Title: Making learning visible in a preschool setting- A qualitative study of how teachers work and evaluate how children’s learning can be visualized                         

Term: Autumn 2015                                                     

Author: Emelie Persson and Annelie Westerlund

Mentor: Maria Rosén

The objective of this study is to examine how two departments at a preschool work specifically to visualize children’s learning processes, both from a Child Perspective and from the Children's Perspective. The purpose is to investigate questions concerning how teachers follow up and visualize the children’s learning process and how preschool teachers evaluate to what extent children's learning processes should be made visible.

The study is qualitative and ethnographically inspired. We have conducted participating observations in order to examine how teachers follow up and visualize children’s learning processes. In addition to this we have made unstructured interviews to examine how preschool teachers evaluate how children's learning processes are visualized.

The theoretical starting point we used is Dewey’s Pragmatism which is based on the assumption that children's learning emerge out of their own experiences and interests.

The result shows that the pre-school teachers follow up and visualize the children's learning processes in different ways. They incorporate different steps of the process and they structure the environment by having materials easily accessible to the children in order to make learning processes based on children’s interests possible. The teachers act as role models when it comes to vocal expression and through active dialogues they create opportunities for the children to reflect on what they’ve learnt. The teachers also actively work to allow the children to express their thoughts and opinions, and to integrate these into the learning process. The most prominent result of the study showed that the teachers’ interaction with the children were shown by their attendance, responsiveness, commitment, as well as to their showing an interest in the children’s many different worlds of experiences.          

Keywords: Pre-school, learning processes, children's learning 

Nyckelord: Förskola, lärprocesser, barns lärande