Torben Næsby, trn@ucn.dk 1
Quality in Preschool
Inclusion
-confusions, questions and answers
ECER 2016, Dublin
Inclusion Confusions
Inclusion has not been defined, eg in the Salamanca Statement, and is ‘like an island,
considered as a separate territory from mainstream education, with its own discourses, policies and
practices’ (Thomas, 2012: 3)
Inclusion focuses on discrete groups of children, with, in Denmark, ‘a tsunami of diagnoses’,
especially of ADHD (Langager, 2014: 1)
Training of teachers for inclusion, and support
materials, emphasize children’s deficits (Allan 2014)
Julie Allan. University of Birmingham 2
Inclusive Questions
What does inclusion do?
Which opportunities do we offer our children?
What’s an inclusive environment for all children and how do we see it?
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Inclusive Answers
The pragmatic (inclusive) approach:
• Inclusive culture (values, approaches, meaning)
• Inclusive strategies (princips, goals, knowledge)
• Inclusive practice (didactics, actions, technologies, iPad as scaffolding… (Booth & Ainscow, 2002)
High quality preschools provide possibilities for participation, learning, well-being, democracy and inclusion (Harms,
Clifford & Cryer, 2015)
Children’s own perspectives, routines and staff lead activities (Sylva et al, 2010).
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The Research Project
What is high-quality in Danish preschool, how do we see, meet and develop it?
The Danish Day Care Facilities Act, which provides the curriculum on which day care education is based, does not stipulate very clearly what children should learn and therefore how educational processes should be organized.
This means that we must accept that there are large local differences in the quality of day care facilities in Denmark, and also that we in fact have little knowledge of whether the desired politically
determined targets are being met and what the quality is really like.
Children’s development does not come by itself. There is therefore considerable interest in the quality of the learning environment and the impact on children’s well-being, learning and development.
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Design
Critical realistic approach
The bio-ecological model; theory on development (proximal processes); an interactionist perspective on quality and inclusion
Mixed methods
Quality assessment of learning environments: ERS -line (quantitative baseline)
Children’s outcome, measured by LearnLab
Observations of learning environments identifying high quality and inclusion (qualitative)
https://cms.learnlab.dk/index.php?id=7866
LearnLab 6
Sample and Analyses Strategy
3 municipalities (80 institutions)
24 institutions
Peirce, 1955; Spencer-Brown 1969; Sayer 1992; Robson 2011 7
Empirical data Empirical
data ERS mean scores ERS mean
scores Social demo- graphics Danish register
Social demo- graphics Danish register
Observa tions of
high quality Observa
tions of high quality
LearnLab data Children LearnLab
data Children
High quality charac- teristics High quality charac- teristics
Baseline Baseline
Abduction
Form analysis
Main Frame:
The Bio-ecological Systems Model
La Paro, Thomason, Lower, Kintner-Duffy & Cassidy (2012) 8
TIME CHRONO
STRUCTURE MACRO CONTENT EXO PROCESS MESO
OUTCOME MICRO
Distal and proximal processes affecting quality in preschool on
different levels (systems)
GLOBAL INCLUSIVE QUALITY
Structural quality:
Materials, curriculum, teacher education, teacher-child ratio, programs etc.
Process quality:
Interactions Possibilities for
Relations, Participation,
Activities
Global Quality
Global definitions make it difficult to inform policy and practice
Do not provide the level of specificity to guide initiatives
Do not provide the information necessary to understand characteristics of settings most important to child outcomes
Do not capture the depth needed to understand what we need to know to positively affect child outcomes
La Paro, Thomason, Lower, Kintner-Duffy & Cassidy (2012) 9
Main Frame:
The Bio-ecological Systems Model
La Paro, Thomason, Lower, Kintner-Duffy & Cassidy (2012) 10
TIME CHRONO
STRUCTURE MACRO CONTENT EXO PROCESS MESO
OUTCOME MICRO
Content quality:
What is being taught
Organization and Leading
Measuring across dimensions
Effect quality What children learn
and their well- being
GLOBAL INCLUSIVE QUALITY
Structural quality:
Materials, curriculum, teacher education, teacher-child ratio, programs etc.
