6.1 Introduction

In this chapter, we aim to bring to the fore the notions of children’s perspectives and child perspective, as key in the scientific knowledge of children’s learning and development in Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories as well as developmental pedagogy. A child perspective is defined by Sommer et al. (2010) as what teachers believe is the best for the child based on his or her knowledge; in other words, an adult’s idea about the child’s world. Children’s perspectives, on the other hand, are children’s own expressions and ways of seeing their surrounding world. The two notions are thus very different concerning whose voice is foregrounded, but they are seldom distinguished from each other in research or practice. Children’s perspectives are often taken-for-granted, as if it would be sufficient to attend to what concerns children, with adults keeping in mind a child perspective. In this sense, preschool has traditionally always had a kind of child perspective—its education focused on the child rather than the subject matter to be learned (Pramling Samuelsson & Asplund Carlsson, 2014). This may often differ from the perspectives held by the children themselves, however; that is, the children’s perspectives. While the difference between these notions and their significance for children and childhood experiences have only recently received attention in debates about early childhood education, we can see how this interest has been influenced by Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s work as early as the beginning and middle of the last century, and is specifically highlighted in the more recently developed developmental pedagogy. Developmental pedagogy has its origin in a methodology called phenomenography where focusing on describing the learner’s perspective of the world around them is key and through this centering the child’s perspective in teaching and learning in early-years education. In this chapter, we will therefore focus on these three approaches regarding their taking a child perspective and children’s perspectives as key to understanding children’s development and learning. Here, we would like to refer to Chapman (1992), who states that the significance of a theory should be measured not in its completeness but in the importance of the problems it poses. Thereby, in this particular discussion, we will not try to cover the whole depth and breadth of these theories but rather to highlight how children’s perspectives and a child perspective have run through the most influential theories on child development of our time as well as contemporary education. The chapter will start with an inquiry of how the child’s perspective come through in Piaget’s studies of children’s development, followed by Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory seen from a Western educational perspective. We then describe developmental pedagogy as it is implemented in Swedish early childhood education and the traces of Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories that can be recognized in the pedagogy.

6.2 What We Learn from Piaget’s Studies of children’s Development

A young Jean Piaget worked with intelligence testing of young children. It is well known that this woke an interest in him to understand why children answered non-logically to given tasks. He devoted a tremendous amount of time and effort to studying and describing the intellectual development of the child, building a model of description for this development in terms of cognitive processes and stages. Children’s perspectives were present from the beginning of Piaget’s work, with an aim to understand how the child reasons and how intellectual skills develop. He did this by developing methods—so-called clinical observations and clinical interviews—through which a trained observer or interviewer was able to reveal the context of the child’s answers and solutions, whether based on reflection, beliefs, play, or even irrelevant chatter (Piaget, 1973). Children’s expressions are thus taken seriously, and multiple observations and interviews build the foundation of Piaget’s universal theory of intellectual development.

6.2.1 Central Concepts in Piaget’s Theory

Piaget’s primary goal in his lifelong work can perhaps be summarized as a search for how knowledge is constructed and transformed in development (Inhelder, 1992). The main objective then becomes to study transitions from less effective toward more effective and valid knowledge.

Piaget’s studies of children’s development pay attention to the individual child. He had a great interest in getting to know how the child perceives his or her surrounding world and made extensive efforts through multiple investigations and publications to unravel the child’s cognitive progress. In his book Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood (Piaget, 1962), he explicitly states that, in order to study the beginnings of children’s representations, he dedicates himself to studies in which individual processes dominate the collective factors, particularly in imitation and symbolic play.

Piaget’s background in biology can be discerned in his explanation of how the main condition for development is the strive for equilibrium as a continuous process. The child develops an idea of something in reality, into which he assimilates other experiences. When the child has new experiences that do not fit into his or her thinking process, this results in a state of disequilibrium. The child now has to either assimilate the new experiences to attain equilibrium or accommodate the new idea. This process of adaptation is the basis of cognitive development, here viewed as a changed way of thinking, which takes place when the child is able to make an accommodation to a new reality (Piaget, 1976). In Piaget’s studies, we see how the core concepts of the theory, assimilation and accommodation, come together in the symbolic function that can be observed in children’s play. Play, in Piagetian terms, is heavily influenced by the assimilation process. During play, the child cares little about objects’ physical features—a building brick can be a phone or a wooden stick can be a sword. The objects are assimilated to the child’s needs and earlier experiences to fit the purpose of the play. Imitation play, on the other hand, bears accommodative features as the goal is to reproduce actions that are defined by external circumstances. To construct this highly theoretical model for describing intellectual development, the researcher needs to apply children’s perspectives, whereby the child’s imagination is taken seriously and regarded as an expression of how the child understands the world.

