Early Childhood Educators in England and Finland: an Exploratory Study

Early Childhood Educators in England and Finland: An Exploratory Study

Viv Moriarty and Anne Chowne

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Sussex at Brighton, September 2-5 1999

Introduction

This paper will outline some of the findings from an exploratory study carried out by me and my colleague, Anne Chowne, in the early part of this year. Principally, we were concerned to explore the responses of early years teachers working in England and Finland to curriculum changes in their own countries and how those teachers viewed the role of parents in the early years of schooling.

The structure of the paper will be as follows:

• Introduction
• Aims
• Research Questions
• Intended Outcomes
• Epistemology
• Contexts
• Methodology
• Discussion
• Conclusion and Ways Forward

Aims

The aims for this paper are to outline the research study and to discuss aspects of the data analysis. It is hoped that this will initiate a dialogue to facilitate future publication and enable the formulation of further research questions. My colleague Anne Chowne will be presenting a paper in Finland at the European Educational Research Association conference at the end of the month.

Research questions and intended outcomes

The questions highlighted are the ones I will be concentrating on today. My colleague will be discussing some of the other issues at the later conference.

• What are the responses of early years educators in England and Finland to their early years curriculum policies?
• What place does professional development have in shaping the views of early years teachers in both Finland and England?
• How do early years teachers in Finland and England view the role of parents in the early years of education?

Intended Outcomes

• Develop an understanding of the way early years teachers make meaning of educational policy and mediate it in practice
• Consider the implications of reforms to the curriculum for children in the year prior to compulsory schooling in England and Finland
• Develop understandings about early years educators’ conceptions of professionalism
• Give opportunities for early years teachers to be reflexive about their own practice and articulate their understandings
• Develop opportunities for early years teachers to engage in a dialogue with other early years professionals.
• Foster professional partnerships between early years educators in Finland and England for further in-service work
• Raise questions for further research

Contexts

Our interest in early years teachers has derived from our own experiences as teachers of young children in England and as teacher educators at the Institute of Education, University of London. These experiences have led us to analyse the processes of policy formation. Additionally, we have an interest in the conceptions of professionality that early years teachers have. ‘Professionality’ is used here to define understandings, knowledge, skills and procedures that are applied by early years educators in their work with young children (Hoyle, 1975) and is used in preference to the term ‘professionalism.’

We chose the national contexts of England and Finland because reforms in early years education are a current issue in both countries. Early years education is currently high on the agenda for the two governments, with an emphasis being put on “diversity, innovation, flexibility and choice in education provision” (National Board of Education, 1998), with the stated priority being to prepare children for compulsory schooling. However, despite some similarities, there are also significant differences in the way decisions about the curriculum to be followed in the early years are made in England and in Finland. In Finland the pre-school curriculum (National Board of Education, 1996) outlines general objectives and subject fields to be addressed in early years settings, emphasising the need for preparation for school. It is the task of local government, known as municipalities, to contextualise these general objectives. Further, each early years setting, or group of settings within a particular locality, must devise their own curriculum. Published in the same year in England, the Desirable Outcomes for Children’s Learning (SCAA, 1996) were devised by the Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority (a government quango). These Desirable Learning Outcomes (hereafter referred to as DLOs) describe areas of learning which enable children to move onto the National Curriculum when they are five years old. These are to be revised, along with the National Curriculum, in the year 2000, and consultation about the new so-called Early Learning Goals (QCA, 1999) began during the time when the field work for this study was being carried out. Although early years settings in England are being encouraged to devise their own documents outlining how they plan to enable children to achieve these Desirable Learning Outcomes, there has been no place for local government to be involved with curriculum formation. This means that in Finland the curriculum is potentially much more responsive to the needs of each community and is more likely to share the values of the families it supports.

Epistemology

The study being reported on was based on the principle that knowledge is a socially constructed phenomenon and that individuals actively construct their own meanings based on their existing perceptions and understandings, in transaction with their social environment and through the use of language. It is also recognised that construction of meaning is effected by existing structures and constrained by them. These structures are broad and are concerned with issues of power and control.

