Conference Agenda

Contribution

The transition between Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) and primary school is one of the major early transitions in a child’s life and can cause both positive and negative experiences regarding well-being, learning and development for the child. This transition is much debated in Norway, where children enter school the year they turn six. 98% of all children in Norway attend ECEC before starting school (Norwegian Directorate for Education, 2023). By law ECEC and schools must collaborate in the child’s transition (Ministry of Education and Research, 1998) to ensure a safe and sound transition and minimizing negative effect due to the change children experience. The municipalities are obliged to define and plan and implement the collaboration between ECEC provisions, schools, and after-schools, with subsequently variations.

A common understanding in Norway is that ECEC provisions and schools have similarities, but also differ in their pedagogical approaches when it comes to didactic literacy pedagogy. In this study we aim to explore if the use of books as transition objects, can bridge these two didactic literacy pedagogies, and provide the opportunity for children to use their literacy competence across the institutions. For this purpose, we have formulated the following research question:

How can books as transition objects bridge the gap between didactic literacy pedagogy in ECEC and school?

In 2023, the municipality of Stavanger (146,000 residents) initiated a project aimed at enhancing collaboration and easing the transition between ECEC, after-school programs, and primary schools. As part of this initiative, a backpack was introduced, containing various transition objects such as two books, a jumping rope, a songbook, figures, and a pamphlet offering tips for engaging activities. This backpack was distributed to ECEC teachers responsible for school-starters, as well as first-grade teachers in schools.

The concept of transition objects has been deliberated in Norway as a strategy to soften the transition process (Hogsnes, 2017). Originally denoted as items providing comfort to children in the context of parental separation (Wakenshaw, 2020), subsequent studies have expounded on their utility in the ECEC-to-school transition (Hogsnes, 2015). Transition objects can involve objects, actions, activities and learning styles (Hogsnes, 2015). The Stavanger municipality project afforded an opportunity for a research-based evaluation of the efficacy of transition objects in bridging the ECEC-to-school transition. This presentation specifically concentrates on the role of books as transition objects, examining their function as a bridge between didactic literacy pedagogies and as scaffolding mechanisms (Bruner, 1985) facilitating the transition.

Within the Norwegian ECEC framework, literacy is conceptualized as emergent literacy, including all reading, and writing behaviours that precede and evolve into conventional literacy (Dickinson & Porche, 2011). During the transition to school, the majority of children remain in this emergent literacy phase, lacking formal reading and writing skills while their focus on the written language intensifies. Both ECEC and schools in Norway adopt a socio-cultural perspective on learning (Säljö, 2000). Nevertheless, literacy didactics in ECEC is characterized by a process-oriented approach, whereas school didactics align more closely with standardized competence goals defined for schools but not for ECEC. The pronounced differences in didactic literacy can be ascribed to modality, where ECEC predominantly emphasizes oral communication, while schools pivot toward written language due to their formalized reading and writing instruction (Skaftun & Wagner, 2019).

In the EU report “10 trends transforming education as we know it' (2019), learning how to learn is mentioned as a value and as one of the current trends and visions for education in 2027.

A learning environment that ensures the opportunity for the child to explore the world, express him/herself and use everyday life experience as a learning experience forms the basis for child’s self-directed learning. In Latvia, the guidelines for pre-school education that envisage children's self-directed learning have been implemented since 2019. Therefore, it is important to identify the challenges and conditions that affect the implementation of children's self-directed learning in teachers’ pedagogical practice, ensuring a balance between the teaching and learning, which forms children's personal understanding of the relationship between interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary connections to everyday real life.

In this context, the research on pre-schoolers’ self-realization and on teachers’ activities when developing a child-centred environment is of great importance (Mikelsone, Grava, 2018; Grava, Pole, 2021) as it reveals such significant factors of child's self-directed learning in preschool as a meaningful teacher’s support, provision of a positive emotional experience and the opportunity to explore, solve the problems. The research also emphasizes the challenges of the pre-school teachers related to the shift in teachers’ understanding on 1) teacher’s professional pedagogical activity, 2) its content, and 3) implementation methods and evaluation of pedagogical strategy.