Piaget regards the child’s intellectual development as a continuum of transition from less to more valid knowledge (Inhelder, 1992), but also describes it as qualitative changes in perceptions. He describes the development in stages, but there are never any abrupt transits between the stages. The first stage is characterized by reflexes and the child’s acts, which gradually shape schemas that help the child organize his or her interaction with the environment (Piaget, 1973). Gradually, the child learns that the environment consists of objects independent of him- or herself. This means that the child realizes that objects exist even if he or she does not perceive them in the immediate space and time. Observations of children’s acts, particularly repeating actions and the coordination of actions, may reveal emerging cognitive structures (or schemas); that is, the meaning behind children’s actions, utterances, or other expressions (Nutbrown, 2011). The pre-operational period in thinking is the stage most often described within the preschool ages. This is characterized by an increasing ability to recapitulate actions, for instance when the child is able to determine a number of items as equal even if the items have been physically rearranged, but is not yet able to draw conclusions, mentally manipulate ideas, or extract general rules from systematic investigations. What is essential in Piaget’s theory of intellectual development, however, is that knowledge and intellectual development do not occur spontaneously or through maturation but rather have to be constructed through an adaptive process, which also means that knowledge is never transmitted directly from the environment to the child but is instead constructed from the child’s subjective perspective (Piaget, 1952).

Piaget studied children’s actions as expressions of the child’s thoughts and understanding. Interpreting the aim of the child’s play and acts then became important for understanding the developing mind of the child. In fact, Piaget studied interactions between children and other people as a source of knowledge construction. Their coordination of viewpoints and intersubjectivity was considered to be the origin of objective knowledge (Inhelder, 1992). However, in Piaget’s theory development is described in terms of the child’s cognition, whereby social, environmental, and cultural influence are said to have the role of pointing the child’s attention to certain objects or phenomena (Beilin, 1992). Thus, in Piaget’s line of reasoning, social environment, interaction, and cooperation are necessary conditions for intellectual development but the construction of knowledge is an individual process.

Children’s perspectives are present throughout Piaget’s theory as the basis for his ambition to form a general theory of intellectual development but are perhaps the most explicit in the notion of egocentrism. At the beginning of the intellectual development, the child is considered to be highly egocentric in his or her thoughts. This is observed in the way children reason and reflects upon the world, for example, as discussed in Piaget (1973, p. 170):

(Excerpt from interview with child aged 6 years 6 months)

Interviewer::

Have you seen the clouds moving?

Child::

Yes.

Int::

Can you make them move yourself?

Child::

Yes, by walking.

Int::

What happens when you walk?

Child::

It makes them move.

Int::

What makes them move?

Child::

We do, because we walk and then they follow us.

Int::

What makes them follow us?

Child::

Because we walk.

Int::

How do you know that?

Child::

Because when you look up in the sky, they are moving.

Int::

Could you make them go the other way if you wanted to?

Child::

By turning round and walking back.

Int::

And what would the clouds do then?

Child::

They’d go back.

Piaget claims that these kinds of dialogues make it possible to identify the nature of the child’s ideas. In this example, his interpretation of the child’s ideas is that the child perceives him- or herself as participating in actions along with the sun and the clouds, whereby his or her intentions or will are coordinated with the will of the other. During the first years of life, the child does not differentiate him- or herself from the environment; but gradually, as in the reasoning in the example above, the child’s perception of the relationship between his or her actions and changes in the environment become more dynamic (Piaget, 1973). Decentration is thereby fundamental for intellectual development. As long as the child is egocentric in his or her thoughts, assimilation dominates the adaptive process and the child only develops a subjective knowledge of the world. Flexibility between different views about a phenomenon is thereby necessary in order to enable accommodation and thus a better balance between what is known and what is new. Piaget’s great interest in and efforts to explain the child’s way of perceiving the world focus on the child’s own experiences of the world and how objects and the child him- or herself relate to one another. More recent research has offered evidence of children’s ability to decentrate already at an early age, and to take the other person’s view that is different from theirs, when encountering familiar problem situations (see, e.g., Donaldson, 1978; Mauritzson & Säljö, 2001). Whatever the interpretations may result in, Piaget’s attention to children’s perspectives on the world has inspired many researchers to replicate his studies and challenges the knowledge of the child’s intellectual development and learning.

Thus, Piaget has made a significant contribution to the attention in research and practice directed at the mind of the child, further explored in contemporary research in psychology as well as education. His interest is in the universality of competences and features of the developing mind and thought (Beilin, 1992). What Piaget accomplished is thereby a general picture of the intellectual development among children, based on empirical observations of their acts and interaction, which are interpreted by taking the child’s way of understanding as the outset. In sum, in accordance with Chapman’s argument regarding the validity of a theory (1992), we find that the questions Piaget raised should perhaps be seen as more relevant for early childhood education than the specific model he outlined. Theories are often regarded as being developed in reaction to dominant paradigms, and in Piaget’s case, his empirical work and detailed documentations of children’s intellectual development represent an argument against the insufficiency of nativist or empiricist views, which he found could not help in the understanding of development. That is, knowledge cannot be imported directly from the outside; nor is development pre-determined. His work arose from a genuine interest in children’s perspectives and resulted in a general theory on intellectual development. The individual child thus became invisible in favor of the general and abstract child (Piaget, 1985), but has nevertheless informed preschool education by affording a child perspective based on scientific inquiries into the child’s perception of the world.

