recognise. This means that we rarely start from the interests of the children who come from other cultures and have different experiences than we educators.

One could claim that listening to children and using their interest in pedagogy is more problematised than the two approaches above. The teacher and the children are both necessary for educating children. The teachers know about the curriculum and have to be active in pointing out content areas. If children should always decide, nothing new may come up; instead, all children need to be challenged. This third category more clearly shows that the teacher’s role is a pedagogical approach to learning and development, which is more in line with developmental pedagogy, the approach to preschool developed in the research group at the University of Gothenburg (see, e.g., Pramling & Pramling Samuelsson, 2011). Teaching in ECE is always a joint venture between children and teachers, in which the teachers know the direction to point out to children for learning (Doverborg et al., 2013), and the children’s experiences and ways of talking about the content are key questions for the teacher to challenge further development of understanding. In developmental pedagogy, the content can be described in two steps: an area, such as the content of mathematics, and the learning objects—that is, the specific aspect of mathematics addressed in every new teaching situation that could, for example, be number conceptions, sizes, and patterns.

All these aspects that teachers bring up are, of course, relevant. Sometimes, children become occupied with something to which the teacher could link his or her planning, but most of the time, the teacher is the one who knows the experiences or the curriculum goal the children need to work towards. However, democratic and negotiating lenses are both necessary for influencing children’s learning. Most importantly, taking children’s experiences and ideas into consideration can be viewed as a touchdown in time regarding the status of the children in their learning process of the aspect of mathematics work right now on the spot (Pramling Samuelsson & Pramling, 2009).

Empirical Research Paves the Way to Education Based on Science?

ECE has a tradition based on child development, a question of children’s more general personal development, which is important in the early years. However, as Sommer (2006) pointed out in his description of childhood psychology, the large general theories about child development have been exchanged with many mini-theories in various areas, with children’s knowledge of mathematics learning being one area (Björklund & Palmér, 2018; Björklund, 2019). This means that content has become important in ECE, which was not previously the case. In the past, the approach of teaching was the key question, which is still central but related to various content areas and to children’s sense-making of the content (Björklund & Pramling Samuelsson, 2020; Pramling, 1983). Hence, empirical work in various content areas is so important for developing didactics for early years that it takes children’s agency into consideration, rather than relying on child development in relation to various content areas.

In what follows are two empirical examples of aspects of mathematics in which the children’s worlds of understanding a specific task vary and become visible in their acting and communication. The scenarios provide the teacher with an understanding of how children make sense and offer opportunities to understand how he or she has to challenge children for further development of understanding a concept. The first scenario evaluated young children’s understanding of the first and the last. The teacher and each child in the study played with animals, and the teacher suddenly asked, “Should we let the animals go for a joint walk?” She then took one animal at the time and said, “First comes the cow, then the panda, followed by the lamb and last comes the pig”. After that, she asked the child, “Which animal is the first one, and then which is the last one?” In the study, 240 children between ages 1 and 3 years participated, and the analyses of children’s understanding were categorised into four categories: (1) know both first and last, (2) know first, and say that the last is the second one (which may be because we had 4 items, 3 may have been easier for the youngest), (3) know only first, and (4) did not bother at all, continue to play (Sheridan et al., 2009).

The second empirical case tried out an example of representation in mathematics. The teacher and a boy (3.4 years) counted animals—two tigers of various sizes—and the teacher posed the question, “Can you write on this paper, how many tigers you have, so we can remember?” The boy had already counted the tigers. He looked at the tiger and said, “I cannot draw the ears of the tiger!” Teacher: “It is not important!” The boy continued, “I cannot draw the mouth of the tiger, either”. The teacher, realising that the boy thought he had to draw the tigers, responded by saying, “But do you think there is any other way to write on your paper how many tigers you have?” Then the boy drew one long line and one short, and then he took each tiger and put it on the respective line, according to the length of the tigers.

These two examples can be viewed both as making children’s way of experiencing these mathematical questions visible from their perspectives and as touching down in time regarding the status of the child’s knowledge development at the present moment. However, we do not know whether these tasks created new knowledge in children’s minds. Thus, there is a need for research on how the process of children’s learning can become visible to the teacher.

Let me exemplify with one more example that has very little to do with mathematics (that is, indirect distance): how to find out something. The participants are 300 children between 2 and 8 years of age. The researcher’s question is, “If you want to find out how far it is to the moon, how would you go about that?” The four categories of conceptions analysed from the data are: (1) I would build a space shuttle and go there, (2) I would ask someone who has been there. (3) I would ask my parents or my teacher, and (4) I will find it out via media, books, the internet, etc. We can see that in children’s minds, conquering knowledge ranges from finding out by independent enquiry to acquiring free knowledge from others (Pramling, 1983).

In a group of children, one can always discern numbers of qualitatively different categories of conceptions. These categories become visible by making children’s perspectives visible. Sometimes these categories represent a step towards a more advanced understanding of something in relation to culturally accepted conceptions; other time conceptions may be horizontal, just representing various ways of expressing the same understanding. The example of how to find out something represents more or less advanced understanding by the children, which helps the teacher see what the next step of understanding for children might be.