Process quality:
Interactions Possibilities for
Relations, Participation, Activities
LOCAL/NARROW
INCLUSIVE QUALITY
Proximal Processes
In the Process-Person-Context-Time model proximal processes are defined as key factors in development/ engines of development The form, power, content, and direction of the proximal processes effecting development vary systematically as a joint function of the
• characteristics of the developing person,
• the quality of the environment, producing increasingly more complex activities
• the direction and interaction (goals, effects, predicted developmental outcome)
• social continuities and changes, relations to significant others The quality of proximal processes determines the outcome
Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006 11
The Model
– levels and arenas of inclusion
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TIME CHRONO
STRUCTURE MACRO CONTENT EXO PROCESS MESO
OUTCOME MICRO
Physical (passive) inclusion Social (active) inclusion Mental (experien ced)
inclusion
Formal, professionally managed learning and development
communities Adult-child communities (interpersonal communities Informal, adult
organized communities (relating to the
institution)
Child-child
communities
(interpersonal
communities)
Pedagogical Quality
A pedagogical perspective of quality has to originate from research and documented evidence but must also inherit the children’s perspectives (Sommer et al, 2013)
It has to be viewed interactively. Neither the objective (global) nor the subjective (or relative) perspective, with their
limitations, should be dominant (Siraj-Blatchford & Mayo, 2012) In an interactionist perspective, dimensions of the society, the pedagogues, the children’s development and the learning
environment continuously and dialectically influence and are influenced by each other
(Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006; Sheridan, 2009)
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Pedagocial Quality
Divided environments = low quality
Constraining environments = minimal quality
Child-centred and dialogue-based environments = good quality
Innovative, inclusive and learning-oriented environments = high quality
Sheridan, Samuelsson & Johansson (2009): Barns tidiga läranda. Gøteborg
Næsby, T. (2014): Kvalitet i pædagogisk arbejde. I: Kornerup I. & Næsby, T. (red.):
Pædagogens grundfaglighed. Dafolo. s. 69 - 95
Children play for
themselves all the time
Children never play for
themselves
Children and staff play together most of the time
Note: From a child
perspective and based on dialogue
Children and staff play together/
have interplay Note: From a child’s
perspective and from a research informed and learning oriented perspective
Outcome
1)Low Quality 3)Minimal Quality 5)Good Quality 7) High Quality
Quality Rating, Play
Children play for
themselves all the time
Children never play for
themselves
Children and staff play together most of the time
Note: From a child
perspective and based on dialogue
Children and staff play together/
have interplay Note: From a child’s
perspective and from a research informed and learning oriented perspective
Outcome
1)Low Quality 3)Minimal Quality 5) Good Quality 7) High Quality
Quality Rating
Research with
children (or listening to children´s own voices) Research with
children (or listening to children´s own voices) Research
about children (or our
knowledge of children) Research about children (or our
knowledge
of children)
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”The key to a child-oriented perspective is to deal with the child’s
utterances and actions as if they have a meaning and rationality that adults need to decode and interpret in order to approach the child’s perspective” (Sommer et al 2013, p. 463) .
“By ‘being involved with the child’ in joint activity, it is also possible to enrich the child’s experience of the world by giving meaning, or
explaining, and by giving emotional and enthusiastic support to the child’s interests and initiatives (Sommer et al, 2013, p. 464).
Mental inclusion: the child’s perspective
Low quality Minimal quality Good quality High quality
Physical (passive) inclusion
Staffs don’t organize various group-size
Staff organize group-size in a pragmatic way, from their own perspective
Staff organize group-size from a child perspective
Staff organize group-size from a child and a
children’s perspective Social (active)
inclusion
Staff let the children play for themselves all the time
Staff never let the children play for themselves
Staff play together with the children most of the time (child initiated)
Staff play together with the children (child and staff initiated)
Mental
(experienced) inclusion
Staff never involve in interactive dialogues
Staff talk to children in an instructive way
Staff listen to the children – from their knowledge of children
Staff listen to the children – from the children’s own voices
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Measuring inclusion
– an environment rating scale
References
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Oxford: Elsevier.
Bronfenbrenner, U. & Ceci, S.J. (1994): Nature-Nurture Reconceptualized in Developmental Perspective: A Bioecological Model. Psycological Review, 101 (4), pp. 568-586. American Psycological Association
Bronfenbrenner, U. & Morris, P. A.(2006). The Bioecological Model of Human Development. In Siraj-Blatchford, I. & Mayo, A. (eds)(2012).Early Childhood Education. Vol 1. pp. 201-262. London: Sage.
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Næsby, T. (2014). Quality in Preschool. Pedagogical Quality and Development of Professional Competencies. Thesis. Aalborg Universitetsforlag. (In Danish.)
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Göteborg Universitet.
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Spencer-Brown, G. (1979): Laws of Form (rev. ed.). New York: E. P. Dutton.
trn@ucn.dk 19