6.2.2 Consequences of Piaget’s theory for preschool education

Piaget focused on discovery processes in the child (Inhelder, 1992), and rarely used the term “learning”. To Piaget, learning meant instructive actions such as showing the child that a number of objects are equal in number when rearranged, which does not necessarily lead to a developed concept of numbers. Instead, to acquire new knowledge, the child has to actively construct the knowledge him- or herself when facing some kind of contradiction (to the child’s conception), or encounter some surprising event that triggers adaptive efforts to obtain equilibrium again.

The Piagetian child is a “scientist”, an exploring child. This metaphor stems from the conjecture that children construct knowledge when searching for coherence, consistency, and application of experiences (Case, 1992). Athey (2007) also describes this development based on multiple observations in terms of schemas; that is, repeating actions coordinated with other actions, constituting a form of thought in the child. In education, these forms of thought are nourished by encounters with content that extends the particular form of thought. A child’s interest in, for example, circular objects may thus be enriched by circular actions that extend the child’s understanding and form of thought.

Even though Piaget and his colleagues wrote sparsely about education, his theory has influenced the discourse on teaching and learning in research and practice in the US and other parts of the world. Murray (1992) states that this should not come as a surprise, as Piaget’s work was the only theory before the 1960s to actually deal with how children understand the content and concepts that are included in most curricula, such as arithmetic, geometry, time, and space.

This influence can be found, for instance, in a highly popular children’s TV show in Sweden (inspired by the American show Sesame Street) during the 1980s, called Five Ants are More than Four Elephants (our translation). The show had the educational intention to teach children literacy and numeracy concepts, framed in short, humoristic sketches accompanied by songs and animations. The discovery of concept meanings by contrasting, for example, different ways of categorizing a set of objects, was the basic framework. The title of the show also clearly flirts with the Piagetian description of children’s conception of conservation as a central feature of developing number concepts (Piaget & Szeminska, 1977/2001)—the size of the objects to be counted should not interfere with the number of objects. That is, the abstraction of numerical relationships depends on the ability to differentiate physical features, such as size, from numerical ones. In this particular show, we can see actors mirroring seemingly naïve perceptions of worldly phenomena and concepts, which other actors contrast with other, more advanced explanations of relationships or meaning, in a child-oriented and playful setting. Children’s different ways of perceiving the world are thus highlighted and contrasted, to help the viewer (the child) recognize his or her own perspective and encounter other perspectives, resulting in the adaptive process that stimulates intellectual development.

In line with Piaget’s view (according to Youniss & Damon, 1992), teaching entails supporting children in developing intellectual instruments to coordinate knowledge, rather than developing procedures. This has led to an emphasis on group work and active discovery, rather than teaching in a master-pupil fashion. The most well-known implementation of Piaget’s theory in early childhood education is perhaps the HighScope program. In the US in 1970, an initiative was taken to develop early childhood education that would support children at risk of educational failure, by establishing the HighScope Educational Research Foundation. The HighScope program includes a scientifically based curriculum and program for instruction with observation-based assessment tools for preschool children. The cognitively oriented curriculum is characterized by teachers interacting with children, both individually and in small groups, to support learning at the child’s own level of cognitive development. Piaget’s theory provided the foundation for this model, based on the assumption that mental growth occurs through children’s active exploration and manipulation of their environment (Weikart, 1981). Today, the HighScope program can be found in several countries outside the US as well. Its main feature is a large number of goals, such as notions that children should learn, but also the process of “plan-do-review”, whereby each child is to plan and tell the teacher what he or she intends to do (playing role play, working with construction materials, working with creative arts, reading books, etc.). After a set time, the child returns to the teacher and retells what he or she has done (Sanders & Farago, 2018).