Whilst it was considered important to understand the constraints within which early years teachers are operating, it was also the premise for this project that there is a role for human agency within social situations and that action is predicated on how particular events are perceived, in relation to a person’s self-identity.

Sample

The sample for the study consisted of 19 early years educators from Finland, and 18 early years educators from England. That is, educators working with six year old children in the pre-school sector in Finland and with four year old children in the education sector in England. It was deemed important that sampling procedures served the purpose of developing theory and allowed for the elaboration of categories during the analysis. We chose research participants who would be able to articulate their responses to the early years curriculum and we invited participants to come forward from schools in England that already had some contact with the researchers. Similarly, in Finland, colleagues from the University of Helsinki helped to select participants who were willing to be an active part of the research. It was the decision of the researchers, to take this approach so that a type of discourse could be sampled (see Epstein and Johnson, 1998).

Methodology

It was decided to use a semi-structured interview as a data collection method. For this study it was important that the method of collecting data served the purpose of allowing the research questions to be answered and also to affirm the importance of the interviewee (Seidman, 1991, p.7). Both the interviewee and the interviewer, in this conception of the process, are actively engaged in co-constructing meanings and uncovering understandings. Through language, the individual is provided with a way of structuring experiences within a social context. What is being asserted here is that we monitor what we do in a reflexive way and that this is expressed to other individuals through the medium of language.

The data for the main study were collected between March and June 1999 in England and Finland. The interview schedule was designed to allow early years educators to express their understandings of early years practice, especially related to children in the year before they begin school and to think about from where these understandings may have derived. Additionally, educators were invited to express their opinion of national policy and their views of the role of parents.

Data handling

Interview data from the tapes were transcribed and imported into the software NU*DIST. Initial coding categories were devised, based on the questions asked and then further subdivided where the interview data clustered around different themes. This led to further coding and it was the task of analysis to attempt to find relationships and emerging themes from the data.

Discussion

This section discusses analysis of the data related to two questions: What are the responses of early years educators in England and Finland to early years curriculum policies? and How do early years educators in England and Finland view the role of parents? The answers to these questions illuminate understandings of professionality that teachers in the different national contexts expressed. It is suggested that these understandings are derived from the relationship that the state has with parents and teachers in the two countries and the way parents are themselves conceptualised by the state and by early years teachers. The expressions made by early years teachers in Finland could be said to be close to Knight et al’s (1993) conception of “democratic professionalism” where groups of stakeholders participate in the decision making processes within early years education. In contrast, early years teachers in England may be expressing understandings of a “bureaucratic professionalism” (Davies, 1996), where decision making is polarized and where their power is derived from their administrative role within the state bureaucracy. Evidence from the data is now presented.

Teachers working in Finland and England, whilst expressing similar aims for early years education and similar pedagogical understandings, had different responses to the curriculum policies in place in their own countries. The evidence suggested that the responses depended on early years practitioners’ own understandings of appropriate pedagogy and curriculum aims for young children and how these were viewed in relation to the formal curriculum and the process of its formulation. There follows an example of a response to the Framework from a teacher working in Finland:

“I think it is important to have it [the Framework] because it’s like a tree. We have this trunk and that’s the national curriculum and then comes the bigger branch and that’s our area curriculum and the leaves are our own small things which we do here and there is no basis if we don’t have that.” (Finland)

The teachers working in England interviewed for this study, whilst not expressing total dissatisfaction with the Desirable Learning Outcomes or National Curriculum, did have some difficulties accepting other initiatives such as the National Literacy Strategy. The teachers felt that these and other policy initiatives were being imposed upon them with inadequate consultation. It seems that the process of policy formation was crucial to the way teachers responded to the questions asked in this study.

A significant number of teachers working in England said that they sometimes faced dilemmas in their daily practice. These dilemmas were experienced because of the demands of the National Curriculum and, more particularly, newer initiatives such as the National Literacy Project. The early years teacher in this study felt that these policy initiatives were forcing them to teach in more didactic and formal ways than they believed were appropriate for young children:

“We are losing that quite a bit - the amount of freedom they can have to choose. Go where they want to go. I think I've lost that in this Reception class. I do regret it really. I don't think it's a good thing they are being so limited.” (England)

“So they are being pushed into a very formal model very early on and the children are not ready for that. Most children still need to think for themselves and organise their own time. I don't think they should be made to do things all together. There is a place for that, but not all the time.” (England)

The dilemmas expressed by the teachers working in England suggests that there is a mismatch between their own pedagogical understandings about early years education and the perceptions of those inferred by the policy documents.

