Designing Learning Experiences Together with Children

Abstract

Children's participation in the early childhood education context has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Participation means involving and enabling children to take part in decision-making processes in their everyday lives. Educators are supporters and enablers of participatory practices. The process of planning activities is an important part of an educator's profession in early childhood education and it can be viewed as designing a learning process. Not only should educators design children's learning and participation, but children should also take part in designing their own learning. In this paper, we focus on children's opportunities to participate in the design learning process in Finnish day care groups. The research data were collected from teams of educators working in day care groups via survey. The results indicate that children's participation in the design learning process is average: They can participate more in the evaluating activities than in planning or implementing them.