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Understanding the role of embodiment in learning is crucial as it highlights the importance of physical interaction in educational settings, particularly for young children. This study reveals that while toddlers predominantly use their bodies to engage with new technologies, teachers tend to rely on verbal communication, leading to a proposed model that emphasizes the dynamic interplay between embodied actions and language in educational interactions.

Programming is becoming a key subject in early education globally, with surging problems of how computer science can become a subject for children of all ages and backgrounds. Problems of implementing new technologies in the old curricula have long been noted, and lately, concern over computer science education goals is often too narrow and skills-based without concerns for the critical educational potential. This study follows the change process of two case preschool departments implementing programming with a floor robot across a seven-month design process. Mixed analytical techniques based on activity theory are used to examine the tensions, conflicts and development of pedagogical alternatives. The studies show the strenuous change processes involving local transformations toward a child-centred, inclusive early computer science education and development of projects centring making, children's exploration, tinkering and play as key parts of the learning process. It discusses how the considerable change processes enabled pedagogical solutions coherent with important concepts in computer programming and how computing education can build on child-centred pedagogies through local adaptations and age-appropriate designs. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic Computer science and programming are becoming part of early education worldwide. Less is known about how to implement computing with ever-younger age groups, especially for those under three. That technological change can be a strenuous change process building on societal, historical and educational tensions, requiring individual learning and organisational change. What this paper adds Two cases of change designing computing education for 1–2- and 3–5-year-olds. Design processes raising critical questions about current standard childhood programming materials being resolved to enable a child-centred computing education. Challenges and potentials specific to early childhood in adopting computer science education. Implications for practice and/or policy Computing education challenges pedagogical notions, such as the role of failure in education. Computing education can be developed for very young children. However, there are considerable critical challenges to resolve in developing a child-centred approach. Childhood fundamentals such as play-based pedagogy can work synergistically with computer science activities, providing educational potential, also relevant for computer science education at large. 

While many children grow up in linguistically and symbolically diverse communities, it is still rare that they encounter an early educational experience adapted to the complexities of their everyday communicational reality. This paper takes an ecological and multimodal approach to a preschool’s book project in a multilingual community. The study examines the web of resources that emerges from activities, actors and their interrelations during the book project. It is shown how multimodal resources emerge when supported by active pedagogical community engagement, and how resources underpinning early childhood literacy cross linguistic and modal boundaries. The paper uses a multimodal interaction analysis to show how the socioecological resources emerging during the project come together in multimodal interaction. Pedagogical potentials building on multimodal resources involving the wider ecology of actors in linguistically complex settings are discussed. 

For decades, educational technologies have been distributed to educational arenas, more recently also including early childhood education. However, many problems stem from a less transformative first-order change in the implementation of digital technologies. This study follows the changing states of educational technologies from three case studies spanning 2015-2022, during which early childhood curricular changes occurred in Sweden. Drawing on an ecological framework, three ethnographies of technology-in-use are examined for how technological affordances affect practice, using meta-ethnography comparisons and qualitative ethnographic analysis. Results show how macro-level curricular change interplays with local rules, technological offerings, pedagogical practice, and interaction to influence how technologies are used and pedagogies are shaped. The paper discusses how local negotiations make second-order educational innovation possible considering all ecological change layers and adds how pedagogy-first and child-first models can work to drive critically informed change in early childhood educational environments.

Play has often been disassociated with learning as a frivolous activity for children set outside of learning environments. In the past decades, this view has changed from research and scholarship on play, relating it to learning and development. This paper takes the point of departure that playful learning offers potential for higher education from its less-goal-directed approach to training. Through this, play provides learning potential well suited to the higher levels of learning taxonomies that higher educational systems strive for. The counterintuitive potentials of playful learning for higher education are presented in the paper, showing how playful learning can provide training for engagement in uncertain environments and foster students towards becoming the creative problem-solving agents sought after in the knowledge sector.

VI LÄRARE DEBATT: Regeringens uppdrag till Skolverket – att göra utbildningen i förskolan skärmfri – riskerar att ge negativa och allvarliga konsekvenser, särskilt för barn som är i störst behov av att möta en digitaliserad värld med stöd av utbildade förskollärare och barnskötare. Det skriver 27 barn- och förskoleforskare i ett gemensamt upprop.

Programming is increasingly becoming a subject across the spectrum of educational environments for preschool children. Concerns have been raised regarding a too instrumental and uncritical implementation of programming. This study follows a preschool and reports on the obstacles infused during a six-month design-based study introducing a programmable floor robot with children, featuring formative focus group sessions and pedagogical development. An activity theoretical approach was taken to examine the various tensions with existing pedagogies that arose during the project and how these led to pedagogical development toward a programming ethos based on making pedagogical materials and tinkering activities, where failure is an inherent part of the educational process. The paper discusses the potential problems of using new subjects with current curricula and how new technologies are part of reshaping childhood pedagogies.