Positioning children with special educational needs in early childhood education and care documents
Heiskanen, N., Alasuutari, M., & Vehkakoski, T. (2018). Positioning children with special educational needs in early childhood education and care documents. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 39(6), 827-843. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2018.1426443
Published in
British Journal of Sociology of EducationDate
2018Copyright
© 2018 The Authors. Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
The article critically discusses the practice of describing children’s special educational needs (SEN) in early childhood education and care (ECEC) pedagogical documents. Documentation is understood as a form of governance. In current practice, documentation is extensively used in educational institutions. Even when the focus of documentation should be pedagogical, the descriptions of children’s SEN commonly describe a child’s individual deficits as a source of educational problems. In this study, we used discourse analysis to investigate how professionals position children and construct their SEN in pedagogical documents. The research data consisted of 143 documents on 29 Finnish children. Three ways of positioning children with SEN were identified in the documents: as a problematic child through definitive descriptions, as a multifaceted child through contextual descriptions, and as a learning child through dynamic descriptions. The results highlight the importance of a pedagogical focus and dynamic conceptualisation of SEN in ECEC documentation.
...


Publisher
Routledge, Taylor & Francis GroupISSN Search the Publication Forum
0142-5692Keywords
Publication in research information system
https://converis.jyu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/27852352
Metadata
Show full item recordCollections
License
Related items
Showing items with similar title or keywords.
-
Teachers' perception of children's agency in early childhood education
Thomayer, Claudia (2017)The concept of agency is currently brought more and more into the focus of ed- ucational research. While professional agency at work is for instance already broadly discussed in adult education, research on children’s ... -
Preservice teachers’ beliefs about young children’s technology use at home
Dong, Chuanmei; Mertala, Pekka (Elsevier, 2021)Teachers’ beliefs about young children’s technology use at home are intertwined with their beliefs about parents and their parenting practices. This paper reports a qualitative study of eight purposefully selected Chinese ... -
The Work of Special Education Teachers in the Tiered Support System : The Finnish Case
Paloniemi, Annukka; Pulkkinen, Jonna; Kärnä, Eija; Björn, Piia Maria (Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2021)This study investigated primary school special education teachers’ (SETs’) (N = 283) conceptions on their work descriptions and uses of pedagogical documents after a reform in the national support framework. The respondents ... -
Oppiminen ja asiantuntijuus varhaiskasvatuksessa : varhaisen oppimaan ohjaamisen suunnitelma erityistä tukea tarvitsevien lasten ohjauksessa
Kovanen, Päivi (Jyväskylän yliopisto, 2004)