Jan-Erik Johansson

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Title: Pre-school methods in pre-school teacher education: A study of a discipline and its tradition
Language: Swedish
Keywords: Pre-school teacher education, pre-school education, phenomenography, teacher thinking, socialization of teachers
Göteborg: Acta Univertsitatis Gothoburgensis, 1992
ISBN: 91-7346-247-0

Email: Jan-Erik Johansson

The aim has been to study the subject of contemporary pre-school methods in Swedish pre-school teacher education. Since this subject has no academic discipline to fall back on on, and has almost no written documentation, the solution was to interview 40 methods teachers. A frame of reference for the analysis has been devised with the help of a study of the Swedish pre-school tradition, and Dan Lortie´s sociological study of teachers (Dan C. Lortie: Scoolteacher - a sociological study. University of Chicago Press. Chicago: 1975).

Background
This study has its background in two reforms. In 1977 a reform of the higher educational system was carried out. It implied that all training of teachers, social workers and nurses would be part of a unified higher educational system, along with the old university disciplines. It was not easy to predict how these three types of vocational training, which lacked scientific traditions, would manage to interact with the learned society in the old universities. That is one reason why the Swedish National Board of Universities and Colleges initiated a research programme with the aim of studying the effects of the reform. The study of pre-school teacher training was one among others in this programme.

The other reform concerned the pre-school system. The expansion of the pre-schools is easily shown if one compares the number of pre-school student teachers, who in 1960 were 450 but in 1980 had increased to about 6,000. During the same period the number of children in day-care increased more than ten times. In 1990 as many as 46 per cent of the children of the ages 3­6 have day-care. This reform was led by the official 1968 Child-Care Committee. In 1972 a new educational programme was introduced which was in direct opposition to the existing Kindergarten programme. The latter was based on theories put forward by developmental psychologists like Ch. Bühler and Gesell, along with remaining Fröbel tradition. The Committee also criticised modern pre-school programmes developed during the 1960´s, which were based on theory of learning. The main effects of the committee´s work were ideological and organizational. Some of the effects were the banning of child observation and detailed planning, because these represented, it was claimed, ways of objectifying the children.

The interviews
As was mentioned above, pre-school methods is not a discipline-related subject in Sweden today. Disciplinary knowledge is public and available in a written form. At the time of the investigation, there were practically no textbooks on pre-school methods in Sweden. This left two alternatives: to observe what was taught in the classroom, or to ask the lecturers what their subject was. The second alternative was chosen and the research question was defined as: "How do lecturers in pre-school methods conceptualise their subject?"

The phenomenographical approach has developed from the observation that people, as a rule, seem to experience and conceptualise phenomena or aspects of the world around them in a limited number of qualitatively different ways. Identifying the categories of description, in terms of which people's differing understandings of a certain phenomenon can be characterized, is seen as the main result of the investigation.

During 1982 two lecturers in pre-school methods from each of the 22 teacher training colleges in Sweden (one junior and one senior member of the staff) were invited to participate in the investigation. 40 lecturers agreed to participate. The reason for choosing a stratified sampling procedure was to maximize the variation in the answers. On average each interview lasted two hours. The interviews were semi-structured so the lecturers had a chance to develop their answers even if they went beyond the questions raised by the interviewer. Everything that was said was tape-recorded and transcribed.

The components of pre-school teacher training are pre-school methods, child psychology and subjects which specify the content of the activities in which the pre-school teacher engages the children: Swedish, Music, Arts and Crafts etc, here called content-subjects. There is also practice teaching. The subject of pre-school methods is the central part of the vocational training in this teacher education. It is inteded to supply the student teacher with teaching skills and the lecturers have to have several years of experience as pre-school teachers themselves.

The present study has two main parts. The first consists of a description of the development of pre-school pedagogy and of pre-school teacher education. Then follow the results of the interviews.

