Curricula of finnish kindergarten teacher education: Interpretations of early childhood education, professional competencies and educational theory

Abstract

SUMMARY The presentation is based on the ongoing research project The Pedagogical Formation of Early Childhood Education in Finland. The data of the first stage consists of all written kindergarten teacher training curricula drawn up in 1973–2002. The aim is to discover the nature of the expertise that the kindergarten teacher training programmes delivered over this period were intended to generate and also to discover what kinds of outlines, divisions and tools concerning the pedagogics of early childhood education the curricula of kindergarten teacher training have offered to the students in the different phases of the training. The curricula are placed in a context comprising the history of training in Finland and its main stages (institute phase, college phase, university phase). The training objectives have been closely linked with the development of day care and pre-school education provision. The objective texts reveal three dimensions in the expertise expected of a kindergarten teacher: a systemic and community-oriented perspective, promoting and supporting the children's development, and improving the kindergarten teacher's own critical thinking and the preparedness to acquire new information. Central subjects include early childhood education and developmental psychology. The curricula contain no intentional definition of early childhood education which would describe its most central features. Instead, they are grounded on extensional definitions, which list the phenomena covered by the domain of early childhood education. Developmental psychology has served kindergarten teachers as a source of theoretical tools for making sense of early childhood education, but now they should be able to analyse their work also on the basis of educational theory. Nevertheless, the union of education and development has been the strength of kindergarten teacher education.