Children’s voices in early childhood education
Recently, there has been a developing interest concerning children’s voices in e.g. decision-making and planning of children within different educational contexts. In Sweden the preschool is viewed as an integral part of the national education policy and emphasize equal learning opportunities as well as children’s right to express their own opinion and be listened to. Although children’s rights are emphasized it is not clear how these rights are expressed in children’s everyday life. Methods focusing on highlighting children’s voices in educational contexts are needed. This presentation will discuss the methods of two research projects stressing children’s voices and perspectives. The first study, involving 30 children, aimed to describe how children view their participation in plans and decisions at preschool. Children were interviewed in two steps: a focus group interview using a puppet interview technique, playing different scenarios with the children as co-actors, and a photo walk in where children took photos of their preschool context and used these as stimulated recall in individual interviews to let the children express their participation in the preschool context. An objective in the second study was to longitudinally explore the language environment in preschool to promote children’s abilities to think and express themselves. The teachers play a significant role in promoting this and thus an observational procedure involving 188 teachers was used to explore children’s interaction with adults. One teacher at a time was observed interacting with one child or a group of children and the interaction was classified according to the relational climate as well as to the degree of language development. The methods will be discussed in terms of the significance of bringing children’s voices to the front in educational contexts as well as in research aiming to promote children’s participation in issues that concerns their own everyday life.