In Sweden, for example, we do not find preschool programs similar to those in the US (e.g., HighScope), because of differences in the educational system and childcare traditions. There is a national curriculum that manifests the intentions of the Education Act (SFS, 2010:800) by formulating goals for children’s development and learning within academic areas of knowledge, as well as values and norms to strive for; but there are no achievement goals, and the preschool teachers who are responsible for carrying out the pedagogical practice according to these goals are free to choose how to orchestrate their teaching. Thus, we find a diversity of approaches to teaching in contemporary Swedish preschool education. Nevertheless, in Swedish childhood and preschool practice, we find indications of Piaget’s contribution from a historical perspective, for example, in the Barnstugeutredningen (Survey of Preschools, Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, 1972) in the 1970s. This survey aimed to renew the content and organization of preschools in Sweden. It was a reaction to an increasing number of working parents, both mothers and fathers, creating a demand for the government to aid in the care of young children. Preschools began to expand dramatically within only a few years (Johansson et al., 2018). The renewal of the preschool came to be based on Piaget’s theory for the cognitive aspects of development, and on Homburger-Eriksen for the social-emotional aspects. Communication became a key notion, as did the organization of different physical areas where children could freely explore and experiment. One can conclude that children’s perspectives were put on the agenda, inspired by Piaget’s many studies in which children’s own ideas were made visible (Pramling, 1983). A practical consequence was that, in order to understand the child’s world, teachers had to be skilled in communicating with children (Doverborg & Pramling Samuelsson, 1985/2012). This can be seen as the beginning of an increasing interest in children’s perspectives in education as well as seeing the child’s subjective world, which in turn directs awareness to children’s own rights. For a short period of time, this approach was called dialogue pedagogy (Schyl-Bjurman & Strömstedt-Lind, 1976; see also Pramling Samuelsson, 2003). However, the emphasis on communication led to a decreasing prominence of the content for learning in preschool.

6.3 Vygotsky and the Cultural-Historical Theory from a Western Perspective

If Piaget is understood as directing attention to the individual child, Vygotsky is often described as attending to the social child. Nevertheless, Vygotsky’s view on children’s development is very much based on an interest in children’s perspectives, which can be seen not least in his thorough investigations of concept development among children, for instance reflected in the well-known quote: “children have their own preschool arithmetic, which only myopic psychologists could ignore” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 84). Our interpretation of the quote, based on our reading of Vygotsky, is that the child always has a reason and logic behind their actions and speech, but it may be different from the adult’s logic.

6.3.1 Key Concepts in Theory Based on Vygotsky

There are certain notions that are associated with Vygotsky (1987) and the cultural-historical theory he developed, which many recent researchers have further developed and added new notions to. Here, we will briefly discuss some of them, which have direct implications on how this theory is used in preschool education in the Nordic countries and that reflect Vygotsky’s attention to children’s perspectives.

The first and most widely used notion is zone of proximal development (ZPD), which relates to the development of children’s higher cognitive and psychological functions (Vygotsky, 1978). These functions concern language and writing, as well as number concepts, logical conclusions, remembering, and selective attention. ZPD is the relationship between what the child can do by her- or himself (individually) and what the child can manage along with a more competent adult or peer (socially). Here, the focus is on the child’s way of knowing and mastering, and what he or she is able to do in the near future. Here, we find children’s perspectives treated as essential, in that it is necessary to identify the child’s way of knowing in order to define where the child is on his or her developmental path. ZPD is a notion that connects the individual and social aspects of learning. The child’s development is said to proceed through the mechanism of mediation. Higher mental processes are mediated by psychological tools such as language, signs, and symbols; thus, mediation can be seen as the process in which the teacher is involved when challenging the child’s cognitive understanding. Today, mediation is by Wertsch (2007) also bringing emotional aspects into the learning process, although Vygotsky’s theory already included emotions in the notion of “perezhivanie” (Fleer et al., 2017).

The Vygotskian tradition specifically emphasizes semiotic mediation; that is, the child is coming into contact with and starting to take over cultural tools (appropriation) that will shape—mediate—how he or she perceives, thinks, etc. Language thus came to be specific in the child’s development of knowledge. On the other hand, in her doctoral thesis Os (2019) points to the notion of mediation as being close to many other notions—for example facilitating, supporting, promoting, fostering, scaffolding, and involvement—and shows how mediation is a common interactive process among toddlers, who due to their young age have limited language skills but nevertheless strive to make themselves understood through other expressional modes than verbal ones. In toddler groups in Norway, teachers involve themselves in children’s play and mealtimes and mediate meaning by making individual children’s ideas visible. Mediation can thus be indirect or direct, in relation to an individual child or a group of children. Indirect mediation targeted at a group of children offers more space for them to continue their joint play, while the opposite, direct mediation in relation to one child, often stops the play between children. Thus, for the mediation process to succeed, there has to be an awareness of the child’s understanding and directed attention; yet again, the children’s perspectives become the key to describing and interpreting learning and development. This is perhaps particularly evident in observations of toddlers—that is, very young children—who strive daily to understand and make themselves understood through other expressional modes than verbal ones. This directs attention to the notion of intersubjectivity, introduced by Rommetveit (1974); that is, how the participants manage to establish joint attention, which is thereby related both to the child’s and the adult’s coordinated perspectives. The notion of intersubjectivity has become important for understanding the communication between child and teacher, but also between children in play (see Pramling et al., 2019).