How Is Play Related to Learning?

All ECE curricula mention play as a key factor in young children’s learning. However, it is seldom problematised but is just taken for granted. Article 35 in UNCRC (1989) also recognizes the child’s right to rest and leisure, to play and recreation adapted to the child’s age and the right to participate freely in cultural and artistic life. If there is anything children relate to, it is play. All children play if they are not hindered from doing so! The play, as such, is what children are mostly interested in, as well as coming to ECE to meet their friends. Some children are ultimate players, whereas others do not depend on their early experiences. Fleer (2015) claimed that early interaction in families sometimes lack the interactive ground for developing playful children. Thus, even though there may be aspects of play that children are born with, acting in imaginative play is learnt from the environment. Further, by being included in imaginary play, children also have to have cultural knowledge to take part (Mauritzson & Säljö, 2003).

Some researchers claim that we, as adults, destroy children’s play if we intervene, and that we should not relate play to learning (Steinsholt, 1999; Øksnes & Sundsdal, 2018; Hangaard Rasmussen, 2016), whereas others consider it advantageous to relate play and learning in ECE (Lillemyr, 1995; Pramling Samuelsson & Asplund Carlsson, 2008). Therefore, how are preschool staff dealing with play in practice? Studies about what teachers say as well as what they do can be described from three perspectives. The first and most common is that play is the child’s own world, and teachers do not get involved in children’s play. Second, teachers are external observers of the play who then try to help children expand their play by giving them new props, reading books on the topic of their play—they try to inspire but not take part. Third, teachers become involved in children’s play as playmates. The debate of whether or not to participate in children’s play is often based on ideology—what teachers think is best for children (Pyle & Danniels, 2017). With this debate as rhetoric, we began to work in our research group to find empirical evidence of what happens if teachers go into children’s play in a praxis-oriented project called Play-based didactics: Developing early childhood didactic theory in collaboration between researchers and preschool teachers. The following is a summary of the application:

Discussions about the preschool’s activities often end up in an advocacy of either teaching or play (in preschool often referred to as ‘free play’). A premise for this project, however, is that such a dichotomy is not fruitful for understanding and promoting children’s development. Instead, a central challenge for contemporary Swedish preschool is to develop a form of teaching that is in line with the preschool’s tradition and history, i.e. to design play-based preschool didactics. In this project, we further develop the preschool’s own theory formation: Developmental pedagogy.

The journey from developmental pedagogy (Pramling, 1994) to the theoretical foundation of this last project has investigated play in various ways. In our earlier studies, we took play for granted; we described it but did not problematise it—play was self-evident therein. However, in 2003, when we published a meta-study of our research in the book The Playing Learning Child (Pramling Samuelsson & Asplund Carlsson, 2003/2014), it became obvious that we looked at children as playing learning children; we did not separate play from learning. As teachers, we have to learn that this is the case, and we have to integrate play and learning in praxis. Then came the question: Is it possible to integrate play and learning into a goal-directed practice? However, this seems to involve two different views: play as children’s world and learning as the teachers’ and the curriculum’s intention. The simple answer to this question became: It all depends on the teacher’s communication—whether they could allow both themselves and children to use both fantasy and reality in the communication (Johansson & Pramling Samuelsson, 2006; Pramling Samuelsson & Johansson, 2006). The latest way to look at play and learning developed from the project mentioned above is through play-responsive teaching (Pramling et al., 2019).

These changes in how play and learning are conceptualised have been viewed more carefully and extended by Pramling Samuelsson and Björklund (2022). The latest publication in process is one in which teachers who participate in a network based on this last research project have developed agency to become authors of their own work, as they have interpreted play-responsive teaching in their everyday work with children. The book is called The Teaching Playing Preschool Teacher. The teacher becomes both the one who leads children towards understanding various mathematical notions and one who learns from children’s ideas all the time. Examples of mathematics in play-responsive teaching can be found in Pramling et al. (2019), specifically Chaps. 8 and 10.

A short summary of what play-responsive teaching means

  • Teaching is a shared activity in which both children and the teacher are engaged jointly. This means that it is not a question of giving children a task and then waiting for an answer. There is a negotiating dialogue going on about meaning.

  • Participants shift between and relate as if (imagination) and as is (accepted, culturally established knowledge) without the play being interrupted. Fantasy and reality are not separated in the communication, although children learn to understand what is the one and the other perspective – but communication becomes enjoyable.

  • Teachers become participants and co-creators in play where they can introduce cultural resources (as is knowledge) or suggest additional fantasies (as if) that can help children expand the play or develop it in new directions.

  • In this kind of play-responsive teaching, children’s agency is promoted so that they can become genuine actors in their life and learning (rather than passive recipients of instructions).

  • Teachers also become genuine active participants, since they find it interesting to see what comes up in children’s minds. They have an interest in what triggers children’s active engagement.

What Did We Learn From the Project?

First of all, the participating teachers became quite skilled in participating in children’s play, even though it was hard for some of them in the beginning, as they video-recorded children play without being involved, or tried to focus on the social aspect to get all children involved. In the end, they said that the children often asked them to come and participate in their play. They could, in other ways, participate without destroying the play! Further, the children enjoyed and asked them to participate when they got used to having teachers involved.