The Fröbel tradition
Chapters 2 and 3 give examples from the development of the Swedish pre-school and the pre-school teacher education. The common denominator of the two is Friedrich Fröbel, who inspired the Kindergarten movement which after 1850 spread to both German- and English-speaking countries, and also to Scandinavia. The Fröbel tradition still exists and may be observed in many countries all over the world. There are many traditional components in the Kindergarten such as free play, group work, singing, interest in the nature and out-door activities etc. But at the same time, their relation to Fröbel´s original thinking and educational practice is not easy to analyze.

Another problem is that his most influential German followers, Bertha von Marenholz-Bülow and Henriette Schrader-Breymann, developed the Kindergarten away from its origin. Marenholz-Bülow is said to be the founder of an authoritarian method in the kindergarten. The result was in many respects a more school-like institution. Schrader-Breymann opposed the mechanical training of children, and tried to change the Kindergarten into a more home-like place, without strict discipline. She also used domestic work as a new part of the curriculum, together with play, work and learning as three important ways to develop the child. At the beginning of the 20th century a Fröbel renaissance started in Germany and Austria, at the same time as the reform education developed. During the 1920's the art education movement strongly influenced the German Fröbel Society. In the same period, educational research in Germany worked within the tradition called Geisteswissenschaft. This tradition was mostly interested in the life of Fröbel and they almost never systematically studied his original writings. This means that the present state of knowledge about Fröbel is confusing. It was not until the 1980´s that a wide representation of his original works became more easily available.

Fröbel´s thinking was a part of the romantic movement. Philosophically he is an objective idealist, the centre in his universe is God. His practical education was very well structured and founded in the rationalistic practice of Pestalozzi. Fröbel claimed that education is like a natural process; that the child is an organic whole which develops through creative self-activity according to natural laws; that the individual is an organic part of the society; and that the universe as a whole is an organism of which all lesser organisms are members. Fröbel saw the child as good from the beginning. He said that education ought to be passive, following, not interfering. According to Fröbel, man was a self-expressive being, who had to follow the inner calling. If this process went wrong, Fröbel did not hesitate to recommend punishment. This means that the child's freedom disappeared. This is but one of the contradictions in Fröbel´s theory.

Fröbel thought that the child´s encounter with the objective reality in the form of geometric bodies opened specific perspectives in the perception of reality. The gifts and occupations follow from Fröbel´s interest in geometry, and his Spheric law. The gifts start with the sphere and move over surfaces to lines and points. The occupations, according to Fröbel, move from points and lines back to two-dimensional surfaces and to solids in three dimensions. They consist of paper perforating, paper cutting and folding, interlacing, weaving, drawing, clay modeling etc. which today are easily recognised as traditional components of a Kindergarten educational programme.

The Swedish Fröbel Movement
The first Swedish Kindergarten teachers were trained by Schrader-Breymann at Pestalozzi-Fröbel-Haus in Berlin. Modern child psychology reached Sweden in the 1930´s. Also the philantropic movement, as described by Donzelot, has influenced pre-schools in Sweden. This is evident in the thoughts of Anna Warburg, the founder of the Swedish Fröbel Foundation in 1918. The second chapter also illustrates the fact that mothers did not always appreciate the Fröbel pedagogy, which almost aspired to better education than the mothers themselves could provide. Finally a forgotten decision from the 1949 is described. This year the Swedish parliament stopped the expansion of both day-care centres and pre-school teacher education. One conclusion of this chapter is that pre-school pedagogy is an artefact, not ²tacit² knowledge.

The third chapter describes the origin of pre-school teacher training in Sweden. It concentrates on the three most important centres: the Fröbel-Institute in Norrköping, the YWCA Pedagogical Institute and the Social-Pedagogical Seminar, both in Stockholm. They all developed in an interesting way during the 1930´s. The Fröbel-Institute was one of the first training institutes in Sweden, and started during the first years of this century. It was founded by the sisters Ellen and Maria Moberg. They also controlled the Swedish Fröbel-Foundation and its journal until 1939. In 1934 Carin Ulin started The YWCA Institute in Stockholm, under the direct inspiration from Vienna, where she had studied in the late 1920´s. Her intention was to give a scientific alternative to Fröbel pedagogy. In 1936 Alva Myrdal started her Social-Pedagogical Seminar, also in conflict with the Fröbelians. But if one analyzes this conflict it becomes clear that all three institutes stayed inside a general Fröbel tradition. Underlying this argument is the fact that Fröbel pedagogy was transformed into a modern form with the help of Elsa Köhler, an Austrian educational researcher, who worked together with Ellen and Maria Moberg. Köhler introduced child psychology from Karl and Charlotte Bühler together with a new perspective on Fröbel. This is clear in her transformation of the concentric principle of Schrader-Breymann [Monatsgegenstand] into what Köhler called Center of interest.