When a child grows increasingly more familiar with a praxis, such as mealtimes or how to play games, and the tools connected to these practices (Säljö, 2005), this implies that he or she can see something as specific but also possible to view in different ways. This process is called appropriation, a notion developed by more recent researchers in the cultural-historical theory (see Wertsch, 1998) and can be viewed as a question of how mankind has developed (and still is developing) cultural tools for preserving and mediating insights and experiences. Wallerstedt et al. (2014) state that these tools may comprise intellectual tools, including language categories and distinctions, narratives and other language genres—sometimes called discursive tools—and physical tools (also known as artefacts) such as books, music sheets, mobile telephones, instruments, watches, compasses, or maps. Appropriation is then the active acquisition and formation of such cultural tools.

Mediation and appropriation are both dependent on language and the child’s involvement in the negotiation of meaning. The cultural-historical theory is non-dualistic; that is, the world around the child cannot be separated from his or her experienced world. In this way, the communication process is always related to something that is communicated about, a content experienced by the communicating partners. Mediation then includes both a content that is focused on and how the meaning of this something is mediated. Thus, “what” cannot be separated from “how”. On the other hand, Elkonin (2005), a colleague of Vygotsky claimed that children have different activity directions, or goals for their activities, at different ages. This can be viewed as equivalent to the Piagetian perspective of stages, although Piaget relates these to mind and inner motivation while the cultural-historical perspective views the actions as related to the social world. Elkonin (1972) sees emotional and intellectual development as closely related, and criticizes a view on child development that most often separates them. The first period in a young child’s life concerns how children relate to other humans through direct personal and emotional activities. Children then become increasingly more focused on physical objects to manipulate, objects that carry social meaning related to adults, which leads to role play. This period of role play is viewed as necessary for the child to move into the next period of human activities and sees them as social and meaningful, which is the foundation for knowledge development and learning in school.

6.3.2 Implications of the Cultural-Historical Perspective in Preschools

If we look at preschool education in the Nordic countries today, we see a strong emphasis on communication and interaction, and a tendency to organize activities in smaller groups for short periods of time during the day (Pramling Samuelsson et al., 2015; Sheridan et al., 2015). We can also see the influence of a cultural-historical perspective, in that language has been the dominant topic in early childhood education as well as, for example, in the goals in Sweden’s revised preschool curriculum (National Agency for Education, 2019). However, this does not necessarily reflects a view entailing participating in activities along with more advanced peers or adults, by which meaning and cultural tools could be mediated. This is apparently a challenging task, as it goes beyond working on a joint project with others and highlights the need to establish and maintain intersubjectivity and thus adhere to different perspectives.

In the book A Cultural-Historical Study of Children Learning Science (Fleer & Pramling, 2015, p. 171), communication around skeletons, which the children are learning about and are asked here to make a drawing of, is represented and analyzed:

Polly::

Can I paint the hair?

Teacher::

You can maybe all paint these (points to the ribs). He has these ones, you see. And then the chest here. Under the head.

Eva::

But can I do a man, me?

Teacher::

Feel free, paint a man here.

Malin::

I’m painting my Mum!

Teacher::

Are you painting your Mum’s skeleton?

Malin::

Mmm.

(––)

Teacher::

Look, Richard has done that too. Look, it looks just like that too (points to the skeleton).

Richard::

That’s me! That’s me!

Teacher::

Is it your skeleton?

Richard::

Yes!

Teacher::

It looks just like that.

In the empirical example above, we can see how every child’s perspective is highlighted and constitutes the ground for the teacher to understand what the children express, for instance that they have grasped that every body has a skeleton. In other words, the children’s perspectives are necessary for the teacher to know what her next step should be in challenging the learning process, in terms of ZPD.

Os (2019) claims that a misunderstanding of the cultural-historical perspective has led to teachers sometimes acting with the belief that if they communicate with children, in general terms, the children will consequently develop skills and knowledge. There are also examples in Os’s study that show how the teacher unintentionally destroys the play through her mediating actions focusing on only one child at a time. Mediation between peers is often more positive, which means that the play continues when a group of children is the focus of the mediation. As appropriation and mediation take place when adults or more advanced peers communicate about what they are doing, communication becomes the most central aspect of preschool pedagogy. However, teachers then have to listen to children in order to know how to challenge them within their ZPD. However, this is a much more vague and general view on applying the idea of ZPD in preschool education than the idea Vygotsky once developed, in which he measured the individual child’s knowledge before and after mediation to evaluate the learning that had taken place.

The notion of active participation is often (mis)used in practice claiming to take a cultural-historical perspective in both research and practice. It may signal to teachers that it is sufficient to activate children in something for learning to occur (Sheridan et al., 2009). Active participation is very seldom used the other way around, with teachers being active in the children’s world, which would be much closer to the original idea of ZPD. Thus, the difference is again obvious when one considers whether it is a child perspective or children’s perspectives that are foregrounded.

