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Children's Projects: A proposal for a research agenda

Authors:
Jaakko Hilppö at University of Helsinki
Jaakko Hilppö
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Abstract

This poster outlines a new project that I’m working on and its research agenda.
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All content in this area was uploaded by Jaakko Hilppö on Dec 11, 2017
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CHILD
REN’S
PROJECTS
A proposal for a
research agenda
Jaakko Hilppö
?
?
CHAT AS A FRAMEWORK
QUESTIONS?
FRAGMENTS FROM THE LITERATURE
POTENTIAL IMPLICATIONS
THREE RESEARCH DESIGNS
Study historical and
contemporary cases
Follow emerging cases
in alternative learning settings
Follow cases
conventional learning settings
Islands of expertise (Crowley & Jacobs, 2002) highlights that children can attain
considerable knowledge funds through their projects.
Interpretative reproduction (Corsaro 2005) captures the general idea of what sparks
children’s projects and their relation to other cultural spheres, but not how they are
sustained or subside.
The Learning Ecologies (Barron, 2006) and Cultural Learning Pathways (Bell, et al., 2013)
frameworks conceptualize the learning journeys and the resources used for children’s
projects, but not their development.
How do projects emerge, are stabilized and maintained
and eventually end as part of children’s everyday lives?
Children’s projects are sustained child-initiated and
child-lead activities that focus on an idea or the
production of an artifact
What do children learn through their projects?
A TENTATIVE DEFINITION
jaakko.hilppo@helsinki.
According to CHAT, activities change and develop
over time via individual and collective level learning.
Conceptualizations like horizontal and vertical
re-contextualization (Van Oers, 1998) as well as expansive
learning (Engeström, 1987, see Learning IIa and IIb),
aspire to theorize this change processes in activities.
While children’s projects have attracted some interest,
projects, their evolution as well as their impact on
children’s learning and development is understudied.
New insights into how children structure and organize learning for
themselves and what they learn while engaged in them.
Relevant to debates on e.g., motivation, learning across contexts,
self-regulated learning and instructional practices.
A new and fruitful context to explore and further develop CHAT theory,
especially concerning children’s agency, their learning and development.
New pedagogical implications regarding how schools, for example,
could be re-structured to provide more opportunities for children’s projects.
... As such, these practices are open to change through collective effort (Engeström, 1987) and children can be part of this process. For example, children can extend the range of people who a family helps or and even large-scale childled compassionate projects can emerge through children's efforts (Hilppö, 2017). In this sense, Hilppö, J., Rajala, A., & Lipponen, L. (in press). ...
Compassion in Children’s Peer Cultures
Chapter
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  • Jul 2019
Peers have a significant impact on children’s learning and development (e.g., Rubin, Bukowski & Bowker, 2015; Sawyer, 2015; Corsaro & Eder, 1990). Interactions with other same-age children not only influence children’s social, cognitive and emotional competencies, but importantly constitute the very grounds for their development. Previous research has shown that peers have a critical role in children’s language learning, cognitive skills, physical wellbeing as well as in socio-cognitive areas of development, like collaboration, cooperation and pro-sociality. While this body of work has significantly advanced our understanding of the nature of peer interactions, there is still a dearth of knowledge on how children orient to and address the worries, concerns or sufferings of their peers in everyday settings, namely, to act with compassion. To this end, in this chapter we will present our cultures of compassion approach (Lipponen et al., 2018) to studying compassion in children’s peer interactions in a Finnish kindergarten and share an example of our video ethnographic work and interaction analysis on compassion. We will conclude our chapter by discussing how it is possible to foster compassionate peer cultures in early child education and care settings.
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Perspectives on the Finnish Early Years STEAM Education: Reflecting on the Avant-Garde
Chapter
  • Jun 2022
The skills needed to live in our current societies are rapidly changing. How will we provide children with the skills they will need in the future? While early years education has been traditionally strong in supporting twenty-first century skills like creativity, collaboration and problem-solving within play, global crises around the ecological, social and economic sustainability of our societies challenge current practices and call on us as researchers and educators to rethink how these and other skills, like computational thinking, could be advanced in early childhood education via science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) education. Over recent years, the Finnish educational system has enjoyed intense national and international attention, the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector along with it. This has resulted in multiple descriptions and attempts to characterize Finnish education’s main differences from other national systems. Finnish early years education has been heralded for its holistic orientation to children’s care and education, as well as its focus on playful learning approaches and participatory culture. However, despite these positive characterizations and the arguably great potential of the Finnish pre-primary education for offering children with rich opportunities to engage in STEAM learning, early childhood educators are still cautious in implementing STEAM and phenomenon-based learning. In this chapter, we present three distinctive approaches to early STEAM education developed in Finland, namely (1) phenomenon-based learning, (2) children’s maker-spaces and (3) children’s projects. In addition, we also discuss how these approaches build on the current form of Finnish ECEC and draw out suggestions on how these approaches could potentially address the above concerns regarding Finnish early years STEAM education.
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