Co-supervisor of Sofie Tjäru's doctoral dissortation in early childhood education

Activity: Supervision, mentoring and other activitiesSupervision of postgraduate students

Description

This is a doctoral dissertation about read-alouds in pre-primary education, which means that it is about situations where teachers read children's literature aloud with the intention of supporting learning and engagement by surrounding their reading with interaction. Pre-primary education refers to the mandatory pre-primary year that precedes children starting school in Finland. Children in pre-primary are usually around six years of age. The purpose of this dissertation is to deepen the understanding of read-alouds by examining pre-primary teachers’ reasoning about them. The research questions focus on the kind of learning teachers associate with read-alouds and what conceptions of read-alouds are evident in their descriptions of how they stage said sessions.

The dissertation consists of four sub-studies, all theoretically framed within sociocultural theory. In the compilation part of the dissertation, the sociocultural framework has a particular focus on the read-aloud as an institution. By focusing on the read-aloud as an institution, I perceive it as a social situation with certain stable patterns of interaction and implementation. These patterns become evident in my synthesis of the dissertation's sub-studies. As the aim highlights understanding, the dissertation follows a qualitative and interpretive research tradition. Studies within this tradition concern individuals' interpretations and understandings of their experiences. The tradition also strongly emphasizes the social world and how people both interpret their context and participate in its construction.

The data in the dissertation primarily consists of pre-primary teachers' oral and written responses to my questions about read-alouds. However, the first sub-study utilizes video observations to study educators' and children's agendas. Sub-study I can be seen as an initial study that inspired me to progress exploratively and allow the purposes and approaches for the other sub-studies to evolve gradually. Sub-study II uses questionnaires as the method of data collection and, with the help of two open-ended questions, explores the purposes pre-primary teachers believe read-alouds can serve. In sub-study III, data obtained through questionnaires is combined with data from interviews. The aim is to investigate how teachers describe organising read-alouds and how they justify the choices they make. For sub-study IV, data collection has involved conversational interviews where I have both asked questions and initiated discussions without planned questions. The data collection has included four sessions with the teachers over video calls where, as a researcher, I have spoken to them about aesthetic approaches to literature and encouraged them to explore and tell me what happens if they allow more space for children's experiences and expressions and promote aesthetic responses during read-alouds.

In sum, the results of the sub-studies show that teachers associate read-alouds with learning related to language development, knowledge about the world, and transversal competencies. Teachers express that read-alouds with fiction literature are part of daily activities and that the books used during these moments can often contain content relevant to other activities as well. However, teachers seldom integrate read-alouds with other learning-focused activities. Although they consider children's needs and interests, the quality of books, and other activities in the planning of read-alouds, it is also apparent that teachers do not plan all their read-alouds. Furthermore, they emphasize the importance of maintaining a certain order during read-alouds and that the sessions should ideally have a pleasant atmosphere.

In the discussion of how the results of the sub-studies portray the read-aloud as an institution, the dissertation highlights that the content of the read-alouds has a low degree of specialization. Teachers associate read-alouds with several different types of learning, but not with learning related to developing literary knowledge. A low degree of specialization and insulation characterizes pre-primary education as a whole and is described in the core curriculum as holistic, meaning that various subject areas, interests, and approaches should be integrated. At the same time, the read-aloud appears to have a high degree of specialization in terms of being organized as a separate activity without integration with other learning-focused activities.

An implication of the results is that the view of what learning read-alouds can offer needs to be expanded to also include aesthetic approaches and literary knowledge. This presupposes more research concerning literary didactics and what literature education can entail within early childhood education and pre-primary education. Another implication is that read-alouds may need to be staged in more varied ways to provide a greater variety in the types of literary experiences children have.
Period201913 Sept 2024
Held atÅbo Akademi University
Degree of RecognitionInternational