6.4 Developmental Pedagogy—Placing the Children’s Perspectives and Content Focus at the Center of Attention

Developmental pedagogy advocates a pedagogical approach aimed at developing children’s values, skills, and understanding as knowledge formation. It is a research-based approach that has been used in early childhood education for the last 30 years, mainly in Sweden. The pedagogy, grounded in phenomenography (closely linked to phenomenological approaches in European philosophy), has developed through multiple empirical studies in Swedish preschools (see Pramling & Pramling Samuelsson, 2011). At the center of this pedagogy is the notion of children’s perspectives; but also, in line with the theoretical framework it is based on, the notion that to understand someone’s perspective of something one needs to know what that something is, which leads to a focus also directed at the content for learning. Learning is always the learning of something; thus, children’s ways of experiencing or perceiving this something is essential to pedagogical practice. Developmental pedagogy is characterized by the teacher participating as a partner in children’s learning and nurturing the children’s development by listening to their voices while still taking an active role in order to understand and extend their thinking. This is why play is also an essential feature of developmental pedagogy. Play and learning are different, but are interconnected through common features, which is reflected in the notion of “the playing, learning child” (Pramling Samuelsson & Asplund Carlsson, 2008).

6.4.1 Key Concepts in Developmental Pedagogy

Developmental pedagogy is based on a phenomenographic research approach developed by a research group under the leadership of Professor Ference Marton at the University of Gothenburg in the 1970s. The research began to focus specifically on the subjective world of the learner, and it soon became clear that students do not understand or misunderstand but rather create a variety of understandings, which researchers came to describe as a variation of meanings (Marton, 1981). This led to many studies in which people expressed their understandings in interviews with open-ended questions (Marton & Booth, 1997). The focus of the methodological framework for investigation was initially university students, but it soon led to classroom studies and then to studies of children’s experiences, of which The Child’s Conception of Learning was the first (Pramling, 1983). The results of Pramling’s study showed different stages of children’s thinking and their talk about their own learning related to age. There was a resemblance to Piaget’s qualitative levels of understanding, but in Pramling’s study it became obvious that the content in focus complicated the qualitative levels and had a great impact on the child’s ways of experiencing the content in question.

The ontological foundation of phenomenography and thus developmental pedagogy is non-dualistic; that is, the subject (the child) and the object (the surrounding world) are perceived as being included in an internal relationship, making one composite whole of the child’s understanding and his or her context. This means that one important aspect, with educational implications, is that a phenomenon appears different to different people because they discern different aspects of it. Thus, it is essential to determine the qualitatively different ways in which a phenomenon can be distinguished by children. By describing the various ways children think and express themselves, it is possible to reveal the child’s understanding and describe these differences in terms of critical aspects (Marton, 2015). In order to help children discern and focus on critical aspects of a certain phenomenon, a teacher has to contribute to creating the necessary pattern of variation and invariance that liberates new ways of seeing the phenomenon. Simultaneity and variation are thereby central notions in the pedagogy, both for understanding the child’s learning process and for orchestrating for learning by offering the child experiences that extend his or her way of seeing phenomena in the surrounding world. Variation and simultaneous experiencing are furthermore fundamental to several aspects of cognitive development in childhood, including the ability to distinguish one learning object or phenomenon from another. This, in turn, is fundamental, for instance, to the categorization process. For example, for a young child to be able to understand the concept of animals, rather than simply designating a single animal an animal it is necessary for the child to experience a variety of animals in order to distinguish the essential features that constitute what we call an animal. However, it is not sufficient to let the child experience a variety of animals. He or she also needs to experience that an animal differs from other living things, such as humans or plants. Gradually, the child will come to understand the concept of a type of animal, also distinguishing the critical features of a dog or a bird from those of other animals.

The notions that constitute the framework of developmental pedagogy have emerged based on both theoretical conjectures of the nature of knowledge and learning and empirical conclusions from a large number of studies. Children’s perspectives and ways of experiencing phenomena in their surrounding world are at the center of the theoretical framework and pedagogy. Key notions for describing the learning and teaching of young children are: open-ended communication, content of the teaching as a learning object, the strategy for learning (the learning act), qualitative differences in understanding or expanding concepts, variation (as both a result of teaching and a source for teaching), metacognition, and finally the playing, learning child. All these notions reflect an interactive, reflective educational practice whereby the content to be learned, or rather how the content appears to the learners, is important to consider as it is related to how this content can be learned (and taught).

For grasping children’s perspectives, open-ended communication is a must. Listening to children and challenging them in open-ended tasks will give them room to express different ideas and their own views. This strategy has to be related to the fact that the teacher is sincerely interested in what the child has to say—rather than seeing if they can produce a correct answer. Consequently, communication on many levels is an important feature of this pedagogy; not only to encourage children to think and reflect, but also for the teacher to turn the communication to a meta perspective and make the children aware that they think and talk from different perspectives—that is, to use a metacognitive approach and turn the children’s attention toward their own way of thinking and their own learning (Pramling, 1983). Communicating and creating meaning from the child’s perspective is not restricted to verbal communication alone but can also be viewed in drawing, solving tasks, or other situations like play.

