“Doing, knowing, caring and feeling: exploring relations between nature-oriented teaching and preschool children’s learning”.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between teachers’ work with children’s learning in Swedish preschools with regard to both learning processes and nature-oriented content. The aim of the study is to make visible the relationship between education and care by examining what happens when teachers in preschools work with learning and children’s learning processes.

The study shows that, with regard to nature-oriented content, pedagogical initiatives and children’s learning processes are intertwined, and that the pedagogical initiatives include both learning and care. Pedagogical work with nature-oriented content is incorporated in the other daily activities and is not a specific planned programme. The teachers guide the children’s learning processes on the basis of experiences from everyday life. For example, they help a child learn how to move up and down a hill by asking him how he feels about this activity.

The data material consists of approx. 16 hours’ video footage of children’s (1-3-year-olds) outdoor activities for a period of 22 days. Preschool teachers were included in some of the footage when they were either helping the children or interacting with the children in spontaneous or planned activities. Everyday situations in which the children were in nature were chosen to illustrate standard Swedish pedagogical practices in preschools. So as to illustrate different activities with regard to place, tools, participants and structure, four different situations were selected for more in-depth analysis. Two situations illustrate activities planned by the teacher, and two situations illustrate more spontaneous activities run by the children; one is from an excursion and the other takes place in the preschool playground. All the situations were transcribed and analysed using two analysis methods inspired by John Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy. The first analysis method, Epistemological Move Analysis, focuses on the teachers’ guiding processes in learning situations. The second analysis method, Substantive Learning Quality Analysis, focuses on different learning qualities in the relationship between the teacher and the child.

Klaar, S. & Öhman, J. (2014). “Doing, knowing, caring and feeling: exploring relations between nature-oriented teaching and preschool children’s learning”. International Journal of Early Childhood, 22(1), 37-58.