These findings resonate to some degree with those of Pollard et al (1994) whose study explored the reactions of Key Stage 1 teachers in England to the National Curriculum in 1992. Pollard et al (1994) write that the main dilemma faced by the teachers was “the issue of how to reconcile beliefs about the nature of young children and their developmental needs with the teachers’ obligation to have pupils learn basic skills “ (p.150). It was proposed by these researchers that teachers were responding to what they perceived to be “pedagogic constraint” (p.153). The teachers working in England interviewed for the present study may also have been perceiving this constraint. However, it may be that these teachers were expressing a different understanding of ‘curriculum’ to policy makers.

When teachers in the study (both in England and Finland) were asked what they thought children should be doing in early years settings, they articulated a wide range of experiences, skills and dispositions. This typifies the kinds of answers that were given:

“They wouldn't match Desirable Outcomes. I want them to leave independent, confident, good sense of self-esteem, good sense of humour and willing to have a go and try things. It's more the attitude to learning and the development. If they've got that they can access the learning later on. So if a child had the right positive attitude, I wouldn't be that concerned with numbers, shapes or colours. It would be the fact that they were curious, inquisitive, eager, get going, get resources independently - it's that sort of thing. So it's the social and emotional and attitude to learning that would be outcomes for me. Then those children would become people with that kind of attitude.” (England)

Woodrow and Brennan (1999) have reported preliminary findings of a study being carried out in Queensland, Australia, where a new statutory Preschool Curriculum is currently being implemented. These researchers conclude that early years teachers in Queensland have a particular awareness of ‘curriculum’, which is different from the understandings of policy makers. The teachers “have understood curriculum as the totality of the experiences children undertake in the setting” (p.84). In contrast, policy makers and administrators “have tended to view curriculum more narrowly from a content and outcomes perspective” (p.84). Woodrow and Brennan (1999) view these as “competing discourses” (p.84), where policy makers treat curriculum as a “policy commodity” (p.85) linked to the marketisation of early years education. There may also be these competing discourses about curriculum in England. In Finland, however, it may be suggested that this is not the case, as the teachers themselves have been actively involved in detailing their own curriculum in collaboration with other teachers, municipalities and stakeholders in the local community.

This involvement suggests that early years teachers in Finland have been able to adopt a complex, democratic model of professionality, linked to the way power has been devolved through the education system. In contrast, early years teachers in England have been distanced from sites of power and have had limited opportunities to consult with policy makers. Additionally, the increase in technical procedures within their work has been perceived by teachers as reducing their autonomy and many have experienced ‘intensification’ (see Hargreaves, 1994) within their work. The intensification of educators’ work is related to policy demands and multiple innovations, imposed externally, that cause extensions in their role. Many teachers in the early years of schooling also experience isolation and individualism that may serve to atomise them (Nias, 1989) and movements towards the marketization of early years provision has worsened this situation. Within this construction, the ‘customers’ of early years provision may be both the parents of young children and the state itself, which invests money in the service. This means that early years educators are accountable to both parents and the state with inspection being used as a mechanism to serve this purpose.

The positioning of parents by educators is important to understanding their conceptions of professionality as, according to Armstrong (1995), the interests of educational professionals are linked to the relationship between the state and the perceived client group. The answers given by the teachers to the question ‘What is the role of parents in the early years of education?’ in our study revealed that many of the educators working in Finland positioned parents differently to the educators working in England. This in turn implied different conceptions of professionality.

All the teachers working in England acknowledged the importance of parents within their setting. Terms such as ‘partnership’ were often used and the importance of fostering communication with parents was also mentioned:

“I think you have to work in partnership - I think that has to happen more and more although that's hard when you've got working parents, although generally in the nursery you tend to see more of the parents than any other teacher further up the school.” (England)