In all communication there is something that is communicated about, and in preschool there is curriculum content that is to be worked on. When we talk about content we do it in a broad sense, for instance mathematics as the area as such, but when we label it learning object it refers to the particular object focused on in the teaching at hand, which could be number concepts, size, or patterns as part of the mathematics. We call the way children learn the act of learning, and this can include many different strategies. But the specific strategies related to teaching are particularly communication, metacognition, and variation, which come from the theoretical source of phenomenography. There are always different ways of understanding among members of a group, and this is then what is used in teaching, in order to make various ways of thinking or understanding something visible to the children—that is, to make the children aware of the specificity and generality of their own way of thinking by encountering a variation of ways of understanding the same content. Of course, some ways of understanding something are more powerful and developable than others. This is for the teacher to deal with and determine, by focusing on critical aspects. The starting point is always the children’s subjective experiences of the object of learning, and the end point is also the children’s experiences of the same learning object, which will have changed as new notions or ideas have emerged.

Finally, the perspective of viewing the child as a playing, learning child also needs to be emphasized; that is, not separating playing from learning but rather viewing children as playing, learning children (Pramling Samuelsson & Asplund Carlsson, 2008, 2014), which also has to do with how the teacher allows room for the child to bring his or her own world into the curriculum and teaching situation. The notion of the playing, learning child centers around children’s perspectives and emphasizes the idea of not seeing a child as playing for one part of the day and learning during another. We wish to picture a child who plays and learns simultaneously. Like learning, as defined in the phenomenographic framework, children’s play is always focused on something—an objective (what they want to play). There is also an enacted aspect, when they arrange and negotiate in the process, and a lived object, which might be the result (what they end up playing), which can be seen in how they experience the content in focus of their play. Another similarity between play and learning is variation as the source of both the play and learning—variation that can be used spontaneously by children or as a tool and strategy for teachers in challenging children in their learning.

6.4.2 Teaching Within the Framework of Developmental Pedagogy

The main features of developmental pedagogy outlined above entail that the teacher makes use of variation as a strategy for making particular knowledge, skills, ideas, or phenomena visible to the child. This demands teachers who are able to adjust their perspective or capture the children’s interest in order to share views on the same learning object. A precondition is that the teacher is able to focus the children’s attention on the learning objects they want them to develop an understanding of, whether this takes place in spontaneous play or in planned teaching situations. Integrating play and learning in a goal-orientated preschool means not only seeing the playing, learning child and making room for the children’s creativity, choices, initiatives, reflections, etc. (thus taking the children’s perspectives), but also being aware of the objects of learning that appear to be meaningful for the children and making use of occurrences throughout the day and any activities to develop the child’s understanding of different aspects of the surrounding world, by adhering to the children’s perspectives.

In developmental pedagogy, the teaching is based on children’s own ways of communicating and thinking. The objective is to highlight the variation in ways of thinking, which leads to the children being challenged to relate their own ways of thinking to those of other children’s. Each child’s taken-for-granted way of thinking is thereby challenged through metacognitive dialogues. Thus, the teacher must make an effort to listen to and observe the children and be willing to see what the child sees, and to interpret this as a touchdown in time, expressed knowledge that is related to what is made explicit there and then.

A number of studies have been conducted in collaboration between teachers and researchers, with the teachers being educated in how to apply the principles of developmental pedagogy in practice. The prosperity of the approach has been evaluated by following these teachers as they work with specific content and comparing children’s learning outcomes with those of other child groups in which their teachers have been working with the same content. For example, for a year, children at one preschool were involved in book reading, visiting the museum of natural science, and other activities that offered to them experiences highlighting different aspects and meanings of the ecological cycles, in line with the principles of developmental pedagogy. These children developed a much more advanced understanding, on a group level, of the complex phenomenon of ecological cycles than did children from preschools following traditional practice, with more focus on learning by doing without reflection or the specific metacognitive approach that characterizes developmental pedagogy (Pramling, 1991, 1994, 1996).

In Swedish preschool, the focus has long been on the act of learning rather than what children should develop their knowledge about. While there have obviously always been content areas for learning—that is, something the teacher intends the children to work with—the content as such has not been considered to be of great importance. In a recent project, the idea of teaching as part of participating in preschool children’s play was put to the test and theorized (Pramling et al., 2019). Following the principles of developmental pedagogy, it is important to embrace the learning objects that are meaningful to develop for the children’s play. This places serious demands on the teacher to read the play situation and determines what content is made relevant to extend and explore, by contrasting meanings and perspectives. In the following, we see an example of how the children’s play and the content of the play are made into learning objects (Björklund et al., 2018, p. 476):

(three children are playing “school”, with the teacher participating in the role of “little sister”)

Alice::

Aa … I’m seven years and I’m in zeroFootnote 1 … in first grade.

Teacher::

So you’re in first grade?

Alice::

You’ll start in the zero.

Teacher::

Zero! But that’s nothing! She says that I’ll start in the zero.

Lisa::

They’re next to us.