Another common trait in the early teacher training was the systematic training during practice teaching. All training institutes taught child observation during the 1940´s and 50´s, and they also tried to demonstrate the fact that teachers both think and act. The aim of Chapter 3 is to show that pre-school teacher training in Sweden has had a strong interest in pedagogy and psychology, within a modernized and reformed Fröbel framework.

Methods teachers and their subject

In Chapter 4 the socialization of methods teachers are described. The starting point is Dan Lortie´s sociological perspective which suggests that teachers have no common, technical knowledge, because of their weak socialization. They usually rely on personal knowledge. The thousands of hours in school, which every child has spent as an apprentice-of-observation, means that every pupil has an idea of what teaching is about. But this idea is subjective, and does not take account of the fact that the pupil does not know much about the teachers, planning, intentions etc. As far as the interviewees are concerned, they were very much the same as the teachers who Lortie discusses, until they started to work as methods teachers. But in some respects they are quite different. One reason is that the ordinary teacher is a person whom almost everyone knows, but few people know that there are methods teachers.

With the help of 40 interviews with methods teachers the common conceptions of the subject of pre-school methods are described. The methods teachers believe that their knowledge of the pre-school is of major significance. They stress the importance of following the development through reading literature. They also think that practical experience is a necessary condition for being a methods teacher, but only a few say that it is sufficient. The experiences they had from their evaluation of practice teaching is of primary importance. Thus practical knowledge has two sides, personal teaching experience and the observation of student teachers in practice teaching.

When the methods teachers describe the content of their subject of pre-school methods, they use categories structured according to the work in pre-schools. This is a vocational perspective and not an academic conception. Methods teachers are of the opinion that student teachers should be able to plan and carry out the traditional pre-school training. They should be able to work together with a staff, and understand parents. A very important ability is to handle a group of children. The teachers aim at the socialization of student teachers in order to become good pre-school teachers. A criterion from the teachers' point of view is the ability to act in a informed and accurate way in managing a group of children during practice teaching. There is a wish to cooperate across all subjects, such as Psychology and Arts and Crafts, in order to form an integrated whole and to work in the traditional concentric way in the pre-schools.The lecturers stress the practical applications of the subject matter in the pre-school.

Almost every methods teacher aims at integrating the supervisors in the teacher training. They think that it is important to make the supervising teachers realize that they are teacher educators as well as pre-school teachers. The attempt to integrate the supervising teachers and the practice teaching to become parts of the teacher training as a whole, is quite obvious.

This chapter shows that the common parts of the subject of pre-school reflect the traditional pre-school curriculum. The knowledge base and the aim of Pre-school Methods

In Chapter 5 the methodology behind the 40 interviews are described. As mentioned earlier, the fenomenographical approach uses semi-structured interviews. The analyses are geared towards disclosing conceptions which are expressed in the interviews. On the basis of their differences and similarities these descriptions are put into categories which are qualitatively different from each other. It is the dominant conception in every interview which determines in which category it is going to be placed. Two aspects seemed to be fundamental for the lecturers´ understanding of their subject. The first aspect is the question of where they find their knowledge base. There are four different conceptions of this kind: first there is a group of lecturers who think that the pre-school itself is the knowledge base. The second conception is that pre-school methods is the application of child psychology. The third is that the base is the traditional subject matter of the Pre-school. The fourth conception is that there is a need of child pedagogy, based upon studies of children in pre-school settings.

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