Past, Present, and Future in Justifying the Need for Support in the Pedagogical Documents of Early Childhood Education and Care

• In Event: Truths and Traditions: Five Research Studies About How High-Quality Early Childhood Education and Care Is Supported in the Nordic Countries

Abstract

While childhood and the being child is understood to be relevant, the future of the child (the becoming child) is also often present in the examination of modern childhood (James, 2009), in addition of the past of the child (Hanson, 2017). The purpose of this study is to investigate how the need for support is described and justified in the pedagogical documents of early childhood education and care (ECEC) in relation to the child’s past, present, and future. As an educational practice, the aim of pedagogical documents is to ensure the individuality of the support and to create systematic approach to planning, enabling a later assessment. One feature of pedagogical documents is that they permanently record child’s needs for support. From this point of view, documents can be seen as pedagogical tools that bring a child's history to the present and, on the other hand, record the present, moving it into the future (see also Ferraris, 2013).

The longitudinal data used in the study consists of pedagogical documents of 64 children (N = 257), drafted during their years in ECEC. The (rhetorical) discourse analysis focuses especially on the expressions of temporality, illustrating how time is present in the documents and how it is used as a linguistic resource to argue the need to intervene in the child’s situation.

The preliminary analysis show that the documents describe the process of support in ECEC as 1) time to wait, 2) time to intervene, and 3) time to hurry. Child’s age serves as a central argument justifying the need to start the support or to postpone it. Considering the youngest children or the once that have just started ECEC, the support is presented as waiting and monitoring the situation. There, the focus is especially on the present (the being child). At the same time, the child’s history is a central assessment point which is used as evidence to support the current statements. As the school transition phase gets closer and the child gets older, the way of writing emphases the systematic intervention and the urgency: school transition appears in the documents as the deadline for systematically starting the support and the perspective is moved more towards the future. Consequently, the becoming child becomes emphasized. Our study illustrates how the emphasis on past, present, and future in pedagogical documents varies during the child's documented history in ECEC.

Authors

• Kaisa Pihlainen, University of Eastern Finland
  Presenting Author

• Noora Heiskanen, University of Eastern Finland
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marja Syrjämäki, University of Eastern Finland
  Non-Presenting Author