Alice::

The zero in school!

Teacher::

Is there a zero in school?

Alice::

Yes, there’s a zero.

Teacher::

Aha.

Alice::

Yes, that’s zero and I’m in the one.

Teacher::

Yes, and you’re in the one.

Throughout the example, the teacher acts in her role as little sister and the children in their roles as big sisters. In the dialogue, “zero” becomes an object of exploration, with the teacher highlighting the possibility to interpret the expression in different ways. Numbers imply different things in different situations, and by saying “Zero! But that’s nothing!” in the context of the talk, the teacher makes visible two dimensions of how the numeral zero can be used, both as the identification of a grade in school and as a quantity. In this example, the teacher and children work together in an intellectual way to solve the problem of what zero means, and the children contribute to the explanation by saying “The zero in school” and “Yes, that’s zero and I’m in the one”. The teacher’s role is of certain importance, as the two dimensions of “zero” would not have been challenged if the teacher had not brought in the contrasting meaning.

Teaching based on attending to children’s perspectives and extending their experiences aims at changing the child’s way of seeing the world (and thus altering his or her perspective). This further means that the focus is simultaneously on the teacher’s ability to adhere to the children’s perspectives and the appropriateness of the teaching setting for offering the best possible opportunities for the children to gain such experiences that will facilitate a more advanced understanding. The preconditions for an early childhood education built on children’s perspectives, or the ways they experience different phenomena, are thereby set by their teachers’ pedagogical skills and knowledge.

6.5 Traces of Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s Theories in Developmental Pedagogy

In this chapter, we have aimed to highlight children’s perspectives in theories with implications for preschool education. However, the child perspective and children’s perspectives can also be related to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), in which a child perspective is related to what adults believe is the best for a child, while children’s perspectives relate to hearing their voices and taking their ideas seriously. Listening to children and entering into communication with them is considered to be a key factor for high-quality preschool teaching today (Björklund et al., 2018), which can also be related to Vygotsky’s theory.

General theories of learning, or rather development, such as those by Piaget or Vygotsky, focus mainly on the act of learning and thus on a child perspective. Certain ways of working with children are thus seen as more appropriate than others, and the pedagogy is adapted to the child’s level of development based on children’s expressions of their understanding. This is clearly a manifestation of the importance of a child perspective—trying to do what one thinks is best for the child according to what we know from children’s own expressions.

Developmental pedagogy also attends to the act of learning, but intertwined with the object of learning. The object of learning is a key toward which the interaction between teacher and children is directed in a teaching situation. Both Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories focus on child development from a psychological perspective; that is, from experimental situations. Developmental pedagogy, on the other hand, derives from studies conducted in preschool praxis and thus contextualized—avoiding to adapt research into practice as the praxis and theory are developed simultaneously. Furthermore, children’s perspectives dominate the approach and it can be viewed as an approach to preschool education in which the content for learning is also important. Piaget and Vygotsky were concerned with child development more generally, while research in developmental pedagogy is concerned with children’s learning of various content areas, which makes it focus more on education than psychology.

One can claim that Piaget already long ago put children’s perspectives on the agenda for preschool practice, perhaps even being the first to take a serious interest in the children’s subjective world. His observations and interpretations laid the groundwork for his theory of intellectual development. However, his reasons for studying children were based on his interest in epistemology. Vygotsky, on the other hand, had a greater interest in the child becoming a member of cultural and social practices; but he also based his theoretical framework for explaining development on observations and interpretations of children’s ways of understanding their world —which is visible in children’s perspectives. This is demonstrated not least in the notion of ZPD. Both Piaget and Vygotsky thus had an interest in children’s perspectives as a basis on which theoretical conclusions of development could be drawn. Developmental pedagogy, on the other hand, focuses on children’s perspectives as a strategy for early childhood education—the child’s perspective is both the foundation for preschool education and the outcome of the education.

One other point to consider is that Piaget focuses on children as a group, while Vygotsky talks about children in a group. In developmental pedagogy the focus is on both: in research it is on the variation in ways of understanding the world around them, which results in qualitatively different conceptions, while in practice the challenging task for the teacher is to use the diversity of ways of understanding in communicating in the group to influence the children’s learning.

In contemporary Nordic preschool practice and curriculum there might be a stronger relation to the cultural-historical theory, considering the emphasis on language and communication, but the explorative approach that is found in Piaget’s way of indulging in the thoughts of the child is in many ways an inspiration that helps teachers interpret children’s perspectives. This is central in preschool education based on developmental pedagogy, in which the content for learning and how it appears to the children is the core of the teaching practice. Shared experiences are considered important, for instance in play and exploration, but planned situations in which new experiences can be attended to are also important. In this need for experiences that extend the children’s views on the world, all three theoretical approaches come together, embracing the children’s own perspectives. A reason why children’s perspectives have been more in focus in the twenty-first century may be that both research and education respect young children and their views more than earlier generations—thanks to the results of research.