The notions of intersubjectivity, narrative, and meta-communication became important to talk about, and the teachers used them to interpret their video recordings. Intersubjectivity clarifies what communication with a joint focus or content can look like, and allows for understanding the intersubjectivity in short situations of shared focus. Narratives seem to constitute a frame for play content. Especially for young children, it was often related to stories or songs they were familiar with as the focus of play. Meta-communication is known as a source for developing awareness in children by putting words and reflections into what they are doing. Children do not always create an understanding of just doing something; thus, engaging the mind of children also means reflecting and communicating about it.

As didactic consequences, we observed that teachers had to plan to become able to get involved in children’s play. This does not happen on the spot, and the other staff must be aware that the teacher now intends to be involved in children’s play and cannot do everything else, such as answering the phone, welcoming late children, or taking care of the dishes. Further, teachers must be convinced that play and learning can influence each other and that there are possibilities to focus on questions in play that are related to the curriculum goals. This means seeing themselves as active in communication with some children all the time, and not only in the thematic work in which they intend to distribute knowledge. Teachers must be responsive to children’s actions (verbally and in acting) and give children preconditions for being responsive to the teacher’s activities. Some of these key notions are the exchange between “as if” (fantasy) and “as is” (culturally established) knowledge. Teachers must become able to talk in play or be different characters, as well as meta-communicate about the play or the content in the play activities in which both the teacher and children are involved. Just as teachers have to be skilled in communicating with children about various content areas, they have to learn the characteristics of play to be play-responsive.

Conclusions

In a recent analysis of documents during the history of Swedish preschool’s development, it becomes obvious that preschool has developed through a hard political battle, first as a struggle between men and women and later between different political parties. It also became visible that changes in both access to preschool and pedagogy depend on political decisions (Klingvall & Pramling Samuelsson, 2022). Hence, lobbying is an important aspect of being a researcher if one intends to influence change. Bringing play into children’s learning has support in the text of the Swedish curriculum (National Agency for Education, 2019, p. 9):

Children should be given the conditions both for play, which they themselves take initiative and play introduced by someone in the work team. All children should be given opportunities to participate in shared games based on their conditions and abilities. When someone in the work team follows or leads play appropriately, either outside the games or by participating themselves, factors that limit play can be noticed and work methods and environments conducive to play develop. An active presence makes it possible to support communication between the children and to prevent and manage conflict.

As play has been more extended and related to learning in the curriculum, Swedish preschools have become more knowledge-oriented. The reason for this is, of course, that we have so much more research today showing the capacity of the child under appropriate conditions. Education has, by tradition, been related to school, where in many places in the world, knowledge is distributed to children. Changing this conception is difficult, even though research reveals otherwise regarding young children’s play and learning.

One aspect concerns the contemporary emphasis in ECE on paradigmatic (categorical, scientific) knowing at the expense of narrative knowing (Bruner, 1990; Singer & Singer, 2005). Due to fear that some children may be falling behind in their knowledge (language development, subject-matter expertise, etc.), increased focus has been put on paradigmatic knowing. However, narrative knowing (typically nurtured through play) is arguably more important and certainly more foundational regarding mathematizing. Through narrating, people communicate, make sense (of themselves, each other, and the world), remember, form identities, and imagine other possibilities (as if and what if?), and it is therefore critical also to a sustainable future—imagining other ways of living and solving problems. Communication is central in all early learning, and a recent research overview, A Systematic Review of Educators’ Interactional Strategies that Promote Rich Conversations with Children aged 2–5 years (Houen et al., 2022), shows that it is not only open questions that contribute to learning; play-responsiveness does as well.

The formal education of ECE is non-formal, in which the teacher needs to have professional knowledge of all content areas, such as mathematics, to know what to focus children’s attention on, thereby giving children opportunities to learn. Putting children’s attention towards various mathematical notions can be achieved by capturing the situation in which a child shows interest, or planning tasks of various kinds. These have been done with great success by designing learning situations based on variation theory (Björklund, 2016). Challenging children in a play-responsive way is important, since play-responsiveness does not have to only take part in imaginative play—it can be used in any situation or with any content area. Play and learning should always be integrated into each other in ECE.

With mathematics, similar to other content areas, children need to both live and experience mathematics in meaningful situations in daily life and communicate mathematics. It is in this communication that teachers can direct children’s attention to aspects that can help them develop an understanding. Even though the intention during preschool years is to develop children’s understanding of various notions in mathematics, the teacher must always be aware of the fact that children need concrete objects that can be used as support to explain or argue for something (Nergård, 2022).

Regarding both a child perspective and children’s perspectives in ECE, both are necessary in practice. For the teacher to have appropriate professional knowledge in mathematics and child development is the basis for early education (child perspective). However, within this frame are the children’s perspectives of, for example, numbers, patterns, and forms, aspects that need to be met and challenged in teaching and influencing children’s learning. This call for specific knowledge by the teachers in didactics in various areas.