Early Childhood Teacher Education: Students Trajectories of Learning About Children's Literacy, 2015

The purpose of the project was to gain insight into the development of students' knowledge and understanding of early childhood literacy; what were their traejctories of learning in this field? We wanted to elaborate theoretical and practical knowledge about how ECE teacher education prepared students to assist young children's languauge acqusition.
The project was partly a comparative study of ECE education and teacher practice in Norway and Sweden. It had a mixed method design. Data was collected through a document analysis of curricular plans in order to study the intentions and contents of the curricula of the different university colleges. A survey based on this document analysis was sent to all Norwegian early childhood education students.
The survey data provided insights into the relationships between the intentional and experienced curriculum, as well as information about students' knowledge and understandings of early literacy. We arranged a conference with selcted ECE teachers and educators. Data from the conference enabled us to link the findings of our document and survey analyses with the needs and discourses of the vocational arena. This data also provided important information for the interviews and observations we conducted in selcted preschools.
The project aimed at studying how the Norwegian and Swedish governments' initiatives to focus on early literacy were understood and realized in curricula and ECE teacher training. Since both countries share a holistic view of children's preschool learning, knowledge of the different ways in which we operationalized this overall view enabled us to learn from each other. We gained knowledge about how newly educated teachers work and their rationales for the practical work they do in facilitating the development of early literacy.