This study focuses on teacher professional learning in early childhood education and care (ECEC) in response to the contemporary challenge of understanding the role of teachers in play. It explores the learning process of teachers when investigating how an ECEC work team in Sweden collaboratively changes their way of reasoning regarding their role…

In this article, the authors problematize the dichotomization of play and learning that often shapes the agenda of early childhood education research and practice. This dichotomization is driven in part by the tendency to define learning in terms of formal learning (i.e. learning as an outcome of direct instruction and school-based approaches that…

This article explores how some children in Denmark, Estonia, Germany and Sweden describe their perspective on learning. The aim of the international study is to gain knowledge of how preschool children in Sweden, Denmark, Estonia and Germany reflect and perceive their learning in preschool and other surrounding social contexts. The results are…

This study explores how group size influences children's conditions for wellbeing, learning and development in preschool in relation to the intentions in the revised (2010) Swedish preschool curriculum. The study is based on qualitative methods generated from interviews and open-ended questions in a questionnaire. Group size is dependent on three…

The aim of this study was to examine how preschool teachers in Sweden and Denmark perceive children's learning in preschool. The study aimed to answer the following questions: What is "learning"? How do children learn? What are the best conditions for children's learning? What is the role of participation in children's learning? The…

The purpose of this study is to contribute knowledge on and gain an understanding of elementary school teachers' perspectives on the function of play in children's learning processes. The study is qualitative with a hermeneutical approach and has George Herbert Mead as a theoretical frame of reference. Interviews have been carried out with seven…

Theory-driven and practice-driven research are often separated, but in this article we shall argue for a research approach that is theory-driven but practice-oriented and shares features with the specific kind of early childhood education pedagogy this research approach has generated, what we refer to as developmental pedagogy (Pramling Samuelsson…

From children's own perspective, play and learning are not always separate in practices during early years. The purpose of this article is, first, to scrutinise the background and character of early years education in terms of play and learning. Second, to elaborate the findings of several years of research about children's learning in preschool…