However, the study of the current situation in Latvia shows contradictions between pre-school education and the implementation of successful learning activities at school, revealing underdeveloped skills of pupils, such as ability to listen, to complete the work, to solve problems independently and express one's own ideas.

Thus, the research objective is to discover the determining factors of the child's self-directed learning, revealing the challenges of the pre-school education teachers in organizing self-directed learning process.

The research question: What are the challenges for pre-school teachers in implementing self-directed learning in preschool?

In our paper, self-directed learning of preschool children is analysed, linking it with the concept of self-realization from a philosophical, pedagogical and psychological point of view, encompassing different approaches in the explanation of the concept. Summarizing the academic research findings, the determining factors of children's self-directed learning are described.

The teacher’s professionalism is characterized by the ability to adapt and assess one's activity and position not emphasizing the reproduction of the knowledge content, but the practical application of knowledge, applying it in the new situations (Bialika, Fadels, Trilings, 2017). We will discover a shift in teachers' understanding of their professional pedagogical activity, its content and implementation methods related to metacognitive abilities, in order to effectively plan, organize and evaluate their pedagogical strategies (Bialika, Fadels, Trilings, 2017).

In our paper, we will stress the need for purposeful teacher’s participation in the learning process, including in learning taxonomy such basic components as learning how to learn, basic knowledge, responsibility, application of knowledge, emotional aspect.

From our position as researchers and teacher trainers in didactics of physical education (PE), we note that the transmission of sport techniques is the subject of contrasting discourses. In the field of the history of sports techniques and technologies, there as been an ongoing debate on technique as a cultural object and as an object of teaching, in other words on the relationship between technology and didactics. This debate has centred on a crucial tension which attempts to reconcile two realities (Arnaud, 1986; Garassino, 1980; Robène, 2014): (a) technique as a product of human culture, likely to be historicised as a significant motricity; and (b) body technique understood as a process, i.e. a creative activity. In the PE didactics literature, an evolution is apparent, from an approach privileging the transmissible and rational character of technique as an effective gesture to an approach centred on creativity, innovation and adaptation, opposing the “fixist” dimension of technique to the dynamic of the subject who acts technically (Goirand, 1987; Robène, 2014). We assume that the first approach is the foundation of the teaching tradition “Teaching PE as Sport-Technique”, according to which sports techniques are at the core of PE teaching, using a molecular approach of dividing and segmenting the content to be learned (Forest et al., 2018; Kirk, 2010), while the second approach refers to the teaching tradition “Teaching PE as Physical Culture Education”, according to which the subject to be taught in PE is the rich and complex configuration of knowledge that is at the core of the social practices taken as reference (Cliff et al., 2009; Forest et al., 2018).

In this paper, we focus more specifically on aesthetic sports. Best (1985) contrasts these sports where the aim cannot be specified independently of the means of achieving it with purposive sports, where the aesthetics is not intrinsic to their purpose which is to win by scoring the most goals, tries, baskets, points, runs, or the recording of the best times and distances. Arnold (1990) distinguishes partially aesthetic sports (e.g., gymnastics, skating, trampolining) from artistic activities (dance, mime), the latter being by their very make-up intrinsically concerned with aesthetic considerations. Both can be taken as social practices (Martinand, 1989) for the teaching of PE at primary school. How does technique determine the aesthetics of sports? It as been frequently argued that when sport is technically excellent, it takes on aesthetic qualities (Da Costa & Lacerda, 2016; Kreft, 2014; Wright, 2003). However, while the relationships between technical qualities and aesthetic ones are important, they cannot on their own ensure the aesthetic value of a particular movement or series of movements. The aesthetics in sport involves an emotional response/experience and not just the recognition of a technically efficient or functionally excellent performance (Wright, 2003).

The aim of this paper is to identify (dis)continuities in official (i.e. curriculum), pre-service and in-service training discourses, in terms of teaching techniques in aesthetic sports. What conceptions of sports technique emerge at these different levels? A “fixist” conception and/or a “dynamic” conception? How is technique considered in relation to aesthetics? What PE teaching tradition(s) do these discourses reveal? Answering these questions will give us a better understanding of the possible tensions to which future primary school PE teachers are exposed during their training, which takes place in several successive institutions. This is a first step towards networking the stakeholders from these different institutions, with the aim of achieving a more coherent approach to teacher training in our context.