Adaptation and agency in early childhood education

This article condenses the milestones of a long project. The ambition of the project has been to seek a balanced view of early childhood education, where both the adaptive and agentive nature of action is considered. A model based on the relationships between perception and environmental change serves as the project's theoretical foundation. The theory has been operationalised with 73 kindergarten children as research participants. Children's differing views about educational settings produce environmental change, in which they not only perceive agency, but where the perception has an agentive property in and of itself. This brings children forward as producers of learning content. The agency of perception applies also to the early childhood educator. Teachers and children of 284 kindergartens in Helsinki have been taking part in the production and refinement of the pedagogical tools, two of which are presented in the article.